Weaponized Information – Glossary of Concepts and Terms
Updated June 19, 2025
Jump to a Term
- Algorithmic Governance
- Anti-Imperialist Sovereignty
- BRICS+
- Cognitive Warfare
- Colonial Contradiction
- Counterinsurgency
- Crisis of Imperialism
- Financial Piracy
- Forward Containment Architecture
- Guerrilla Intellectual & Tradition
- Hyper-Imperialism
- Imperialist Decay
- Imperialist Media Apparatus
- Imperialist Recalibration
- Lawfare
- Militarized Imperialism
- Multipolarity
- Neocolonial Extraction
- Neocolonial Militarism
- Nuclear Apartheid
- Proletarian Cyber Resistance
- Redline
- Revolutionary Rupture
- Sanctions Architecture
- Settler-Colonial Pacification
- Sovereignty Theater
- Technofascism
- Technological Sovereignty
- Unipolarity
- Weaponized Infrastructure
- Weaponized Propaganda Excavation (WPE)
- Digital Colonialism
- Platform Feudalism
- Dual and Contending Power
- Necro-Extractivism
- Chokepoints
Algorithmic Governance
Definition — The deployment of automated systems—e.g., predictive policing, credit scoring, gig-worker management—by states and corporations to entrench capitalist control, surveillance, and racialized social ordering.
Sources — Sara Bannerman’s concept of “algorithmic imperialism”; critical digital-labor scholarship exposing inequality reproduced in code.
Anti-Imperialist Sovereignty
Definition — The right of Global South nations to pursue autonomous development and self-determination free from sanctions, coups, or regime-change machinations.
Sources — Post-colonial socialist theory; Cambridge research on sovereign development pathways.
BRICS+
Definition — A coalition of emergent Global South powers—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa plus accession states—building alternative trade, finance, and diplomatic institutions to erode Western hegemony.
Sources — Transnational Institute analyses of South-South coordination and de-dollarisation efforts.
Cognitive Warfare
Definition — Deliberate narrative operations—propaganda, disinformation, psychological ops—engineered to shape perception, legitimize violence, and fracture solidarity.
Sources — German Marshall Fund’s “firehose of falsehood” studies; military PSYOP manuals.
Colonial Contradiction
Definition — The irreconcilable conflict rooted in land theft, racial hierarchy, and ecological devastation that underpins capitalist globalization.
Sources — Anti-colonial Marxist frameworks; scholarship on digital colonialism.
Counterinsurgency
Definition — A multi-pronged strategy—military force, surveillance, NGO soft-power, economic coercion, media manipulation—designed to suppress revolutionary movements.
Sources — Colonial-era doctrine; U.S. FM 3-24 and Frank Kitson’s “Low Intensity Operations.”
Crisis of Imperialism
Definition — The structural unraveling of U.S-led unipolar dominance amid economic decline, militarist overreach, and global resistance.
Sources — Leninist and Global South analyses of late-stage capital accumulation.
Financial Piracy
Definition — Systematic extraction through debt traps, asset seizures, sanctions, and SWIFT denial—imperial plunder via spreadsheets and courts.
Sources — Dependency theory, Jason Hickel on unequal exchange.
Forward Containment Architecture
Definition — A modular network of drone launchpads, missile hubs, logistics corridors, surveillance nodes, and chokepoints designed to encircle rival powers and project force in a decentralized, low-footprint form. This architecture allows the U.S. and its allies to “contain” adversaries like China through pre-positioned military assets embedded in partner states.
Sources — Indo-Pacific Command briefings; Tricontinental analyses of the first island chain; U.S. basing doctrine and logistics strategies.
Guerrilla Intellectual & Tradition
Definition — Scholars who fuse rigorous analysis with revolutionary praxis, spreading knowledge through grassroots struggle—after Walter Rodney’s example.
Sources — Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa; radical pedagogy literature.
Hyper-Imperialism
Definition — A decadent stage of imperialism defined by hyper-sanctions, hybrid warfare, spasmodic militarism, and digital information blockades wielded by a faltering U.S-led bloc.
Sources — Tricontinental Institute study “Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage” (Jan 2024).
Imperialist Decay
Definition — Systemic collapse of hegemonic structures as overextension, declining productivity, and popular resistance converge.
Sources — Post-colonial scholarship linking material scarcity to militarism.
Imperialist Media Apparatus
Definition — Tightly-coupled network of legacy outlets, intel-linked think tanks, and PR firms that manufacture consent for war, extraction, and sanctions.
Sources — Studies on social-media weaponization; declassified COINTELPRO files.
Imperialist Recalibration
Definition — Strategic shift from direct invasions toward hybrid tactics: economic coercion, lawfare, cyber ops, and algorithmic surveillance to sustain domination.
Sources — Case studies on Syria, Venezuela, Ukraine; Pentagon doctrine on “unconventional war.”
Lawfare
Definition — Weaponizing courts, treaties, and IP regimes to criminalize dissent and strip nations of sovereignty.
Sources — UN Special Rapporteur reports; analyses of ICC selectivity.
Militarized Imperialism
Definition — Use of armed force—state or private—to enforce geopolitical expansion and quell resistance.
Sources — Arms-trade data on Sahel; AFRICOM briefings.
Multipolarity
Definition — An emerging world order rooted in anti-hegemonic cooperation among Global South states to replace U.S. unipolar dominance.
Sources — Non-Aligned Movement communiqués; CELAC-BRICS joint statements.
Neocolonial Extraction
Definition — Continued plunder through debt, unequal trade, and corporate capture despite formal independence.
Sources — Tariq Ali, Jason Hickel on colonial continuities.
Neocolonial Militarism
Definition — A system in which a nominally independent military is subordinated to the command, doctrine, and strategic interests of an imperial power. Unlike traditional occupation, neocolonial militarism functions through interoperability, funding dependency, elite training pipelines, and intelligence integration—maintaining the illusion of sovereignty while enforcing real submission.
Sources — U.S. military assistance records; FM 3-24 doctrine; Philippines–U.S. joint operations; postcolonial military studies.
Nuclear Apartheid
Definition — A global system of double standards under which the United States and its allies retain full nuclear capabilities while denying Global South countries the right to peaceful nuclear development, often through coercive diplomacy, sabotage, sanctions, and propaganda.
Sources — South Centre NPT legal briefs; histories of the JCPOA; Global South diplomatic statements at the IAEA.
Proletarian Cyber Resistance
Definition — Class-struggle use of hacking, open knowledge, and decentralized networks to undermine digital capitalism.
Sources — Research on “algorithmic sovereignty” and hacker-commons.
Redline
Definition — Weaponized Information’s recurring feature that re-frames daily headlines from an anti-imperialist perspective.
Sources — WI Redlines archive.
Revolutionary Rupture
Definition — Proletarian-peasant overthrow of capitalist-imperialist systems, opening paths to socialism and decolonisation.
Sources — Lenin, Nkrumah, and anti-colonial revolutionary practice.
Sanctions Architecture
Definition — Global legal-financial regime that administers economic blockades against defiant nations.
Sources — NIEO critiques; Treasury OFAC data.
Settler-Colonial Pacification
Definition — Ongoing suppression of Indigenous and internally-colonized peoples via structural violence and erasure.
Sources — Historical records of Indian Wars; contemporary land-defender repression.
Sovereignty Theater
Definition — The staged performance of national autonomy under conditions of neocolonial subordination. In sovereignty theater, imperial powers write the script, direct the military choreography, and control strategic decisions—while local comprador elites repeat the language of “mutual cooperation” to disguise dependency as parity.
Sources — Analyses of U.S.–Philippine relations; case studies of postcolonial military alliances; critiques of foreign basing agreements in the Global South.
Technofascism
Definition — Fusion of surveillance tech, corporate finance, and militarized state power to pre-empt and crush dissent.
Sources — Scholarly warnings on AI policing; Snowden revelations.
Technological Sovereignty
Definition — The right of nations—particularly in the Global South—to autonomously develop, produce, and control technological infrastructures and scientific capabilities without subordination to imperialist powers, sanctions regimes, or transnational monopolies.
Sources — Tricontinental Institute briefs on science and sovereignty; Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik on de-linked development; analyses of digital colonialism and scientific apartheid in Global South tech literature.
Unipolarity
Definition — Post-Cold War order dominated by U.S. military, economic, and ideological supremacy—now in decline.
Sources — Global South critiques of Pax Americana; IMF data on shifting GDP shares.
Weaponized Propaganda Excavation (WPE)
Definition — WI’s four-step method—Excavation, Extraction, Reframing, Mobilization—for turning enemy propaganda into revolutionary analysis and action.
Sources — WI editorial handbook; academic disinformation studies.
Weaponized Infrastructure
Definition — The embedding of military, logistical, and surveillance systems—often disguised as development aid, humanitarian logistics, or security cooperation—into the internal fabric of subordinated states. These infrastructures, from drone labs to missile hubs, serve imperial power while bypassing democratic control and sovereignty.
Sources — U.S. EDCA agreements; AFRICOM infrastructure maps; military–industrial zone analyses in Southeast Asia and the Sahel.
Digital Colonialism
Definition — Data and computational labor extraction by Big-Tech monopolies from the Global South, mirroring historic colonial wealth flows.
Sources — Digital-rights scholarship; Wikipedia overview on digital colonialism.
Platform Feudalism
Definition — Monopoly platforms that impose algorithmic governance and extract surplus value from digital labor, creating a new serfdom.
Sources — E-flux essays; platform-labor studies.
Dual and Contending Power
Definition — Strategy of building counter-institutions that prefigure and accelerate the overthrow of capitalist-imperialist states.
Sources — Non-Aligned Movement doctrine; New International Economic Order proposals.
Necro-Extractivism
Definition — Resource extraction in which death—of people, ecosystems, cultures—is an operational feature, fusing imperial plunder with necropolitics.
Sources — Tricontinental study “Necroextractivism and the Rural World”; TNI report on sacrifice zones.
Chokepoints
Definition — Strategically controlled nodes—geographic, digital, financial—through which essential flows must pass, enabling coercion without direct force.
Sources — Farrell & Newman on “weaponized interdependence”; studies of Suez, SWIFT, and undersea-cable dominance.
Weaponized Information 