The Time and Geology of the Global Majority

The spatial footprint of European colonialisation covered 84 per cent of the planet’s surface before 1914, with the so-called Scramble for Africa constituting political control of over 90 per cent of the African landmass by European powers.1 The cumulative impact of colonisation on the geosphere is inevitably much larger, as climate change attests to. Imperial expansion represented not just the territorial acquisition of the majority share of the planet’s surface but, vertically and volumetrically, it represented the acquisition of sub-surface and deep time ‘resources’ and brutally enacted the rearrangement of the social-ecological lifeworlds of the Global Majority. Colonialism was not a series of surface-led political events, nor did it have shallow environmental effects; rather, it tore deep into the skin and bones of the planet and people’s relation with the earth. It constituted a violent attack on the relational accords with land and its embodied archives of environmental epistemologies, severing the entanglements of living knowledges within inhuman and nonhuman material bonds.

The political system of colonialism culminated  through the transformation of environments for the extraction of geopower (power that was geographically transferred and concentrated in Europe by means of extraction of the metals, minerals, plants, and people from outside of Europe).2 The genre of this extraction could be described as ‘white geology’ insofar as its mobilisation of geology into capital accumulation was predicated on the hierarchisation of racial precepts.3 My argument is that geophysics is the dominant and ongoing paradigm of life that has been instituted as an earth and planetary practice. This practice was institutionalised through colonialism and grounded in the separation and deadification of the inhuman, which turned the earth and racialised subjects into a mode of geopower. The hunger for geopower as a geology on the move (i.e., a movement of the earth’s physical properties from colony to metropole) sedimented the extractive principle as the guiding orientation of European colonialism and the primary means to defend it as a (hierarchised) form of life. This rubric of geopower was operationalised through the scalar geographical ambitions of imperialism and in its repetition of infrastructures (epistemic, geophysical, affectual, material, and grammatical). The colonial settlement of these earth practices within the geophysical fabric of the planet is recognisable in the architectures of land theft and clearances, monocultures, hydro-weaponisation, plantation logics, and so forth. 

As the driver for colonialism in action, extraction and its grammars, syntaxes, and scripts of matter are a crucial target in the dismantling of the planetary effects and racial logics of colonialisation. The greatest Global Majority movement to challenge the 84 per cent of white geology’s extractive empires above and below was and is decolonisation. 

In the writings and practices of some of its revolutionary thinkers, decolonisation was understood as an environmental as much as a political process of decoupling from colonial practices of planetary extraction. Figures such as Amílcar Cabral, Thomas Sankara, and Walter Rodney expressed innate concern for the ecological conditions required to make new lifeworlds for decolonial subjects so they could achieve a state of independence and autonomy.4 As Khaled Mohieddin, Secretary of the Press Committee of the Arab Socialist Union, United Arab Republic, said at the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Cuba: ‘The realization of the ultimate content of independence implies more nutrition.’5 Dignity for the decolonial subject was conceived as a landed relation, where hunger and famine could be fought through collective cultivation of the soils, where trees were organised as political subjects to fight desertification in the afterlives of colonial plantations, and where the metals and minerals of the earth became localised rather than internationalised ‘out of Africa’.6 Rodney framed the African ‘subsidy’ to the Western world through his study How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). Filipa César calls Cabral’s politics an ‘agropolitics of liberation’ in order to characterise the primary role that agronomy played in his thinking and in the organisation of how to counter colonialism through soil and crop cultivation.7

As different as they were from one another, peoples from the Global Majority recognised that the common condition of colonialism united their experiences of subjugation under the 84 per cent. As the Indonesian President Sukarno said at the first large meeting of the Global Majority in Bandung in 1955: ‘This is the first international conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind! … Almost all of us have ties to common experience, the experience of colonialism.’ Billed as the first international conference on ‘racialism and colonialism’, Bandung shifted the compass of global imaginaries from the overdeveloped world into a non-aligned movement of collective world-making consisting of ‘We the Underdeveloped’.8

The differences and divisions reproduced within this shared ‘we’ remain under tension, especially in the context of gender inequality, which patriarchal revolutionising tended to invoke in speech but not necessarily in action (this patriarchal trend was very much in evidence at the 2025 African Climate Summit 2 in Ethiopia organised by the African Union).9 What is important to note about the women organising under the umbrella of Third World Women is that these movements were led and defined by interracial and intercaste women who faced exclusion (along with their revolutionary environmental knowledges) from elite and patriarchal-led national projects of independence. The 1985 Nairobi Conference on Women, for example, was very much focused on socio-ecological survival and the role women have played in centralising those concerns and actively transforming those practices at grassroot and regional levels. This directly led to the first international Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and to a proliferation of women of colour theorising of environmental and economic alternatives to development.10

In viewing decolonisation as an unfinished spatial project that may have only just barely begun, we can begin to see a historicity of folds where the time of decolonisation of the 84 per cent still presses on the present tense. Revisiting cold-case archives of anti-colonial revolution and their ideas for the transformation of the earth has much to teach us about what reparations might look like now: as a restructuring rather than a structure-confirming event. Looking at the archive of Global Majority movements, we find the 1966 Tricontinental Meeting, of the ‘First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America’ is dedicated to ‘the Palestinian people, who today in their battle against Zionism are the focal point of anti-imperialist struggle’.11 In their speeches, delegates from around the tricontinental world acknowledged their solidarity with the Palestinian struggle and the situation in Sudan. Thinking with the geographically grounded liberation practices and situated ecological theories of the Global Majority is to notice the future-orientated possibility of these decolonial archives in speaking to planetary conditions. There is a transchronic possibility of reactivating this political speech as a possible future yet to arrive, a possibility inscribed in the environments riven by extraction. It is also to notice that revolution, when conceived of in the tight script of the political, misses the material organisation of sovereignty as an act of political geology and environmental restructuring.

Frantz Fanon perhaps says it best when he describes political speech as articulated in the hands of the people placed in the earth, which Cabral gave further ecological extension to in revolutionary soil. In his aphorism, ‘Our people are our mountains’, Cabral signalled the seismic force of the populace that was needed to defeat the Portuguese, while also making a serious joke about Guinea-Bissau’s lack of mountains to constitute a recognisable geographic environment of guerilla struggle, so that the people must provide this tectonic movement and orogeny themselves.12 In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon employs another mountain metaphor as a caution for the revolutionary struggle: ‘The movement from the top to the bottom and from the bottom to the top should be a fixed principle, not through concern for formalism but because simply to respect this principle is the guarantee of salvation. It is from the base that forces mount up which supply the summit with its dynamic, and make it possible dialectically for it to leap ahead.’13 Both Cabral and Fanon understood the dangers of elite thinking in the revolutionary movement, eschewing the ‘mountaintopism’ of intellectuals, leaders, new messiahs, or caste hierarchies, which they saw as replacing the existing colonial order with the same again: an elite capture of the peoples’ struggle. For Cabral, this meant democracy must be learnt through practice in the forests, with the soil, and in armed insurgency produced through collective deliberation. When the ITV film crew for the current-affairs programme World in Action was embedded with guerillas in Guinea-Bissau, they were surprised by the extensive amount of talking that went on during insurgent actions.14

Fanon argued the principle of ‘decentralization in the extreme’, whereby collective responsibility organises collective sovereignty, in which all must have ‘dirty hands’: no ‘deus ex machina upon the social scene’, he says.15 The kind of structural revolution that both Cabral and Fanon dreamt of, was one in which an ontological shift took place that redefined the structures of relation, rather than reifying them in the various guises of neocolonialism’s new mountaintops that development was prescribing (cash crops, agribusiness, debt seed farming, big infrastructure, etc).16 For both, the struggle to invent new structures was plotted in a direct collision course with extraction, of both subjective and soil elements. Life cannot be extracted from that which supports and nourishes it, argued Cabral. Guyanese academic and political activist Walter Rodney, too, noted how the colonialists came as outsiders, seeing the dense vegetation and incorrectly assuming a disastrous relation with the topsoil.17 Or how mineral depletion was irreplaceable theft: ‘African gold played its part in the development of the monetary system and of industry and agriculture in the metropoles. But, like bauxite and other minerals, gold is an exhaustible resource. Once it is taken out of a country’s soil, that is an absolute loss that cannot be replaced.’18 Rescuing communal elements of the soil and subsoil was a means to build a socialist democracy, Rodney argued; one that was predicated on refusing the attachment to colonial fictions of the separability of life from the ground.

The Global Majority comes into being through the 84 per cent planetary reach of colonialism as a racialised geologic formation; it is made in the shared environmental experience of white geology and its extractive geographies. African American author Richard Wright, who spent three days travelling to the small West Javanese island of Bandung for the 1955 conference, configures it most succinctly when he says that there was something ‘almost extra-human about it; it smacked of tidal waves, of natural forces … The agenda and subject matter had been written for centuries in the blood and bones of the participants.’19 The churning materiality of embodied experience was explicated in the political reality of collectively coming together in resistance to colonial extraction through shared environmental experiences shaped by the geologics of coloniality. The ‘meeting of the dejected’, as Wright termed it, had collective experience of famine, marginalisation of their environmental knowledges, and the imposition of debt agriculture. It is worth noting that through the theorising of the non-alignment movement that the term ‘ecocide’ is introduced in the 1972 Stockholm Conference as a nascent environmental legal aperture. 

Among the rich archive that was presented to build another history (and another world) in Rheim Alkadhi’s 2024 exhibition Templates for Liberation at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, were a series of ‘transynchronic rebels’ hung on the wall. When I read the cold-case archives of the decolonial solidarity movements, I read with the Transynchronic Rebels as sentinels, and in the warmth of their contagion to bring a world forum of ecosocialism that spanned difference and diversity into being. ‘Time is on fire’, says Alkadhi, and as the legacy of that time burns its historic devastation into the present, it also creates crossings and openings to an struggle that has already been fought and given shape, and it is that which we must step into and continue to fight for. Reading the 1966 Tricontinental papers now is an exercise in repetition of the violent origins of the settler colonial state that are folded through Palestine as an open wound of injustice. Unearthing the ecological dimensions of decolonisation – seeing decolonisation as a struggle against colonial geologies of extraction, soil depletion, and ecological death – aids us in understanding resistance as a geological act. As Kali Rubaii reminds us in the catalogue text accompanying Alkadhi’s exhibition: ‘The templates for resurgency are bent ones, forged and repurposed out of pieces of the past that bridge us to bleak but stubborn futures.’20 

The past is made in the painful tensions and torques of lived time, not as a history made for the future that arrives for us to read in the present. But that embodied time is also searching for a geography outside of repression. The secret quality that propels resistance beyond its present moment is this desire to breach the carceral conditions of the psychic and geophysical life of colonialism and to arrive in another place through what Fanon called ‘invention’. These fractures in the normative make temporal fissures that carry time in the folds of history. It is, in other words, a ‘transynchronic rebellion’.

Fanon argued that ‘colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it. This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance today.’21 As the struggle over and within the earth continues along the teleological track of white geology, often in its weaponised form, the decolonial environmental archive that attempted to retool the directionality of geology-on-the-move takes on even greater significance in the arriving afterlives of colonialism’s geocide. 

I use the term ‘geocide’ to capture the imbrication of genocide and ecocide that characterises the tactics of imperial earth practices to capture geologic materials, historically and in the present, towards concentrations of geopower that have and are transforming the geosphere. Geocide was initiated in a planetary mode through the condition of enforced landlessness of peoples in colonial and settler colonial states, and it continues in declared and undeclared neocolonial wars for geopower, enacted at the expense of everything and everyone who stands in the way of that extraction. It continues through billions of displacements that are currently underway due to the climate crisis and extractive industries. Geocide is a process, then, of deliberately detaching affective relations with the earth through the medium of the earth. Colonialism is geology in action. There is reason to return to anticolonial resistance in this current moment of rampant imperial geopolitics, and to understand political independence as accompanied by a co-present history and archive of ecosocialist Global Majority solidarity movements and their associative world-making practices; a history that was amputated but remains as another possible path configured by and for the Global Majority. Focusing on the environmental dimensions of decolonisation also draws attention to the work of quiet agrarian revolutions and gendered agronomic interventions that often made the patriarchal political revolutions possible through the environmental-social reproduction of resistance.

The politicisation of minoritarian interventions against geocide and the partially realised histories of Global Majority eco-socialisms – alongside the global solidarities of anti-imperialisms that shaped new geographical imaginaries of power – point to another possible earth politics and horizon of located earth practices. As Cabral claimed, ‘every practice produces theory’, so the transchronic archive asks and instructs us in the present to think of different geophysical practices as theory-making planetary portals in the reign of geocide.22 What is interesting and politically compelling about thinking about the Global Majority as an environmental event, practice, and transchronic archive is that it comes into being as a majority through the imposition of the 84 per cent of colonial materialism.23 Thus, the term ‘Global Majority’ is compelling when understood not simply as something that exists, but as something produced through political geologic practices of solidarity and world-making that refuse the fiction of sovereignty without the earth (or geocide).