The state is colonialism: Debating infrastructural colonization and the roots of socioecological catastrophe

Replying to criticism to the term infrastructural colonization, this commentary article discusses the colonial and how colonization is conceived. Infrastructural colonization, as opposed to colonialism, takes a literal approach to territorial control, landscape and socio-cultural change, exploring the literal colonization of habitats, people, social fabrics and more-than-human networks. Colonization-discrimination, control and extraction-operates on numerous scales and across various actors and places, accumulating into large-scale irreparable socioecological consequences. While it should not be conflated with (settler) colonialism, infrastructural colonization seeks to identify the roots and mechanisms of the colonial model, specifically how habitats and peoples are captured, psycho-politically captivated and together accumulated into an extractivist political economy. As an approach, infrastructural colonization implicitly recognizes state formation as colonialism, statism as (neo) colonialism and the state as colonial model(s). States, in their relative diversity, are understood as a structure of political and socioecological conquest.