Empire rebranded: The new architecture of violence

Colonial power may have changed its language, but it still decides who lives, who dies and who is forgotten, writes Dr Shaymaa Elkadi.

LET US say it plainly. Let us reflect on it deeply.

Human-made death is death inflicted through systems of power, oppression, racism, colonialism and calculated violence. It is not death from natural causes, but death wrought by human hands, in human names, for human gain.

And it is intolerable.

Whatever your skin, your belief, your identity, your place — it is unacceptable.

Unacceptable means we do not brush it aside. We do not rationalise it. We do not decide that one death is more worthy of grief than another.

Gaza's past preserved as present is destroyed

As the systematic death and destruction in Gaza continues and steps up, it banks in a growing set of problems and dangers for the future.

The Deadly Olympics: A rigged contest

Today, we observe a grotesque Olympics of death, broadcast across every screen. This is not a game of athleticism or excellence. It is a competition in which the worth of human life is ranked and scored.

First place goes to those whose deaths elicit global outrage, memorials and wall-to-wall coverage.
Second place to those whose deaths attract passing sympathy but little sustained action.
Third place, or no place at all, to those whose deaths are erased, dehumanised, or rationalised as collateral.

This hierarchy of grief follows the same colonial lines that once divided the world into “civilised” and “savage”. We mourn loudly when violence reaches us, yet remain largely unmoved when it devastates lands and peoples still marked by the scars of empire.

The attack on any person for their faith, in a church, mosque, synagogue or temple, must be condemned with equal clarity, equal outrage and equal accountability. And yet, when we elevate some deaths above others, we perpetuate the same systems that justify killing in the name of civilisation, security, or divine right.

Colonialism is not history, it is alive

To speak of human-made death without naming colonialism is to silence one of its central architects.

Colonialism remains a living, breathing structure and its modern incarnations include:

land theft and dispossession, seen in Palestine, West Papua, the Congo Basin and across First Nations lands in so-called Australia;
economic violence, where “development” and “investment” translate into extraction, exploitation and dispossession;
cultural erasure and legal subjugation, where colonised peoples’ laws, languages and beliefs remain marginalised; and
the hierarchy of human value, a legacy of empire that continues to dictate whose lives matter.

Colonial killings hidden in code spark truth-telling debate

A settler’s coded diary of killings is challenging Australia's comfort with its colonial past and raising new questions about who gets to control the historical record.

The new face of empire: The “peace board”

When we see drone strikes in Gaza, military incursions into Indigenous territories, or the violent removal of people from ancestral lands, these are not isolated tragedies. They are the echoes of empire, dressed in new language and legitimised through new institutions.

This is the new form of colonialism. It no longer calls itself “empire” but hides behind the language of humanitarianism and order. It is what many scholars and activists now describe as the peace board: the global architecture of power that manages conflict through diplomacy, aid and surveillance, while sustaining the same colonial hierarchies it claims to dismantle.

These peace boards meet in Geneva, New York, London and Canberra, far from the lands they decide upon. They promise peace but trade in control. They deliver “stability” while entrenching dependency. Under banners of “peacebuilding" and “stabilisation”, they determine who governs, who eats and who dies.

They authorise occupations through development grants, justify blockades as “security measures” and rebrand economic exploitation as “reform”. As critical peace scholars note, colonial power no longer needs conquest when it can achieve the same through consensus.

The peace board operates through multilateral institutions, defence alliances and private contractors, from the UN Security Council’s selective interventions to the aid-industrial complex that sustains endless crisis without sovereignty. It is a boardroom where dispossession is reframed as progress and resistance is painted as extremism.

The people of Palestine know this too well. So do Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples resisting the militarisation and mining of Country in the name of “national interest”. The people of the Congo, Sudan, Myanmar and West Papua live daily under these peace boards’ logic, their sovereignty traded for “partnership”, their lives negotiated by those who profit from instability.

This is the modern continuation of empire. It no longer needs gunboats when it has global markets, no longer needs missionaries when it has media, and no longer needs manifest destiny when it has policy language of “peace” and “security”.

To call for justice today is to name this truth: peace without justice is not peace at all. It is colonialism rebranded, peace written by those who benefit from the silence of the colonised.

Australian colonialism bares its fangs

The result of the Voice Referendum highlights the work needed to eradicate racism and ignorance from the Australian nation.

The podium will always be rigged

Let us name the facts:

the mass killings in Gaza, measured in thousands, prompt empty statements but no accountability;
missiles bear the signatures of leaders;
the massacres in Sudan and the Congo continue, largely untelevised;
the genocide of the Rohingya and internment of Uyghurs unfold under global indifference; and
starvation is wielded as a weapon, sanitised as “defence”.

If there were a fourth or fifth place on this grotesque podium, these deaths would occupy it. The “chosen” deaths will always take gold, while the “barbarian” and the “beast”, those who defy empire, are cast aside.

Ideologies of supremacy

Let us name them clearly:

Antisemitism.
Islamophobia.
Homophobia.
Sexism.
Racial hierarchy.
Settler-colonial supremacy.

These ideologies endure not because humanity cannot change, but because they remain profitable. They are the engines of empire, turning hate into policy and hierarchy into governance.

It is not the black masks on our streets that explain human-made death. It is the white masks in parliaments, corporate boardrooms, media networks and military alliances — the architects of indifference.

A call to uncompromising justice

All human-made death is unacceptable, no tiers, no podiums, no exceptions.

If we cannot condemn every act of oppression with equal force, we are not neutral — we are complicit.

Justice demands that we dismantle not only the instruments of death but the systems that sanction them. It demands we refuse the peace board that trades lives for leverage. It demands that we build solidarity beyond the colonial imagination.

Because until we do, the empire will keep rewriting itself and history will record not just the deaths, but our silence.

Dr Shaymaa Elkadi is a values-driven governance and strategy leader with over 15 years’ executive and board experience across the justice, mental health and community services sectors.