The Architecture of Captured Liberation in West Asia

by Celia Boumpas

ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images

The modern West Asia emerged not from a clean break with empire, but from a fragmented transition in which colonial systems were repackaged into national ones. Independence movements across the region promised liberation, dignity, and self-determination after decades of colonial control. Yet the states that emerged often inherited the same extractive structures they once fought against. Borders imposed by colonial powers, militarized administrations, centralized economies, and elite-driven governance survived the departure of foreign rulers. The result was a post-colonial condition defined less by freedom than by contradiction: nations politically independent yet economically and strategically dependent, revolutionary in language yet authoritarian in practice.

European colonialism did not simply occupy territory; it reorganized societies around strategic interests. The borders drawn after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire divided communities, concentrated resources unevenly, and created states whose primary function was often administrative control rather than social cohesion. Britain and France designed political systems that secured access to trade routes, oil reserves, and military influence. Adding to that the raising power of Soviet Union during the second World War and the Cold War, periods when the region of West Asia was in the process of recollecting it self outside the European colonial project, the dynamics become more and more fractured.

This external involvement did not operate only through direct intervention. It functioned through layered systems of dependency. The Soviet Union supported anti-colonial and nationalist movements, for example factions of the PLO, through weapons, training, and political backing, while the United States and Western European powers consolidated relationships with monarchies, military governments, and later regional allies such as Israel. As historian Rashid Khalidi argues:

“External powers repeatedly shaped the modern Middle East according to their strategic interests, often overriding the aspirations of the people living there.”

But it wasn’t only the regional power that were being supported. it was the built of maritime channels and land routes through Syropalestine, Jordan, Egypt, Iran, which were utilized for overland supply, especially during regional conflicts, from West Asia to North and Central Africa. This is why the post-colonial condition can be understood as an unfinished departure. Colonialism did not end completely; it changed form. Direct occupation gave way to financial dependency, military agreements, debt systems, and geopolitical influence.

This lead to the countries of the region being formed in a state of “captured liberation” where their fight for self-determination and governance were hijacked by the ruling class and vested interests. This interpretation draws from dependency theory, decolonial thought, and Frantz Fanon’s critique of the postcolonial national bourgeoisie as an intermediary class reproducing systems of extraction after independence (Fanon, 1963;).

Instead of dismantling this apparatus, many post-colonial regimes followed the algorithm:

The revolutionary became ruler. The ruler became gatekeeper.

And gatekeepers rarely dismantle the systems that secure their power.

The question then becomes whether a region can ever fully exit the architectures of empire, in terms of ownership, resources, infrastructure, agreements between external and internal factors. If colonialism shaped borders, economies, and political institutions, how can independence truly dismantle those foundations?

The political speeches, the news, the radio, the language of freedom was everywhere. And that captured the collective consciousness in a very hazed state. If liberation is all that is being talked about, if we are achieving it, why is it nowhere around to be found? Why do people lose more and more land and rights? Why are the local political factors becoming richer when the population is being increasingly deprived by basic resources, ownership, rights, basic living standards?

The post-colonial fracture, in this way, is not only institutional but psychological. It exists in the gap between the promise of liberation and the reality of governance. It appears when revolutionary symbols outlast revolutionary substance, when the language of resistance becomes a tool of state power. The unfinished departure from empire is not simply about borders or governments; it is about whether societies can create an identity that breaks free from the extractive logic embedded in both colonialism and authoritarian nationalism. And yet, despite this fragmentation, many of these histories preserve something else: the belief that liberation was never fully defeated, only interrupted, absorbed, or redirected. Even after authoritarianism, civil wars, occupations, and economic collapse, people continue organizing, remembering and imagining.

If a full exit means completely erasing the past, the answer is likely no; if an exit though means subverting those architectures, the focus shifts away from the state capital and toward the margins.

Real decolonization in the region often happens outside the formal state structures. It is a grueling, multi-generational process of decoupling local survival from both the foreign capital that demands extraction and the native factors who profit from it.

Citations

Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth (C. Farrington, Trans.). Grove Press.

Khalidi, R. (2020). The hundred years’ war on Palestine: A history of settler colonialism and resistance, 1917–2017. Metropolitan Books.

Mitchell, T. (2011). Carbon democracy: Political power in the age of oil. Verso.

Munif, A. R. (1987). Cities of salt (P. Theroux, Trans.). Random House.

Phalanxus Team. (2024, August 4). Soviet military engagements in the Middle East: A historical analysis. Phalanxus. Phalanxus

Said, E. W. (2003). Orientalism. Penguin Classics.

Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press.