The Cambodian–Thailand frontier conflicts over the Preah Vihear Temple and its surrounding areas are a testament to the enduring shadows of colonial cartographic politics, disputed sovereignty, and politicized heritage. This study examines the controversy in the Cambodian context, tracing its origins to the Franco-Siamese treaties of 1904 and 1907 and the ensuing mutually inconsistent delineations of the Dangrek mountain watershed, culminating in the Annex I map to Cambodia’s advantage. The International Court of Justice ruled in 1962 in favor of Cambodia’s sovereignty over the temple itself but refrained from addressing ambiguities regarding the surrounding territory. Such ambiguities, left untouched for so long, were once more raised in 2008 when Preah Vihear was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, igniting a game of nationalism and military engagements. In 2011, ASEAN’s role in mediating conflict and its most extensive intervention in member state conflict were tested. The ICJ unanimously reaffirmed Cambodia’s full sovereignty over the promontory in 2013, thereby legally confirming Phnom Penh’s sovereignty, but it did not appease Thai protests in adjacent areas. The latest escalations in July and December 2025 brought extra rational actors. Under Malaysian chairmanship, ASEAN brokered ceasefire deals and hosted special ASEAN foreign minister meetings in Kuala Lumpur aimed at de-escalation and dialogue to end fighting between Thailand and Cambodia; the United States, China, and Russia exerted varying degrees of influence, including through diplomatic pressure, support, and mediation. It contends that Preah Vihear is a cultural heritage site where identity intersects with power politics and the rule of law. It concludes that long-term occupation requires a combination of legal definitions, ASEAN-facilitated diplomacy, and cultural coordination that transforms the temple from a monument of enmity into a symbol of shared heritage and regional reconciliation. We conclude that legal rulings alone cannot resolve identity-linked territorial disputes without complementary regional diplomacy and the depoliticization of heritage.
This article argues that Policy Advisory Systems (PAS) construct authority through a process of epistemic authorization that has heretofore not been analyzed in sufficient depth. Furthermore, this article argues that this process is mediated through institutional, relational, discursive, and procedural interacting “bridges” or relationships among policy actors that embed knowledge within policymaking contexts, thereby rendering it usable for decision-making. First, it implies that PAS are not only institutional arrangements that provide advice but also configurations that construct and stabilize epistemic authority. Second, it implies that the distribution of epistemic authorization across different moments and sites of policymaking should be carefully assessed when making judgments about the impact and influence of knowledge and evidence on policymaking. The study provides a case study of how such processes operate in the climate change area.
IntroductionSpace technology has become a strategic priority for the European Union, with collaborative research and innovation playing a central role in capability development. Yet broader participation in EU-funded projects does not necessarily produce equivalent gains in collaboration depth, formal coordination leadership, or reduced dependence on established countries. We examine how the European space-technology knowledge network evolved between 2014 and 2025 and whether less-established national actors improved their positions while established countries retained network prominence.MethodsUsing CORDIS metadata of 7,754 collaborative R&D projects involving 23,167 unique participating organizations, we constructed country-level networks for 60 countries across four 3-year periods. Social Network Analysis was applied to three complementary layers: a joint-project network capturing project co-participation, an organization-participation network capturing the depth of organizational involvement, and a coordination-dominant network capturing formal consortium leadership. Countries were classified as core, intermediate-potential, or peripheral, and group trajectories, core-linkage ratios, and coordination patterns were assessed longitudinally.ResultsThe network widened substantially, but decentralization remained partial and uneven. Joint-project collaboration expanded rapidly, while core-country involvement remained high across all three layers. Germany, France, Italy, and Spain consistently occupied the most central positions and dominated many of the strongest dyads. Intermediate-potential countries achieved statistically significant gains in project-based and organization-based weighted degree centrality but not in coordination-based centrality. Their organizational core-linkage ratio declined over time, indicating that a larger share of their organization-based collaboration involved partners outside the four-country core, although dependence on core countries remained substantial.DiscussionEU Framework Programmes expanded access and collaboration scale without generating an equivalent redistribution of organizational depth or formal coordination leadership. The findings distinguish collaboration-scale power from coordination-based leadership. Evaluations of European research networks should consider participation intensity, organizational depth, coordination reach, and core dependence jointly when assessing integration, technological sovereignty, and the upgrading prospects of less-central national systems.
This article develops the concept of platformed citizenship rupture to explain moments when digitally mediated protest unsettles established relations of political legitimacy and moves toward provisional debate over leadership, representation, and governance. Using Nepal’s 2025 Generation Z protest as an illustrative case, it operationalizes this concept through the Digital Momentum–Governance Translation Model. It argues that Nepal’s youth uprising cannot be adequately understood through binaries of online/offline activism, leaderless/organized mobilization, or democratic/authoritarian politics. Rather, it reveals a transitional condition in which formal democratic institutions, coercive state response, platform architectures, anti-corruption claims, misinformation, surveillance risk, and youth political agency converge. Nepal is used as an illustrative and conceptually generative case, not as an empirical reconstruction based on the original field data. Published news accounts and institutional reports establish only the publicly documented contours of the event, while the analytical contribution is grounded in the scholarship on contentious politics, digital repression, platform governance, political agency, digital citizenship, and digital inequality. The article develops the Digital Momentum–Governance Translation Model. The model is organized around six analytical phases: moral shock, digital assembly, repressive escalation, counter-sovereign deliberation, institutional translation, and surveillance backwash to explain platformed citizenship rupture. Through this model, the article clarifies how digitally mediated protest can unsettle state legitimacy, create provisional arenas of political imagination, and expose the limits of both spontaneous mobilization and formal institutional response. Its central claim is that the democratic challenge after platformed protest is not mobilization alone but translation. The article therefore examines how digitally mediated legitimacy claims can be converted into accountable, inclusive, and rights-protecting governance without reproducing the exclusions, vulnerabilities, and institutional distrust that generated the rupture.
This article reports a quantitative meta-analysis of agenda-setting effects across political and platformized communication contexts. The analysis draws on a 30-study analytic sample selected from a local full-text corpus of 973 records, with 20 studies providing convertible effect sizes and variance estimates for the weighted synthesis. The central question is whether the correspondence between media salience and public, policy, or platform-mediated salience varies across geographic context, regime type, internet/media openness, and a post-2021 proxy for intensified platformization and AI-mediated communication. The primary effect-size metric is Fisher’s z-transformed correlation, with transformed r reported for interpretation and Cohen’s d used only as a secondary translation. Results indicate a strong positive overall agenda-setting effect and substantial heterogeneity, while moderator patterns are directional but statistically non-significant in the weighted analytic sample.
PurposeThe article highlights the country’s reliance on soft tools, such as traditional diplomacy, cultural diplomacy, and messaging, to protect national security and preserve unity. This paper aims to examine the extent to which the Sultanate of Oman utilized national soft power to mitigate the negative impact of the Muscat terrorist attack.Design/methodology/approachThis study used a qualitative approach to answer the research questions, applying document analysis as the primary method to collect the data from official statements, social media, and media coverage. Secondary data were collected from interviews with officials and analysts.FindingsThis article confirmed that soft power instruments played a major role in the time of the Muscat terrorist attack to mitigate the negative impact. Classic and public diplomacy, national identity promotion, and religious approach were the main instruments used in soft power. The Sultanate of Oman’s approach not only maintains public trust but also fosters cultural unity, ensuring that security and prosperity policies, as outlined in Vision 2040, remain unaffected. Besides that, this article showed that Oman successfully mitigated the negative impact based on no sectarian strife, swift restoration of security, and international cooperation. However, the research indicates that many challenges could be faced when deploying soft power instruments in crisis management, such as economic challenges, cyber threats, disinformation, and institutional coordination.Originality/valuesThis article contributes to a deeper understanding of how soft power can be affected in an unstable region for national security domestically and regionally. In addition, this article gives politicians and academics another point of view on how to protect national security by using soft power.
IntroductionPolitical efficacy is a key determinant of democratic participation; however, it remains unevenly distributed, particularly among rural women in India. Existing research has largely emphasized sociodemographic predictors, with limited attention to the combined associations of sociocultural, relational, digital, and institutional factors on political efficacy. This study addresses this gap by adopting a multidimensional framework to examine the determinants of political efficacy among rural women in India.MethodsA quantitative cross-sectional design was employed using data from 394 rural women in Kerala. Data were obtained through a structured questionnaire administered online (Google Forms) and in person (face-to-face). Political efficacy, gender norms, household decision-making power, social capital, digital engagement, and institutional exposure were also assessed. The incremental contribution of the predictors was measured using hierarchical multiple regression analysis.ResultsSociodemographic variables were significant in the baseline model but no longer significant in the fully adjusted model. In contrast, gender norms and the power to make household decisions were strong and reliable predictors of political efficacy in this study. Social capital and digital engagement contributed additional explanatory power, whereas institutional exposure had a significant independent effect in the final model. The full model accounted for 42% of the variance in political efficacy.DiscussionThe findings indicate that political efficacy is more strongly associated with sociocultural, relational, digital, and institutional factors than with the sociodemographic characteristics included in the analysis. The findings further suggest that gender norms, household agency, social capital, digital engagement, and institutional exposure should be considered together when developing policies and programs to support women’s political efficacy.
IntroductionImmigration was among the defining issues of the 2024 electoral cycle on both sides of the Atlantic. This study examines how the securitization framing of immigration in campaign discourse — its construction as an existential threat — relates to electoral mobilization, and whether the affordances of social-media platforms amplify that frame. It compares two dissimilar democratic contexts: the 2024 U.S. presidential election and the 2024 European Parliament elections.MethodsCombining framing theory and securitization theory, the study adopts a mixed-methods, most-different-systems design. It analyzes 155,827 news-influencer posts (Pew Research Center/Knight Initiative), video-level TikTok engagement data for 247 videos from Donald Trump and five European right-wing/populist leaders (via Exolyt), and official party manifestos, integrating quantitative content analysis, social-media analytics, and qualitative discourse analysis. The design is observational, and all quantitative analyses were performed in R.ResultsSecuritization intensity is strongly associated with engagement (r = 0.73, p < 0.001), and high-intensity threat language attracts roughly 2.3× the engagement of moderate messaging. Cross-Atlantic convergence is pronounced for economic-threat (r = 0.84) and border-security (r = 0.91) frames. Within individual leader accounts, however, immigration/security content does not command an engagement premium (0.97×), indicating that platform uptake tracks affective and mobilizational formats as much as the securitizing frame itself. The findings support H1–H3.DiscussionThe reported relationships are correlational, not causal. Results suggest that algorithmic curation forms part of the securitizing apparatus by governing audience uptake, while cautioning that engagement is an ambiguous proxy conflating attention, approval, and outrage. The study contributes a systematic, quantitative extension of securitization analysis to the algorithmic environment of short-form video.
This study investigates the agenda-building and agenda-setting process on the coverage of international students’ visa restrictions in the U.S. media organizations between 2018 and 2024 within highly polarized and platform-driven communication environments. Employing agenda-building, agenda-cutting, agenda-setting, and framing perspectives, the analysis explores how ideological media systems selectively amplify or marginalize competing narratives related to immigration governance, national security, digital surveillance, and international student mobility. This study conducted quantitative content analysis on 160 news articles from five ideological media tiers: mainstream, conservative, progressive, higher education, and policy-oriented outlets. The study compared dominant frames, source prominence, immigration salience, privacy concerns, and strategic communication practices across these media environments. The results show that administrative and restriction-oriented frames dominated coverage across ideological media systems. Conservative and policy-oriented outlets more frequently emphasized security and immigration-vetting narratives, while progressive and higher education publications prioritized humanitarian and economic frames. Regression analysis showed that strategically sophisticated communication practices significantly increased source prominence and stakeholder visibility, reflecting stronger agenda-building capacity within media narratives. The analysis also identified agenda-cutting processes, whereby ideological media systems selectively minimized competing narratives and amplified preferred interpretive frames. Furthermore, articles focusing on social media screening exhibited higher levels of critical tone and privacy concern compared to general visa denial coverage. The linkage of immigration salience increased over time, suggesting that international student mobility became progressively integrated into broader political discourse on immigration governance and national security. This research contributes to political communication scholarship by illustrating how media organizations influence salience through selective amplification, suppression, and narrative prioritization in polarized, platform-driven competitive media environments.
IntroductionThis study examines the digital transformation of sanitary and epidemiological monitoring in Kazakhstan and identifies managerial mechanisms supporting timely, coordinated, and data-driven public health responses.MethodsThe study combines a two-tier comparative analysis of benchmark countries and regional institutional comparators with regulatory review, institutional analysis, digital maturity assessment, national indicators for 2019–2023, and expert evaluation.ResultsThe analysis identifies fragmented interagency coordination, outdated regulatory arrangements, and uneven regional digital capacity as major constraints. An adapted digital maturity index and an institutional–digital model based on platform integration, legal modernization, and behavioral sensitivity are proposed.DiscussionThe findings indicate that stronger coordination, clearer managerial KPIs, and integrated digital infrastructure may improve the diagnostic readiness of sanitary monitoring. The proposed model should be regarded as a diagnostic and conceptual framework requiring further empirical validation.
Public participation, often theorized within Western democratic planning traditions, is widely viewed as essential for sustainable development. As planning is simultaneously people-centered and technically intensive, participation is crucial for legitimacy; however, higher positions on participation ladders do not automatically yield better outcomes, especially in technically complex domains dominated by professional expertise. Grounded in stakeholder theory, this study uses an integrated analytical approach combining a participation ladder with the Values-Rules-Knowledge (VRK) framework to examine participation in China’s Territorial Spatial Planning (TSP), a multi-scalar planning system with dense technical content. We examine participation provisions in national laws and regulations, compare them with implementation evidence from publicly accessible governmental feedback and response reports, and conduct an in-depth case study of Yubei District. Results show a persistent gap: participation is increasingly mandated but often organized as late-stage consultation, with limited influence on agenda-setting and weak feedback loops. Participation quality is constrained by centralized decision authority, asymmetric access to planning knowledge, and predominantly one-way communication that offers limited translation of technical content into community-relevant terms. Limited access to information, the technical and long-term nature of TSP, low expectations of influence, and possible norms of deference or risk avoidance may together reduce incentives for sustained engagement. By linking participation levels to VRK-defined decision contexts, the study develops a case-grounded diagnostic logic for identifying context-appropriate pathways to strengthen engagement. This logic may be adapted and tested in other planning systems, but its cross-context validity remains to be established.
Contemporary debates on the state tend to frame stability and chaos as opposing conditions—one the aspiration of governance, the other its pathological breakdown. This perspective article argues that the dichotomy conceals the mechanism through which states actually navigate between the two. Drawing on the concept of competitive statecraft—understood as the deliberate, coordinated mobilisation of institutional, regulatory, economic, and diplomatic capabilities by the state to build and project its relative position within a contested international order—the author reinterprets stability and chaos as endpoints of a single continuum defined by the shadow of the future: the probability that strategic interactions among states will be sustained over time. This parameter, rooted in Axelrod’s iterated prisoner’s dilemma framework, is operationalised through a stylized round-robin tournament in which five archetypal statecraft strategies are scored across the full range of shadow-of-the-future values. The simulation yields a crossover result: reciprocity-based strategies dominate coercive ones only once the shadow of the future crosses a critical threshold, below which defection remains locally rational even when globally destructive. A second finding reveals that this crossover materialises only when all actors in the system possess institutional capacity for retaliation. The results are interpreted against four episodes of geoeconomic rivalry and institutional erosion—the paralysis of WTO dispute settlement, the Western sanctions response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, US–China technological decoupling, and the Iran–Israel–US war—with the United States as the connecting thread across all four.
IntroductionThis article examines BRICS economic, strategic, financial, and normative engagement in the Middle East between 2020 and 2024, conceptualizing BRICS+ as a dual political form: a collective platform of non-Western institutional coordination and a constellation of divergent national strategies.MethodsThe study combines structured discourse analysis of five BRICS summit declarations, comparative case analysis of Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt, and secondary quantitative evidence on trade, development finance, payment systems, and reserve-currency dominance.ResultsChina primarily advances infrastructure, energy interdependence, financial connectivity, and selective mediation; Russia relies more on security diplomacy, energy coordination, and anti-sanctions narratives; and India practices strategic hedging through simultaneous BRICS participation, Gulf partnerships, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, and continued engagement with Western institutions. Regional actors use BRICS-related ties to widen strategic options rather than replace existing Western partnerships. BRICS-linked trade, development finance, local-currency mechanisms, and CBDC experimentation have expanded, but remain insufficient to displace the United States-centered security architecture or the dollar-centered monetary system.DiscussionBRICS contributes to a qualified pluralization of Middle Eastern regional order. Its influence is cumulative rather than revolutionary and is mediated through regional agency, infrastructural power, monetary experimentation, and internal contradictions among BRICS members.
IntroductionAs the global order fractures into a competitive multipolar system driven by the US-China trade war, middle powers in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are increasingly pursuing dual alignment strategies. These nations are simultaneously engaging with Western-led institutions like the OECD and non-Western revisionist blocs like BRICS. However, while systemic structural pressures remain uniform across the region, their strategic responses exhibit significant variance.MethodsTo explain this variance, this study employs a neoclassical realist framework centered on the state apparatus and political economy. It conducts a comparative analysis of four ASEAN nations: Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand. By treating global economic tensions and BRICS expansion as constant external variables, the research evaluates how domestic transmission belts—specifically domestic political economy, elite cohesion, and state resource extraction capacity—shape foreign policy outputs.ResultsThe analysis reveals divergent strategic paths. Indonesia’s dynamic balancing of nationalist and technopopulist elites drives a high-risk trajectory, simultaneously pursuing full BRICS membership and OECD accession. Conversely, the other three nations adopt risk-averse partnership models due to distinct domestic constraints. Malaysia is constrained by its entrenched semiconductor lobby, Vietnam by its consensus-driven politburo, and Thailand by its urgent need to escape the middle-income trap.DiscussionThe findings indicate that domestic transmission belts crucially filter systemic structural pressures. This study concludes that domestic vulnerabilities and internal economic imperatives, rather than overarching global shifts, are the primary determinants dictating how middle powers navigate contemporary great power competition and institutional alignment.
Strengthening democratic citizenship requires new kinds of tools for articulating and assessing the competences needed for responsible democratic participation. This article presents the development of the Responsible Democratic Citizenship (RDC) assessment tool, created within the EU Horizon Europe DEMOCRAT project to operationalize four core democratic competences: Solidary Participation, Deliberation, Judgment and Critical Thinking, and Democratic Resilience. Grounded in theories of democratic citizenship and education for democracy, the RDC tool was developed through an iterative, research-based process combining conceptual analysis, expert consultations, and co-design with practitioners. The tool was subsequently implemented and tested across multiple Living Lab pilot initiatives in six EU countries, within school communities, classrooms, and teacher education settings. Empirically, the article draws on a mixed-methods evaluation of 40 pilot interventions involving 144 teachers and 1,889 students, combining ex ante and ex post competence assessments with teachers’ structured documentation, interviews and focus groups, and an external evaluation. We describe the tool’s conceptual structure, development logic, and practical adaptations across contexts, and report initial insights into its usability, contextual fit, and perceived value for supporting democratic learning. The findings indicate that the RDC tool offers a flexible and pedagogically meaningful instrument for diagnosing and fostering democratic competences in formal education contexts. We discuss implications for the future development and broader application of competence-based assessment in citizenship education, with attention to innovative pedagogical approaches, including experiential and embodied, student-centered project learning, that support democratic engagement and the development of RDC competences in complex and contested environments.
COVID-19 proved to be one of the greatest events leading to return migration in Kerala, thus showing the need for better governance in this process. The interventions undertaken were mostly about repatriation and quarantine management, as well as emergency support, while reinstatement as such was neglected to a considerable degree. The current viewpoint presupposes a change of focus in dealing with this issue from reinstatement as the economic outcome of migration sabotage to an issue requiring governance. This study relies on the use of Reintegration Theory and Sustainable Livelihood Framework, as return migration is perceived as a multi-faceted process that finds itself at the intersection of livelihood opportunities, social protection, institutional assistance, and community resources. Research may prove that the majority of Gulf returnees face income uncertainty, lack of employment, and no prospects with regard to migration. Family ties and personal savings were found to be the most effective means of handling the situation. It is also proposed to change the approach to migration governance from repatriation to reinstatement, which is based on four pillars such as livelihood recovery, social protection, psychosocial well-being, and institutional coordination.
This Perspective argues that populism is best understood not primarily as a pathology of identity or anti-pluralism, but as a political response to social and economic institutions – most notably those associated with global capitalism – that generate inequality, insecurity, and democratic disempowerment. Against liberal interpretations that criticize populism on moral grounds and seek to counter it by correcting its essentialist conceptions of “the people,” the article contends that exclusionary and majoritarian rhetoric functions less as the motivational core of populism than as the political language through which structurally induced grievances are articulated. Drawing on the Italian case, it illustrates how right- and left-wing populisms construct different notions of “the people” from distinct positions within global capitalism, yet nonetheless converge on nationalist responses to supranational economic constraints. This convergence reveals the strategic but ultimately self-defeating character of populist nationalism: While it channels demands for protection and democratic control, it does so through exclusionary national frames that cannot effectively address the transnational structures producing these grievances. The article therefore argues that the persistence of populist nationalism reflects not ideological inevitability itself but the absence of transnational institutions capable of combining democratic accountability with social protection. Addressing populism therefore requires a global covenant to reform global governance and re-embed markets within democratic control.
This study examined how Ecuadorian digital news media framed, valued, positioned, and followed the penitentiary situation at the Cárcel del Encuentro (CPL Santa Elena No. 1) during 2025 and 2026. Grounded in critical realism, it moved beyond the empirical visibility of news events to interrogate the deeper generative mechanisms associated with prison disease, isolation, institutional opacity, and punitive governance. A purposive corpus of retrievable digital publications from Ecuadorian news outlets was examined through qualitative content analysis and frame analysis. The coding focused on transmitted messages, protagonists, adjectivization, news positioning, follow-up, visual framing, headlines, and interpretive orientation. The media field organized the case through four dominant frames: official control and denial of epidemic risk; humanitarian alarm around tuberculosis, malnutrition, and family testimony; securitized punishment and the symbolic transfer of “dangerous” inmates; and restricted access to information. These frames revealed a stratified reality in which visible events such as deaths and prisoner transfers were connected to deeper structures including punitive populism, militarized prison governance, institutional secrecy, social abandonment, and the cultural dehumanization of incarcerated bodies. The findings indicate that prison dignity is not a rhetorical supplement to security policy but a constitutional, ethical, pedagogical, and public-health condition for democratic life. Ecuador’s penitentiary crisis cannot be addressed through isolation alone; sustainable security requires rehabilitation, education, health care, family contact, transparent oversight, and preventive social policies.
IntroductionProtests in South Africa have become increasingly common, as they are recognized as a fundamental human right and a form of social justice. In South Africa, the most prominent protests center on issues related to service delivery, driven by marginalized communities demanding necessities such as water, electricity, and sanitation. These apolitical protestors are commonly labeled as irrational, violent, or politically manipulated, which serves to delegitimize their actions and obscure the deeper socio-economic and structural inequalities fueling their discontent. These labels are not neutral; they function as instruments of power that allow the state to categorize different groups in ways that justify either coercive force or calculated diplomacy. Thus, labeling becomes a mechanism through which the state manages dissent.MethodsThe aim of this paper is to critically examine how apolitical protests in South Africa are (mis)characterized and (de)legitimized, and how such representations shape both public perception and state responses. The paper adopts a qualitative, desktop-based secondary research approach, employing labeling theory as the theoretical framework, and focuses on how power influences the construction of meaning surrounding such protests.ResultsThe findings reveal that labeling and stereotyping criminalize dissent and delegitimize grassroots mobilization, especially when it is not aligned with dominant political interests. This shapes how the state and police respond to such protests.DiscussionIn conclusion, the paper argues that such (mis)characterizations reflect broader struggles related to who has the authority to define legitimate political expression in post-apartheid South Africa.
In the 21st century, the relationship between income and social status has evolved into a defining feature of socioeconomic layers in the Global South. Rising polarization poses a fundamental challenge to democratic governance and social sustainability worldwide, yet its structural roots in the Global South remain underexplored. This study argues that contemporary political and societal divisions in countries like India are not spontaneous but are produced by the long interaction of colonial political economy and postcolonial caste-based capitalist structure in economic development. This paper examines how shifts from historical colonialism to a neocolonial agenda have leveraged the hierarchical Indian caste structure to extract economic gains within India’s economic system. It contributes to current debates by linking caste and neo-colonial economic structure to modern political polarization in the Global South, offering a structural explanation often missing from polarization literature focused on the neo-colonial agenda. Findings suggest that addressing polarization requires confronting its deep historical and economic roots, not merely managing electoral behaviour or social divisions and their negative impact on sustainable development goals. This study identifies colonialism and caste hierarchy as interlinked and interdependent systems of domination driven by capitalism and explores the political economy of wages.
