Politics, People and Power :

Dependency theory was once mainly about economics. It explained why so many countries in the Global South remained poor not because they had somehow failed internally, but because they were locked into a global system designed to benefit the industrial “core” at the expense of the “periphery.” Wealth flowed upward. Raw materials flowed outward. Dependency was not an accident. It was built into the structure of the world economy. 

Today, dependency is not only economic. It is also intellectual and political because inequality is no longer maintained only through trade, debt, and development models. It is also maintained through the control of knowledge and the control of global rules. In other words, the modern world is not just divided between those who have more and those who have less. It is also divided between those who define truth and those who must borrow it, and between those who make the rules and those who live under them. 

Dependency shapes not only what countries can produce, but it is extended to what they are allowed to think and how far they are allowed to govern themselves.

The first of these extensions is epistemic dependency. Elite universities, major journals, global publishers, and ranking systems are still overwhelmingly concentrated in Europe and North America. They function as gatekeepers of legitimate knowledge. Ideas from the Global South are often welcomed only as “local experience,” “case studies,” or cultural perspective, but rarely as theory with universal relevance. Hamid Dabashi cuts straight to the point: the issue is not whether non-Europeans can think, but whether their thinking is ever recognized as thinking in the full sense. That is not a side issue. It is a hierarchy. It determines whose ideas travel, whose language counts, and whose frameworks are treated as neutral or universal.

This is reinforced by language, funding, prestige, and institutional dependency. Many universities outside the West are pushed to imitate Western standards in order to be visible or credible. Scholars often have to publish in English, cite approved canons, and pass through Western institutions to be heard. Even talent itself is extracted. Brain drain is not just migration. It is a transfer of intellectual capacity from the periphery to the core. And in the digital age, the problem has mutated again. AI infrastructure, data systems, cloud platforms, and digital research environments are increasingly controlled by a handful of corporations and institutions in the Global North. Dependency is no longer only about factories and finance. It is now coded into platforms, servers, and algorithms.

The second extension is political dependency. The language of sovereignty suggests that states are formally equal, but the structure of global governance says otherwise. Institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and UN Security Council do not operate on neutral ground. They are shaped by unequal voting power, veto rights, and entrenched geopolitical privilege. The result is predictable: some states are disciplined, monitored, and restructured, while others act with impunity. Loan conditions, sanctions, diplomatic pressure, and selective enforcement all shrink the policy space of weaker countries. Political dependency is not the absence of a flag or an anthem. It is the inability to act freely without external approval.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the selective enforcement of international norms than in the treatment of nuclear power in the Middle East. The pattern is not random; it is structural. States such as Iran, operating inside the non-proliferation regime, have been subjected to sweeping inspections, sanctions, and sustained diplomatic pressure, while Israel, which remains outside the NPT and is widely understood to possess nuclear weapons, has faced repeated criticism but little comparable coercive enforcement. Iraq offers the harshest example of this asymmetry: its nuclear facilities were first bombed, then its weapons programs were placed under intrusive international control, and it was ultimately invaded even after inspectors had cast serious doubt on the claims used to justify war. 

Global institutions are often strict with weaker states and permissive toward powerful ones or their allies. Rules are invoked when useful and ignored when inconvenient. That does not merely expose hypocrisy. It reveals structure. The international order is not failing to deliver 

So what follows from this? The answer is delinking, but not in a simplistic or romantic sense. It does not mean isolation. It means building autonomous intellectual and political capacity rather than permanently outsourcing legitimacy to the “core”. In knowledge, that means investing in local institutions, languages, research agendas, and South-South networks. In politics, it means building forms of cooperation and sovereignty that are not permanently subordinated to Western patronage or Western-designed institutions. It also means being honest about fake decolonization. When “core” institutions manage “decolonial” agendas without giving up real power, they often reproduce the same dependency in softer language.

Dependency theory still matters because dependency itself never disappeared, it expanded, reshaped and strengthened. It moved from trade into universities, from raw materials into data, from colonial administration into global governance. The question today is not only who owns resources. It is also who gets to define reality, who gets to set the terms of legitimacy, and who gets to decide which nations are fully sovereign and which are merely tolerated. Until those questions are confronted directly, every claim of a fair and universal world order is little more than political theater.