Mapping Colonial Ignorance: A Decolonial Ranking of Nation-States
Ranking the Colonizer
Part I: Foundations of Colonial Ignorance and Methodology
Oye, mira. The persistence of colonial violence is not confined to historical timelines but actively lives within legal systems, education policies, cultural industries, and data infrastructures of modern nation-states. This study introduces the Colonial Ignorance Index (CII), a decolonial metric designed to identify, evaluate, and rank the denial and erasure of colonial legacies across contemporary states.
Unlike traditional development indices, the CII is rooted in anti-colonial analysis and guided by the DRRI (Decolonization Readiness and Resistance Index) framework. While the DRRI tracks progress toward structural decolonization, the CII inversely highlights which countries are most invested in preserving colonial amnesia. This tool is necessary because colonialism did not end, it transformed.
(See Tuck & Yang, 2012, who argue that decolonization is not a metaphor but a material project of land return and structural dismantling.)
Colonial ignorance manifests in multiple dimensions:
Legal erasure of race and ethnicity
Suppression of Indigenous or Afrodescendant history
Curricular omissions or distortions
Maintenance of colonial-era laws
Militarization and carceral expansion
Export of anti-Black, anti-Indigenous ideologies
Gendered and heteronormative violence rooted in colonial patriarchies
The CII is calculated using a qualitative review of legal archives, curriculum audits, public policy reports, community testimonies, and geopolitical analysis. Each country receives a score from 0 (active decolonization) to 100 (total colonial denial), based on:
Historical accountability
Reparations and land return
Legal structure transformation
Education system decolonization
Narrative and media control
Data sovereignty and algorithmic justice
Gender, sexuality, and cultural restitution
Scoring Methodology and Elasticity Rationale:
Each CII score is derived from a weighted synthesis of structural indicators across seven domains: historical accountability, reparations and land return, legal structure transformation, education system decolonization, narrative and media control, data sovereignty, and gender/cultural restitution.
Elasticities, i.e., how much each variable impacts the broader decolonial gap, are informed by historical outcomes, cross-country comparisons, and movement testimony.
For instance, countries that criminalize racial data collection or ban Indigenous languages see compounded effects across education, law, and media.
Scores are calibrated based on both measurable reforms (e.g., land returned, budget allocations) and institutional resistance (e.g., denialist laws, state violence against land defenders), allowing for comparative precision without flattening regional context.
While the DRRI measures readiness, the CII reflects active suppression and is structured to penalize performative gestures with no structural consequence.
Part II: High Colonial Ignorance (CII 90–100)
These states actively suppress colonial truth, maintain white supremacist systems, and export ideologies of dominance.
(As Fanon wrote, 'colonialism is not a thinking machine, it is violence in its natural state.')
France (CII: 98)
France has made the denial of colonial legacy a matter of law. It criminalizes anti-colonial speech, bans collection of racial data, and upholds laïcité to erase Islamic and Afro-descendant presence. Its educational system glorifies empire while marginalizing its colonial crimes in Algeria, Haiti, and across Africa.
United States (CII: 97)
The U.S. is a global exporter of anti-Blackness and militarized policing. Indigenous genocide and enslavement are erased or diluted in curricula. CRT bans and whitewashed textbooks dominate public education. The prison-industrial complex remains a direct continuation of plantation capitalism.
(Mbembe’s necropolitics helps us understand how colonial states determine who is allowed to live and who must die.)
Brazil (CII: 96)
Brazil maintains one of the most violent anti-Black, anti-Indigenous regimes. The myth of racial democracy masks the structural violence facing Quilombola and Indigenous communities. Evangelical and military forces work hand-in-hand to reinforce patriarchy and heteronormativity.
United Kingdom (CII: 95)
Britain refuses to reckon with its empire. The monarchy, school system, and public institutions valorize colonization. Reparations are avoided, and the Caribbean Windrush scandal revealed how Black citizens remain disposable. British media maintains colonial nostalgia as cultural identity.
Japan (CII: 94)
Japan continues to erase its colonial domination of Korea, Taiwan, and China. Textbooks minimize war crimes. Nationalist rhetoric denies forced labor and sexual enslavement. Japan's cultural elite resist inclusion of Koreans and Okinawans, promoting purity myths.
Germany (CII: 92)
While Germany has confronted the Holocaust, it has failed to acknowledge its colonial genocide in Namibia or its complicity in global anti-Blackness. Surveillance laws rooted in Nazi frameworks persist. Afro-German communities remain systemically marginalized.
Argentina and Chile (CII: 91)
These Southern Cone nations perpetuate the myth of whiteness. Mapuche people face criminalization for land defense, and education denies Black history. Settler narratives dominate, and legal systems continue to enforce European cultural supremacy.
Israel (CII: 91)
Israeli governance replicates settler colonial logic. Palestinian dispossession is framed as security. Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jewish communities face racial hierarchies. Laws suppress Indigenous land claims while memorializing only selective trauma.
India (CII: 90)
Postcolonial nationalism in India masks caste apartheid and Islamophobia. Hindutva ideology promotes a revisionist history, erasing anti-colonial alliances and reinforcing Brahmanical dominance. English-medium education perpetuates colonial aspirations.
Australia (CII: 90)
Australia upholds the terra nullius myth, denying the sovereignty of Aboriginal nations. Mass incarceration of First Nations people, police violence, and ongoing land theft mark a system rooted in genocide. Truth-telling commissions are weak or performative.
Part III: From Institutional Erasure to Emerging Decolonial Movements
Medium Ignorance (CII 60–89)
These countries have systemic colonial denial but are also sites of active contestation and community resistance.
Mexico (CII: 89)
The ideology of mestizaje denies Afro-Mexican and Indigenous autonomy. Femicide, religious conservatism, and state corruption perpetuate colonial gender violence. Textbooks omit Oaxaca and Chiapas uprisings.
Philippines (CII: 88)
The U.S. colonial legacy remains intact through education, military presence, and political structure. Mindanao Muslim communities face martial law-style surveillance. Church-state collusion restricts gender and reproductive rights.
South Africa (CII: 87)
Post-apartheid economic structures maintain white property ownership. Townships remain underfunded. Afro-Indigenous languages are still devalued in education. Resistance thrives but is met with police brutality.
Canada (CII: 86)
Truth and reconciliation remain symbolic. Residential school legacies continue through foster systems and health care discrimination. Indigenous communities leading land defense face militarized repression.
(As Simpson argues, Indigenous resurgence must not be confined to state-approved gestures but rooted in self-determined governance systems.)
Colombia (CII: 85)
The Black and Indigenous communities of the Pacific coast suffer ongoing dispossession. Paramilitary control and corporate extraction dominate. Historical reparations are virtually non-existent.
Kenya and Nigeria (CII: 84)
These countries retain colonial law frameworks, British-style education, and criminalization of LGBTQ+ lives. Church-state alliances replicate Victorian-era morality. Resistance exists but lacks state protection.
Lower Colonial Ignorance (CII 30–59)
These states show structural shifts, community-led governance, and cultural memory work that challenge colonial reproduction.
Bolivia (CII: 59)
As a plurinational state, Bolivia recognizes Indigenous nations. However, resource nationalism undercuts land return, and elite mestizo classes resist true power-sharing.
Ecuador (CII: 58)
Intercultural education and Kichwa media outlets grow, but oil extraction continues in Amazon territories. Indigenous land defenders face violence from state-backed actors.
Rwanda (CII: 57)
Post-genocide unity is legally mandated, but suppresses ethnic memory and debate. Decolonial public health and agriculture policies are innovative, but top-down governance limits grassroots narrative control.
Cuba (CII: 56)
Cuba trains anti-imperialist doctors and educators globally. However, anti-Blackness within the state persists, and queer communities face intermittent repression. Economic colonial dependence persists via sanctions.
Vietnam (CII: 55)
Vietnamese education teaches French colonization and resistance with clarity. However, ongoing political repression, limits on cultural pluralism, and surveillance infrastructure reflect internalized colonial control.
Colonial Amnesia by Region — A Deep-Dive into Denial
Part 2:
Section 1: Europe and the Institutionalization of Forgetting
France
France maintains one of the most strategic systems of colonial denial in the Western world. The 2005 law mandating that schools teach the "positive role of colonization" in French history is emblematic of a culture of sanitized nationalism. France also exports anti-Blackness through laïcité, a form of secularism that bans public religious expression while reinforcing Eurocentric standards. Colonial education in schools is minimal, distorted, or omitted, with little discussion of the genocides in Algeria, Madagascar, or Haiti.
Germany
Although Germany has taken steps toward Holocaust education, its colonial past—especially in Namibia and Tanzania—is rarely addressed. Many of the laws passed during the Nazi era still remain encoded, particularly those related to policing and surveillance. The acknowledgment of colonial crimes is recent and still highly academic, not institutional. Germany is slow to address the intersection of racism and its imperial history, hiding behind its post-Nazi moral authority.
United Kingdom
While often celebrated for teaching the evils of slavery, the UK systematically avoids discussion of colonialism’s deeper structures. The British Empire’s crimes in Kenya, India, and the Caribbean are often glossed over in public curriculum. Monuments to slave traders and colonizers remain protected. Furthermore, British media and politics use multiculturalism to mask the ongoing imperial presence in the Commonwealth.
Netherlands and Belgium
Both countries profit from a reputation for liberalism, but their education systems teach very little about their brutal legacies in Indonesia and Congo respectively. In Belgium, the glorification of Leopold II continues in public spaces. In the Netherlands, the role of Dutch slave trading is often treated as a footnote in national history. The DRRI analysis shows high narrative comfort, low land or reparative reform.
Section 2: The Americas — Patriarchy, Religion, and the Racial Lie
United States
The United States is a paradox. While racial justice movements are globally influential, the U.S. education system continues to suppress honest teaching of slavery, Indigenous genocide, and settler colonialism. States like Florida are actively banning books and restricting Critical Race Theory. U.S. anti-Blackness is a cultural export, replicated through media, policing models, and foreign policy. Reparations and land return remain symbolic, not structural.
Canada
Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a significant step, but most of its calls to action remain unfulfilled. The federal government continues to build pipelines through Indigenous territories. Residential school histories are only recently being acknowledged, and often without budgetary commitment. Digital and data sovereignty for Indigenous communities remains weak.
Latin America and the Caribbean
In Latin American and Caribbean states, coloniality is often erased through a myth of racial democracy. Countries like Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia glorify mestizaje while suppressing Black and Indigenous identities. National narratives deny the role of the Catholic Church and colonial patriarchies in shaping laws that perpetuate gender-based violence, anti-LGBTQ persecution, and economic exclusion. Femicide rates are high. School curricula rarely mention Indigenous resistance or colonial rape as foundational violence.
(Quijano’s theory of the 'coloniality of power' explains how these hierarchies persist through law, gender, and epistemic control even in postcolonial states.)
Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories
Commonwealths like Puerto Rico exist in suspended sovereignty. U.S. colonial rule is obscured under the language of "territorial status," leaving Puerto Ricans without voting rights or full federal protections. Decolonization is structurally blocked. The Jones Act continues to choke the economy while anti-Blackness and patriarchy persist in education, healthcare, and politics.
Section 3: Asia — Nationalism as Colonial Code
Japan
Japan’s curriculum actively downplays its imperial role in Korea, China, and Southeast Asia. Nationalism is state policy, with historical revisionism taught in schools. The Yasukuni Shrine honors war criminals. Post-WWII U.S. occupation helped encode a denial of colonial guilt. Japan remains a model of productive imperial forgetting.
India
Despite its own colonization, India replicates colonial patterns internally through caste apartheid, anti-Muslim state violence, and suppression of Indigenous Adivasi land claims. Nationalism has merged with Hindu supremacy (Hindutva), creating new forms of epistemic injustice. The Dalit movement is suppressed in education and media. Colonial economic patterns persist through extractive development models.
China
China resists Western imperialism in rhetoric but employs settler colonial strategies in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia. The state suppresses Uyghur language, religion, and cultural memory through mass surveillance and internment. Han supremacy mimics the colonial machine. The Belt and Road Initiative exports infrastructure imperialism under the guise of development.
Philippines
The Philippines embodies layered colonization—from Spain, the U.S., and Japan—yet struggles to confront any of them fully. Martial law legacies under Marcos continue to influence governance. U.S. military bases, English-language dominance, and Catholic doctrine maintain colonial infrastructures. LGBTQ rights are precarious. Feminist and Indigenous histories are underrepresented.
Part 3: Africa, the Middle East, Oceania — and the Global Decolonization Gap Index
Section 1: Africa — Extraction without Repair
Despite being the epicenter of resource wealth and colonial extraction, Africa remains under the boot of global debt, digital surveillance, and resource neocolonialism. Decolonization in name did not lead to structural liberation.
Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa While formally independent, these countries still operate under economic and legal systems imported from colonial rule. Nigeria’s legal system retains British common law; Ghana’s mining codes still favor foreign companies. Kenya maintains elite settler structures, with Indigenous land dispossession ongoing in Maasai and Ogiek territories. In South Africa, despite the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, land reform is slow, and economic apartheid persists. These states often celebrate independence while outsourcing governance through the IMF, WTO, and U.S. foreign policy.
(Ndlovu-Gatsheni shows how 'development' has often served as a colonial continuation in Africa through debt, conditionalities, and institutional capture.)
Francophone West Africa Countries like Senegal, Mali, and Côte d’Ivoire still use the CFA franc — a currency controlled by France. Despite recent uprisings and coups, France's grip through financial and linguistic colonialism remains firm. Education systems still prioritize French epistemologies over Indigenous knowledge. Colonial denial is coded as modernity.
North Africa In Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt, coloniality is layered with Arabization. Amazigh (Berber) populations are suppressed, and Black Africans in North Africa face systemic anti-Blackness. France's cultural and linguistic influence remains dominant. These countries often suppress their own histories of anti-colonial resistance in favor of elite nationalism.
Section 2: Middle East — Empire by Proxy and Internal Colonialism
Israel/Palestine Israel represents the most active form of settler colonialism today. The occupation of Palestinian land, apartheid legal structures, and demographic engineering via settlements are textbook violations of self-determination. The Israeli state receives massive U.S. funding, surveillance tech, and legal export models. Palestinian epistemologies are systematically erased through censorship and military violence. Resistance is criminalized. The DRRI would assign Israel the highest Decolonization Gap globally.
Saudi Arabia, UAE, Gulf States These monarchies embody internal colonialism—concentrated wealth, repression of migrant workers, anti-Blackness, and patriarchal religious control. Political dissent is criminalized, and Indigenous tribal structures are co-opted or erased. Digital control mimics surveillance models from the West and China, with AI and facial recognition used against laborers and activists.
Iran, Iraq, Syria These postcolonial states are shaped by British and French mandates. While opposing U.S. imperialism, many retain legal structures rooted in colonial partition. Ethnic minorities (Kurds, Assyrians, Baloch) are still denied autonomy. Decolonial truth-telling is sidelined by state militarism and theocratic control.
Section 3: Oceania — The Ongoing Theft of Land and Memory
Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand) Australia’s foundational lie is terra nullius — the idea that the land was empty. Aboriginal sovereignty is still not recognized in its constitution. The Voice referendum was a weak attempt at symbolic inclusion without land or resource return. Mass incarceration of Indigenous Australians is among the highest globally. Aotearoa has moved further, with the Treaty of Waitangi and partial land reparations. But many Māori communities still lack basic health infrastructure, education parity, or shared governance.
(Contravenes principles of UNDRIP, particularly Articles 8, 10, and 26.)
Pacific Islands Nations like Guam, American Samoa, and French Polynesia are still colonies in all but name. Nuclear testing, tourism-based economies, and climate displacement are compounded by colonial governance. Language loss, Christianization, and imported gender norms have dismantled matriarchal and queer-affirming traditions.
Section 4: Global Decolonization Gap Index – Top 25 Most Colonially Ignorant Countries (Indicative)
Using a preliminary DRRI model—based on evidence of land return, reparations, epistemic justice, narrative control, and structural change—we rank the countries with the widest gap between colonial harm and redress:
RankCountryPrimary Forms of Denial
1.) Israel Active settler colonialism, apartheid, erasure
2.) France Narrative control, legal erasure, language colonialism
3.) United States Export of anti-Blackness, land denial, repression
4.) Brazil Patriarchy, Indigenous erasure, religious weaponization
5.) Saudi Arabia Internal colonialism, patriarchal theocracy
6.) China Settler colonization in Xinjiang, Tibet
7.) Germany Holocaust-focused memory, denial of African colonialism
8.) United Kingdom Royalist mythology, Commonwealth colonial continuities
9.) Japan Imperial denial, nationalist curriculum
10.) Canada Symbolic reconciliation, slow land return
11.) Netherlands Sanitized curriculum, economic extractivism
12.) Belgium Glorification of Leopold II, Congo denial
13.) India Caste apartheid, anti-Muslim policy, Adivasi dispossession
14.) Mexico Machismo, anti-Blackness, religious patriarchy
15.) South Africa Land inequality, slow reform post-TRC
16.) Australia Terra nullius, incarceration, Voice failure
17.) Egypt Arabization of Indigenous identity
18.) Philippines U.S. dependency, misogyny, Christian nationalism
19.) Colombia Indigenous land targeting, gender violence
20.) Russia Imperial holdover, suppression of minority groups
21.) Mali French financial colonialism, limited restitution
22.) Kenya Settler land retention, political elite colonial continuity
23.) Argentina Denial of Afrodescendant presence
24.) Indonesia Papua occupation, militarized nationalism
25.) Iraq Post-British legacy, ethnic exclusion
Conclusion: Decolonization is Measurable, Memory is Action
This study confirms what many already know but what states and institutions fear: decolonization is not a metaphor. It can be measured through structural changes. It begins with the return of what was taken, land, wealth, language, power, and ends only when the myths that prop up Empire are dismantled in law, in education, in code, and in memory.
The Decolonization Readiness & Resistance Index (DRRI) is not simply a scorecard. It is a call to memory, a tool of enforcement, and a ledger of truth. Let no nation hide behind multicultural branding again.
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