The question that opened this series, whether nations that won independence have won sovereignty, admits of no simple answer. The picture is one of gradation, struggle, and uneven advance rather than a clean division between the free and the unfree.
This final part steps back from the case studies to examine the mechanisms themselves, the four structural forces that reliably reproduce dependence regardless of geography, political system, or the good intentions of any particular government.
The Architecture of Perpetual Dependence
Resource Extraction: The Colonial Bargain Continues
Resource extraction remains the foundational mechanism through which the global economy reproduces inequality between states. Countries in the Global South are positioned as suppliers of raw materials, while the manufacturing of finished goods, and therefore the capture of value added in production, occurs elsewhere. The result is a structural condition in which the more a country exports its natural wealth, the poorer it tends to remain.
The Congo’s coltan, which powers the world’s smartphones and laptops, is mined by artisanal miners who earn a few dollars a day under the supervision of armed groups, and sold to multinational processors who sell it to manufacturers who sell finished devices worth hundreds of dollars in wealthy countries. Transfer pricing, the manipulation of prices in internal transactions to shift declared profits to low-tax jurisdictions, costs African governments alone an estimated $50 billion a year in lost tax revenue, more than the total aid received by the continent.
Legal, normalized, and routine, this practice constitutes one of the primary channels by which formally sovereign states are stripped of the fiscal resources real sovereignty requires. The EU’s handling of Congo’s mineral crisis in 2025 illustrated the priorities of the dominant system with unusual frankness.
While formally condemning Rwanda’s support for M23, the European Union refused to suspend its critical raw materials agreement with Rwanda, even after Amnesty International documented gang-rape and torture by M23 fighters. Access to the minerals, Amnesty concluded, had been placed above Congolese lives. It is, in miniature, the same calculation that has organized the Congo’s relationship with the outside world since Leopold II.
The Industrial Trap: Why Manufacturing Remains Elusive
Ha-Joon Chang’s analysis demonstrates that every successful industrialization in history required a period of protected development during which domestic industries were shielded from foreign competition until they could survive it on their own terms.
Britain, the United States, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and China all used precisely these tools: infant industry protection, state investment, credit allocation, technology licensing restrictions. This is not controversial economics; it is economic history.
But the trade regimes imposed on developing countries through the WTO, bilateral free trade agreements, and structural adjustment conditions systematically deny them the policy space to do what every successful industrializer has done. South Korea, when building up its steel, shipbuilding, and semiconductor industries in the 1970s and 1980s, was doing things that are now officially barred by WTO rules that South Korea helped write after it had successfully industrialised.
The ladder of industrial policy has been kicked away, and the global poor are expected to rise without it.
Dollar Dominance: The Invisible Cage
IMF COFER data show the dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves has declined from 73 percent in 2001 to around 57 percent in 2025. The World Gold Council’s 2025 survey found that 73% of global central bankers expect the dollar’s share of reserves to fall further over the next five years. These aren’t small changes. They are a structural response to the weaponization of the dollar hegemony that started to accelerate in 2022.
More devastating for sovereignty than the dollar’s reserve role is its use as an instrument of political coercion. The United States’ control over the SWIFT international payments network, over dollar-clearing operations in American banks, and over the international financial institutions that regulate capital flows gives it the capacity to effectively excommunicate any country from the global economy.
Countries targeted by American sanctions cannot easily export, import, borrow, or conduct international transactions — not because of any physical blockade, but because every financial intermediary in the world must choose between access to the dollar system and relations with the sanctioned country.
“Sanctions, through asset freezes and confiscation of international reserves in many countries, have definitely stirred things up and made countries reflect about the reliance on this previously thought of neutral system that is now a threat to their national sovereignty and economic policies.” — Green Central Banking analysis, citing international monetary policy observers (2026)
As of 2025, the United States maintains active sanctions regimes against more than thirty countries. The cumulative population living under American sanctions exceeds one billion people. President Trump has explicitly threatened BRICS members with 100 percent tariffs if they back any alternative to the dollar, a threat reported across major news organizations in late 2024.
The message could not be clearer: monetary sovereignty is not a right but a privilege, extended or revoked at Washington’s discretion.
Technological Dependency: The New Colonial Frontier
The twenty-first century has added a new and increasingly decisive dimension to the sovereignty struggle. Advanced semiconductors are produced in meaningful quantities by only a handful of companies: TSMC in Taiwan, Samsung in South Korea, and Intel in the United States.
The design software for these chips is controlled by American firms. The manufacturing equipment required to produce them is dominated by ASML, a Dutch company. When the United States moved to cut China off from this supply chain in 2022, it demonstrated the reach of this control. The subsequent waves of restrictions, tightened in 2023 and 2024 and further expanded in 2025, represent the most consequential use of technological leverage in economic history.
China’s state media in December 2025 reported a Chinese “Manhattan Project” for semiconductors: a recognition that technological sovereignty has become, in Beijing’s strategic calculus, almost indistinguishable from sovereignty itself. For countries outside the charmed circle of technological self-sufficiency, which is to say most of the world, digital infrastructure built on American platforms is subject to American surveillance and American political conditions.
The Martinican poet and philosopher Edouard Glissant argued that genuine sovereignty requires “the right to opacity”: the capacity of a people to define themselves on their own terms, to resist the universalizing claims of any dominant system. In the digital age, when every communication, financial transaction, and economic decision produces data harvested by American platforms and potentially available to American intelligence agencies, opacity has become almost technically impossible for most of the world’s people.
Conclusion: Sovereignty as Ongoing Struggle
The question that opened this series, whether nations that won independence have won sovereignty, admits of no simple answer. The picture is one of gradation, struggle, and uneven advance rather than a clean division between the free and the unfree.
China shows that the architecture of dependence can be overcome. But this required decades of conscious state capacity building, technological investment, and willingness to defy the prescriptions of institutions that benefit from the existing order.
Russia shows that sovereignty can be reasserted in an assertive way, but at a great price. Cuba demonstrates that a small country can sustain ideological and political sovereignty, in the face of the most sustained sanctions regime in history, for more than six decades, at a terrible economic cost.
Iran, Vietnam, and Brazil demonstrate the variety of strategies available to nations attempting to navigate between complete dependence and direct confrontation. What emerges from this survey is that sovereignty in the contemporary world is not a binary condition bestowed at independence and thereafter secure.
It is a dynamic capacity that requires active building, defence, and renewal against constant erosion. The mechanisms of that erosion — resource extraction terms, industrial policy restrictions, dollar-denominated debt, financial sanctions, and technological dependence — are structural, not conspiratorial.
They do not require personal ill will; they are the normal functioning of a global system constructed, historically and institutionally, to reproduce the advantages of those who constructed it.
“Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it.” — Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
Fanon’s formulation, written in 1961, captures something that purely economic analysis of sovereignty can miss: that the deepest injuries of dependence are not only material. They are epistemic. The capacity to imagine a different order, to believe that genuine sovereignty is achievable rather than perpetually deferred, is itself a resource that the dominant system has an interest in depleting.
As the dollar’s reserve share declines, BRICS is growing to represent nearly half the world’s population. China’s DeepSeek moment shows that technological independence under sanctions is possible. Global central banks are gathering gold at a rate we haven’t seen in decades. This situation is creating a serious challenge to the structure of dependence since decolonization.
Whether this challenge leads to true multipolarity or just a new order of control depends on the decisions being made right now in the streets, legislatures, and boardrooms of the Global South and beyond. The stakes are essential. It’s not just about who thrives and who struggles, but also about who has the power to shape their own future.
Tamer Mansour, Egyptian Independent Writer & Researcher
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