Description
This article introduces the concept of ontological imperialism to theorise how hierarchy is maintained within the global political economy through the stabilisation of meaning itself. Building on critical and postcolonial traditions in international political economy, it argues that domination today operates not only through material or institutional asymmetries, but through the ontological foundations that define what counts as knowledge, value, and legitimate order. Ontological imperialism describes the recursive process by which Northern actors and institutions universalise particular ontologies - of property, development, sustainability, or humanity - as the taken-for-granted basis of global cooperation. By tracing how these ontological premises underpin successive regimes of governance, the article reveals the limits of existing critical approaches that focus on exploitation, dependency, or ideology without examining how the very categories of political economy are constituted. The argument advances an ontological political economy framework that integrates material, epistemic, and ontological dimensions of power, showing how hierarchy persists through the reproduction of world-making assumptions rather than the imposition of rules alone. In doing so, it provides new theoretical foundations for analysing the endurance of empire within ostensibly post-colonial global orders.
