The global colonial politics of liberal democratic citizenship

In the British context of April 2025, where this commentary is positioned, one could hardly be in a more obviously contested and anxious time for Global Northwestern liberal democracies and their governance of citizenship. Coming from the perspective of an interdisciplinary feminist decolonial psychosocial critique of liberal democratic governance and with its author similarly located in the global colonial Northwest, this commentary works with the critical thrust of the contributions of the volume’s “Bordering Citizenship” section. The commentary highlights the multiple interrelated problematics and prospects of the contested relationship between citizen subjects and the liberal democratic state. The aim is to draw out how the contributions invite further analysis of the reproduction of global colonial power carried through the neoliberalisation of the citizen subject in our contemporary capitalist coloniality. It frames and invites extension of their analysis from within a critical engagement of our current global coloniality as intersectionally cisheteropatriarchally white and hyper-capitalist; technically enabled through the expansion of techno-fascist “surveillance capitalism” but also, under extreme pressure through a range of economic, social, and environmental crises and liberal democratic political institutional decline.