Empire Within: Hostile Environments, Indigenous Realities, Patriarchy, and the Climate Crisis in Contemporary Britain

 Introduction

The concept of a “hostile environment” often refers to regions affected by war, civil unrest, crime, or natural disasters (G8, 2015). In the UK, however, the term has been formalized through government policy: the Hostile Environment framework is a set of administrative and legislative measures aimed at making life as difficult as possible for people without leave to remain, thereby encouraging voluntary departure (Home Office, 2012). These policies are more than bureaucratic instruments; they reflect enduring imperial logics, embedding racial hierarchies and exclusionary practices into everyday governance (Bhambra, 2017).

Britain’s imperial legacy continues to shape contemporary social and political structures. Although colonialism is often framed as a historical phase, its philosophical and structural residues remain embedded in English law, governance, and social behavior. The persistence of state-sanctioned hierarchies, coupled with racialized norms, demonstrates how empire is not merely historical, but continues to manifest in contemporary policy and institutional culture. Two particularly stark manifestations are: (1) the UK’s Hostile Environment immigration policy, now intensified under 2025 reforms, and (2) the ongoing marginalization of Indigenous populations, both abroad and within diasporic communities in the UK.

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The Hostile Environment and Its Evolution

Racist exceptionalism and separatist ideologies underpin the delivery of Hostile Environment policies, implemented by state bodies such as the Home Office and Department for Work and Pensions (Wemyss, 2019). The 2012 Conservative government codified these measures, encouraging migrants to “return to where they came from,” a framework later inherited and maintained by successive governments. The Windrush and Grenfell scandals illustrate how institutionalized hostility fosters systemic harm, disproportionately affecting racialized and marginalized communities (Phillips, 2018; Lowndes, 2020).

2025 Immigration Reforms

Recent policy developments have intensified these dynamics. The 2025 Immigration White Paper, Restoring Control over the Immigration System, introduces measures that tighten legal, economic, and linguistic requirements for migrants and asylum seekers (Home Office, 2025a). Key reforms include:

• Raised skill thresholds: Eligibility for Skilled Worker visas now requires RQF Level 6, excluding lower-skilled roles historically filled by racialized migrants (CIPD, 2025).

• Closure of care worker visa routes: The SOC 6135 and 6136 visas for care work are closed to new overseas applicants, exacerbating gendered precarity in a feminized sector (CIPD, 2025).

• Extended path to settlement: Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) and citizenship now require 10 years of continuous residence, replacing the previous 5-year standard (Home Office, 2025b).

• Stricter English language and “earned contribution” criteria: Language proficiency and evidence of economic contribution are now mandatory for settlement and citizenship (FT, 2025).

• Enhanced border and asylum controls: Measures include the Rwanda relocation scheme, tighter deportation powers, and the “one in, one out” mechanism with France (Safety of Rwanda Act 2024; The Guardian, 2025a,b).

• Digital ID initiative: Proposed mandatory digital ID systems (“BritCard”) would link identity, work rights, and residency, raising concerns about surveillance and social sorting (Gov.uk, 2025).

These measures reflect a biopolitical approach to governance: the state regulates who belongs, who contributes, and who is excluded, embedding racialized hierarchies into the architecture of citizenship and mobility (Foucault, 2003).

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Imperial Legacies, Race, and Governance

The Hostile Environment exemplifies the ongoing influence of imperial thought in British governance. Stuart Hall (1992) highlights that notions of national identity are socially constructed, yet often presented as natural or homogeneous. Policies that extend ILR periods, enforce English proficiency, or require “earned contribution” exemplify state racism (Balibar, 1991), producing differential treatment along racial, gendered, and class lines.

Paul Gilroy (2004) identifies a postcolonial melancholia in Britain: the persistence of imperial hierarchies manifests in social and political institutions, where racialized labor and structural exclusion reproduce colonial patterns. The closure of care worker visas, for example, disproportionately affects migrant women from Global South countries, linking gendered precarity to racialized exclusion. These dynamics illustrate how patriarchal and colonial logics intersect in contemporary migration governance.

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Intersection with Indigenous Realities and Climate Crisis

The Hostile Environment also reflects broader imperial logics affecting Indigenous and Global South populations. Conditional citizenship and punitive migration rules echo colonial hierarchies of “worthiness” and control, while ignoring the legacies of displacement and dispossession experienced by Indigenous communities (Bhambra, 2017).

Climate migration adds a further layer of urgency. Restrictions on low-skilled work visas, asylum access, and settlement pathways hinder climate-affected populations from reaching safety. This demonstrates how environmental and geopolitical crises intersect with structural exclusion, producing a governance regime that prioritizes containment over protection.

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Socioeconomic and Psychological Impacts

Hostile Environment policies generate profound social and psychological effects. By embedding systemic suspicion and bureaucratic hostility, the state fosters fear, anxiety, and trauma among migrant and minority populations (Hall, 1992; Wemyss, 2019). Exclusionary practices also reinforce labor market hierarchies, suppress wages in certain sectors, and perpetuate social stratification. These outcomes exemplify the broader consequences of state-sanctioned hostility: it is not simply policy, but a cultural and psychological force shaping everyday life.

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Conclusion

The 2025 reforms underscore that the Hostile Environment is a living, evolving mechanism of control rooted in Britain’s imperial and colonial legacies. By tightening skills, language, and settlement requirements, closing lower-skilled visa routes, and enhancing surveillance, the state reasserts a conditional, racialized model of belonging. These measures intersect with patriarchy, Indigenous marginalization, and the climate crisis, highlighting the complex, intersectional harms of contemporary migration governance.

Critically, these policies reveal that hostility is not incidental to state function: it is a defining feature, structuring who is included, who is excluded, and who bears the social and economic costs of governance.

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Polycentric Dynamics from Cell to State: Why Balanced Polycentricity Is the Fundamental Architecture of Resilient Systems

Across biological, ecological, and human systems, resilience emerges not from centralization or fragmentation but from balanced polycentricity — the coordination of multiple semi-autonomous units within a coherent, adaptive whole. From the level of the cell to the structure of the state, life demonstrates that no system can remain stable by relying on a single dominant center of control, nor can it survive without mechanisms that integrate diverse components into shared regulation. Balanced polycentricity is not merely one possible configuration of organization; it is the architecture that makes complex life possible.

At the biological level, the hierarchy from cell → tissue → organ → organism is inherently polycentric. Cells operate with their own regulatory machinery, maintaining homeostasis independently, yet survival depends on intercellular communication, feedback signaling, and metabolic interdependence. Organs are composed of locally autonomous tissues but function only through synchronized physiological regulation. Even within a single organism, no singular structure commands total control; instead, endocrine, neural, and immune systems form overlapping regulatory centers, each capable of influencing but not overriding the others. This distributed architecture ensures that failure at one node does not collapse the entire system, a core principle of resilience.

Ecological systems amplify this logic. Forests, coral reefs, and grasslands are polycentric networks of species, nutrient pathways, and microclimates. Stability arises from functional redundancy, diverse response strategies, and decentralized feedback loops. No single species, trophic level, or biogeochemical pathway holds absolute authority; instead, multiple agents simultaneously regulate energy flow, nutrient cycling, and population dynamics. Ecologists consistently find that systems with higher polycentric complexity — more distinct yet interacting centers of regulation — are more resistant to disturbance, more adaptable to environmental variability, and more capable of long-term persistence. The scientific consensus is clear: biodiversity and distributed ecological regulation are inseparable from systemic stability.

Human governance mirrors these dynamics. While modern states often aspire toward centralized unity, empirical evidence—from Ostrom’s common-pool resource studies to contemporary resilience theory—shows that large-scale systems function best when they adopt polycentric governance structures. In these systems, communities, institutions, and regulatory bodies retain local autonomy but remain connected through shared rules, monitoring, and communication channels. This enables rapid adaptation to local conditions while preventing fragmentation into isolated or conflicting units. Such arrangements distribute risk, reduce the consequences of failure, and promote innovation through diversity.

Crucially, both extremes undermine stability. Excessive centralization — whether in a biological organ, an ecological system dominated by a single species, or a political system controlled by a single authority — reduces adaptive capacity and makes the system vulnerable to collapse. A monoculture field, a top-heavy bureaucracy, or a single-point biological regulator becomes brittle, unable to respond to perturbations. Conversely, excessive multiplicity without coordination results in fragmentation: unregulated cell proliferation becomes cancer; unbounded species competition destabilizes ecosystems; uncoordinated political actors produce governance failures.

Balanced polycentricity provides the corrective to both extremes. It allows self-interest to operate at multiple scales while embedding each autonomous unit within a network of reciprocal constraints and feedback. It ensures that diversity is not merely tolerated but functionally integrated. It prevents domination by any single center while preventing chaos across many. It is, in scientific terms, the optimal configuration for robustness, adaptability, and long-term systemic persistence.

From the micro-scale of cellular regulation to the macro-scale of global governance, the conclusion is consistent:
Resilient systems are polycentric. They thrive when many centers of agency operate in constructive tension, each autonomous yet none isolated, maintaining a balance that neither hierarchy nor fragmentation can provide.

Balanced polycentricity is not an ideological preference but a structural necessity for any complex system seeking endurance across time.

The Monoculture of Power, the Pluriversal Commons, and the Climate Imperative

 We rarely talk honestly about power. We use words like “government,” “market,” or “infrastructure” as if they’re neutral features of the world. But behind these polite labels lies a harder truth: a small cluster of corporations, militaries, billionaire networks, and media platforms quietly steer the systems that shape our everyday reality.

This concentrated formation is what might be called the Monoculture of Power.

It operates across wealth, war, pharmaceuticals, energy, finance, food systems—everything that can be extracted, commodified, or controlled. It functions through a web of self-reinforcing interests, all driven by the same basic logic:

Extract more. Centralise more. Control more.

And nowhere is this logic more visible—or more dangerous—than in the climate crisis.
The Monoculture of Power has built an economy that burns the future to maximise present profit. Fossil fuels, deforestation, industrial agriculture, land grabs, water extraction—these are not accidents; they are the infrastructure of dominance supporting klepto capitalism.

Psychologically, this system is driven by what might be called pathological masculinity: an expansionist mindset that treats human beings and the Earth itself as something to conquer. Some within this system genuinely imagine ruling the planet, ignoring and destabilising the climate that sustains it.

Will they ultimately succeed? Perhaps—if they didn’t constantly undermine one another.
Power blocs fracture. Deals collapse. Rival states fight for resource control. Wars erupt—often over land, energy, and scarcity made worse by climate breakdown.

And millions of people are displaced, exploited, or sacrificed to these competing factions of the same extractive logic.

This is the central contradiction: the Monoculture of Power is immensely strong, yet climate instability is exposing its fragility.

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The Pluriversal Commons: A Different Map of the World

Sitting within this centralising force is  something plural, relational, and adaptable: the Pluriversal Commons.

This is not a single movement. It is a constellation of many different worlds:

• Indigenous stewardship practices

• Feminist and ecological frameworks

• Regenerative agriculture and food sovereignty

• Mutual aid and community resilience networks

• Local knowledge systems

• Renewable, decentralised energy initiatives

• Climate justice movements

The Pluriversal Commons sees the planet not as a resource to dominate but as a network of relationships to honour.
It values regeneration over extraction, complexity over efficiency, interdependence over control.

And crucially: the Commons holds many of the answers the climate crisis demands, because it never accepted the Monoculture’s fantasy of infinite growth on a finite planet.

But even the Commons is not immune.
It forms organisations that can be co-opted. It negotiates with states that undermine it. It navigates the same climate shocks as everyone else.

This is not good vs. evil.
It is a spectrum—between extraction and reciprocity, domination and regeneration, collapse and renewal.

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Climate Change Makes This Tension Impossible to Ignore

For centuries, the Monoculture of Power and the Pluriversal Commons have been locked in a slow civilisational tug-of-war.

Climate breakdown accelerates the timeline.

Suddenly, these aren’t just philosophical differences—they are survival strategies.
One worldview treats the Earth as expendable.
The other recognises the Earth as kin, partner, and teacher.

The climate crisis lays bare the costs of the Monoculture’s logic.
It also highlights the strength and necessity of pluriversal ways of living.

The stakes have never been higher.

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Culture: Where the Climate Future Is Actually Decided

Culture is the operating system of human meaning.
It shapes what we think, what we fear, and what we hope for.

Culture decides:

• whether a forest is a sacred being or a commodity

• whether water is a relative or a resource

• whether care is a duty or a burden

• whether the future is something to protect or something to exploit

The Monoculture of Power uses culture to rewrite the climate crisis as a technical glitch, a market opportunity, or a distant inconvenience.

The Pluriversal Commons uses culture to remember that the Earth is alive—and that humans are part of something bigger than themselves.

Culture is where climate denial is crafted.
Culture is also where climate courage begins.

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So Where Do We Go From Here?

Most of us live in the space between these two worlds.
We rely on systems we distrust.
We participate in economies we hope to transform.
We feel connected to relationships the system can’t comprehend.
And we live with a climate future that feels both terrifying and still salvageable.

But once we understand that culture is imagination made real, everything changes.

If cultural stories built a world of extraction, they can build a world of regeneration.
If the Monoculture created climate collapse, the Commons can shape climate renewal.
If one worldview is ending, another can emerge.

The future is not predetermined.
It is still open, still contested, still unfolding.

The climate crisis doesn’t just demand action.
It demands a different imagination.
It demands a different culture.
It demands different worlds.

And those worlds are already here—if we choose them

The Human as System: A Bio-Mimetic View of Being

The human being is often imagined as a single, unified self. Yet biologically, each of us is a plurality: billions of living entities cooperating in colonies of cells, microbiomes, and organs. This internal complexity mirrors the living systems around us — forests, oceans, and atmospheres woven together by reciprocity.

Alongside this biological reality, humans build symbolic systems: colonialism, capitalism, nationalism, even the -isms that define identity and ideology. These are not natural laws. They are extensions of human cognition — shaped by emotion, imagination, and the need to survive. In this sense, the system is the human, and the human is the system. We build the world from the structures already inside us.

But unlike natural systems, human-made systems are filtered through ego. Ego separates, controls, and protects its own continuity. Through this lens, self-interest becomes the central source of systemic corruption, pushing societies toward domination rather than reciprocity. When human-made systems forget the principles that sustain life — finitude, regeneration, interdependence — they drift into extraction and imbalance.

All of this unfolds while the human organism remains profoundly finite. Our bodies depend on ecological networks; our minds depend on relational worlds. To ignore finitude is to design systems that deny the conditions of their own survival.

At the same time, humans are continually transforming. Biological renewal, mental development, and technological expansion shape us in layers. The rise of machinic technologies — artificial intelligence, automation, bioengineering — reflects our impulse to reproduce aspects of ourselves in material form. Yet these machinic systems must learn from biological intelligence rather than replace it.

This is where bio-mimicry becomes essential. Nature thrives through feedback, cooperation, and regeneration. The human body is a living model of this logic. If human systems are to endure, they must move closer to the relational intelligence of ecosystems: designing with limits in mind, embedding reciprocity, and honouring the cycles that allow life to flourish.

To be human, then, is not to dominate systems but to participate in them. We are finite, plural, and always becoming — biological, mental, and machinic at once. Understanding this offers a different kind of clarity: that sustainable futures emerge not from mastery, but from alignment with the deeper, regenerative logic of life itself.

Neo-colonialism : The British Establishment and the Extractive Culture of Capital

The foreign takeover of England’s vital sectors — water, housing, and infrastructure — cannot be understood apart from the complicity of the British establishment, whose institutions, ideologies, and governance structures sustain the very conditions for dispossession. What appears as external control by foreign investors is, in fact, an extension of internal culture: an establishment historically conditioned to align with global capital rather than communal welfare. The monarchy, the City of London, the Treasury, and political elites operate as domestic brokers of imperial logic, facilitating the transfer of national resources to transnational investors under the guise of economic modernity.

Within the Extractive/Relational spectrum, the British establishment exemplifies the Extractive pole — hierarchical, acquisitive, and self-legitimating. Its authority is maintained through ritual and rhetoric: the monarchy symbolizes divine order, finance symbolizes prudence, and austerity symbolizes virtue. Beneath this ceremonial surface lies an ideological continuity from empire: the belief that wealth and power naturally concentrate in the hands of a few. This is a cultural theology of extraction — the sanctification of private ownership, the erasure of collective responsibility, and the normalization of inequality.

The result is a form of internal colonialism, in which England becomes subject to the same logics of exploitation it once imposed abroad. The City of London, legally semi-autonomous and financially opaque, functions as a metropole of global capital rather than national governance. As Bhattacharyya (2018) notes, neoliberal Britain perpetuates the economic order of empire by other means: through debt, speculation, and privatization rather than conquest. The establishment thus presides over a self-inflicted recolonisation, ensuring the extraction of value from public goods into private, often foreign, hands.

In contrast, the Relational pole offers a radically different ontology — one grounded in interdependence, reciprocity, and shared stewardship. This is the logic of the commons, both in Indigenous traditions and civic governance. Elinor Ostrom’s research (1990) demonstrated that communities, when entrusted with self-governance, develop durable and equitable systems for managing shared resources. Far from chaotic or inefficient, such systems embody a collective rationality — one grounded in accountability, trust, and care.

Through this lens, England’s economic vulnerability — where foreign investors control essential utilities and housing — reveals a cultural disconnection from the commons. The Extractive establishment cannot conceive of value beyond accumulation and domination. Yet Ostrom’s work, like Indigenous ecological thought, exposes a more sustainable form of governance: one where stewardship is not a moral luxury but a structural necessity. The Relational paradigm thus reclaims what the Extractive model displaces — the understanding that life, land, and resources are not commodities, but relations to be tended.

Decolonising the English economy, therefore, requires more than policy reform or nationalization; it demands a reconfiguration of governance and culture. It entails shifting from hierarchical control to relational accountability, from private ownership to communal stewardship. Water, housing, and infrastructure must be reimagined not as instruments of capital accumulation but as commons — domains of care structured around social, ecological, and intergenerational responsibility.

The irony of post-imperial Britain is that the system it once exported — the Extractive culture of empire — has returned, consuming its own foundation. The path beyond this recursive coloniality lies in embracing the Relational paradigm: communal, regenerative, and accountable. Only through such a transformation — institutional, cultural, and spiritual — can England begin to decolonise itself from both the global capital it serves and the establishment that enables it.