Boaventura de Sousa Santos has argued that globalisation is not a ‘spontaneous, automatic, unavoidable and irreversible process which intensifies and advances according to an inner logic and dynamism strong enough to impose themselves on any external interferences’ (2006, 395). It is not, in other words, an uncontrolled force which can be tapped into by all nations equally; rather ‘globalization results from a set of political decisions which are identifiable in time and space’ (ibid.), and in fact promotes exclusion stemming from neoliberal policies that maintain the structural inequalities constructed during the colonial era. This continuity between colonial and neo-colonial structures is referred to as ‘coloniality of power’ by Aníbal Quijano, who argues that Europe constructed itself as ‘the central place of the new pattern of world- Eurocentered colonial/modern capitalist power’ (2000, 217–8) and created a

Quijano here exposes the global constructions of racialised identities who are deemed exploitable, a subjection that has been maintained from colonial times to the present through global capitalist structures. As Samir Amin argues, technology plays an integral role in the creation and structuring of inequalities which enables the North to profit from the South. He outlines the five monopolies which facilitate the coloniality of power:

While technological initiative is here listed as its own category, it is clear that technology is an inherent part of the other four monopolies and that it enables the sustaining of global inequalities. However, as David Arnold argues, the role of technology in coloniality is not one of an ‘advanced’ civilisation dominating another, but one of exchange in which indigenous knowledge was ‘appropriated, hybridized, or empirically arrived at, then became part of Europe's store of technical know-how (with its colonial origins often quickly forgotten)’ (2005, 99).