Hyper-Imperialism and Rethinking Gender Theory in the Global South

In the post-pandemic world, a radical change reshaped our global world order. The discourses, administration of international relations, and malleability of legal structures and international humanitarian law became manifest and ushered in normative, risk-managing governance. The pandemic restructured the global economic order and exposed imperial asymmetries in pandemic response (Tooze, 2021), breaking down multilateral governance and giving rise to authoritarian governance and abandonment of developing nations (Tom Bernes, 2020). As a result, legal regime(s) were restructured, globalization transformed, and state–corporate alliances were prioritized (Marel, 2020; Alami, Taggart, Whiteside, Gonzalez-Vicente, T. Liu, & Rolf, 2024). New security regimes were introduced through nationalized responses, health securitization, and retreat from collective humanitarian responsibility (Moodi, Gerami, & D'Alessandra, 2021). These shifts have meant a new global order is in the making—ruled by great power competition, resurgence of territorial claims and counterclaims, weakening deterrence mechanisms, and rupture of the rules-based liberal order. This is manifest in the fact that the year 2024 saw several interstate wars and imperial conflicts—the most since 1987—driven largely by large-scale hostilities in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and South Asia. Across all conflicts, what emerges is a hyper-imperial modality: about logistical, psychological, and data-based domination, propaganda, and misinformation campaigns, where epistemic violence and algorithmic governance shape the new battlefield. The normalization of a ‘hyper-imperialism’ as a structure of power, whereby sovereign states, transnational actors, and non-state actors pursue indirect or hybrid forms of domination over regions, populations, and epistemologies in ways that mimic colonial logics. This new trend of hyper-imperialism is increasingly aided by technological and digital forms of control, Artificial Intelligence, and surveillance of the multiplicity of experience. These new forms of political sovereignties attempt to alter and refashion regional political identities and gender subjectivities through digital governmentality, algorithmic governance, digital content lawfare, technological disciplining, and lethal autonomous weapons systems. In this section, we interrogate this new modality of politics and its normalization in the Global South, and rethink what gendered subjection means in the age of hyper-imperialism and attempt to rethink from within gender theories, to make sense of the transforming gendered experiences of politics, institutions, movements, social phenomena, and culture(s). These shifts demand a fresh theoretical rethinking, generalized sense-making, a more accurate understanding, and a deeper reimagining of the global international order's impact on gender subjectivities. The section will focus on the Middle East, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and South Asia as regions of prime focus. This section invites panels and papers that interrogate these new modalities of domination and rethinks some of the following questions: • How does hybrid imperialism reshape or weaponize gender in the Global South? • Can gender theory survive this hybrid imperial capture—or must it be fundamentally rethought from the peripheries? • How does hyper-imperialism redefine and regulate gender discourse through the architecture of digital space? • If algorithmic visibility is accorded based on digital identities and platforms, how can we understand this process? • Does hyper-imperialism turn rights into performative acts optimized for algorithms or training models? • How do surveillance and biometric policing reshape gendered bodies and movements? • How is gender politics framed as a developmental metric? • How do algorithms reinforce the structural inequalities of race, gender, and identity?