Colonialism is the systematic domination and exploitation of one group by another for resource extraction, extending beyond historical land conquest to encompass neocolonialism, which is an indirect political and economic control, and internal colonialism within nations. Capitalism is a core driver of colonialism, evolving into contemporary corporate and financialized colonialism through globalized systems of wealth extraction, intellectual property control, and tax avoidance, impacting both high and low-income countries. We propose a three-part agenda for decolonizing global health, addressing power imbalances between actors, the colonization of global health governance structures, and the exploitation occurring within the health sector itself. This agenda calls for political and economic anticolonialism, alongside social decolonization, to foster greater diversity and equity within global health systems.
The original article by McCoy, D., Kapilashrami, A., Kumar, R., Rhule, E., & Khosla, R. (2024) titled “Developing an agenda for the decolonization of global health,” published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization (Vol. 102, No. 2, pp. 130–136). https://doi.org/10.2471/BLT.23.289949.