For centuries, power was measured in the most tangible of currencies: soldiers on the ground, ships at sea, and flags planted on conquered soil. Sovereignty was enforced at the barrel of a gun, and empires rose and fell on the strength of their armies.
Yet as the colonial era receded, overt coercion gave way to more discreet instruments. Loans replaced legions. The age of the gunboat yielded to the age of the bond. Institutions draped in the rhetoric of development extended credit that bound recipient states to conditions so stringent that they shaped entire economic regimes. Debt became a velvet shackle, no less constraining than military occupation, but cloaked in the language of modernization and growth.
Today we stand at the threshold of a third phase: the tokenization of power. If war subjugated land, and debt subjugated budgets, tokenization subjugates the very notion of rights. Land, resources and collective entitlements are converted into digital units, tokens, tradeable, divisible and transferable on global ledgers.
What was once the bedrock of sovereignty becomes an entry in a blockchain registry. Presented as innovation, democratization and financial inclusion, tokenization in fact heralds a new architecture of control, one in which individuals are neither subjects of conquest nor debtors of banks, but participants in systems whose rules are coded beyond their reach.
The logic is no longer theoretical. U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent proposal to rebuild Gaza by placing land into a “trust,” parceled into tradable digital tokens, is less a reconstruction plan than a pilot scheme in economic dominion. The notion that sovereignty can be fractionalized and securitized opens an alluring precedent: if it can be tested in Gaza’s ruins, it could be replicated in Greenland’s icebound resources or across African states courted by both Washington and Beijing.
What is presented as development aid may yet become a new form of territorial governance, one executed not by armies or creditors, but by algorithms and investors.
Dr. Bella Barda Bareket Photo: Lia YaffeThis evolution illustrates the enduring genius of power: its ability to conceal itself even as it extends its reach. From bayonet to bond to blockchain, coercion has grown subtler but no less pervasive. Dependence remains the constant. Where once the measure of domination was the number of soldiers stationed in a territory, and later the volume of debt on a nation’s balance sheet, it is now the extent to which access to property, housing or even subsistence is mediated through digital wallets. Power no longer requires the spectacle of occupation; it resides instead in the infrastructure of code that silently dictates the terms of access and exclusion.
The paradox is striking. Tokenization is marketed as decentralized, democratic and liberating, yet in practice, it may consolidate authority in new and opaque ways. A token can be traded, speculated upon or sold, but the framework that defines its value remains controlled by those who design and regulate the system. Ownership itself risks becoming a simulacrum, a tradable representation of rights rather than rights in substance.
This is not the end of imperial logic but its reinvention, stripped of its banners, shorn of its balance sheets and re-encoded in algorithms.
- Dr. Bella Barda Bareket is a global trends analyst specializing in the intersection of economics, geopolitics and technology.