George Orwell’s immortal axiom – ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others’, remains the most apt diagnosis of our world’s political condition. It captures the deception at modernity’s heart: that human rights, democracy, the constitution, and the rule of law emancipate, when in truth they destroy life in the name of life. This piece makes two interrelated arguments – first, that these concepts (human rights, democracy, the constitution, and the law) are encryptors of power and a grand simulacrum presenting domination as liberation; and second, that they are the chief enablers of imperialism and the internationalisation of suffering.
The
Theory of Encryption of Power (TEP), developed by
Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo provides the scaffolding. TEP shows that coloniality works because it simulates democracy and encrypts power. The greatest trick of encrypted power is to present a world of violence, racism, famine, war, genocides and epistemicides as the only necessary, and unalterable truth. The constitution is the master encryptor: through it, racial, gender, and national hierarchies are established, the commons privatised, and democracy destroyed in its own name while capitalism is installed as the sole global truth. Democracy is not merely compatible with coloniality; it is its most seductive disguise.
Nowhere is this simulacrum more viscerally exposed than in South Africa – which possesses one of the world’s most celebrated constitutions, yet with the majority remaining dispossessed. The Constitution of 1996 enshrines rights to dignity, equality, housing, healthcare, food, water, and education. On paper, it is a monument to human rights. In practice, a monument to their encryption.
Right was vindicated; life was not
Three decades on, South Africa is the most unequal society on earth by Gini coefficient. Over 60% live below the poverty line; unemployment exceeds 40%. The spatial geography of apartheid – townships, informal settlements, and land dispossession, remains structurally intact. The constitution encrypted this geography under a new lexicon of rights. Land was not redistributed but entrenched under Section 25, hiding racial lines of dispossession behind the language of private property.
The ‘hidden people,’ excluded from full legal protection and abandoned to market violence, constitute the majority of South Africans. Invoked as the sovereign people, they are structurally excluded from substantive sovereignty. Sanín-Restrepo (2025: 6-7) writes:
‘We the People’ is the most terrifying fusion of power and the purest form of violence under an impermeable armour of legitimacy [where] the people become the transcendent and mystical model of their own exclusion. Injustice is naturalised as justice. Crime as law.
South Africa’s Constitutional Court produced celebrated judgments – Grootboom of 2001, Treatment Action Campaign of 2002, are hailed as global exemplars. Yet,
Irene Grootboom died homeless in 2008, evicted from the land she had litigated to occupy. The right was vindicated; the life was not. The rule of law is the umbilical cord uniting neoliberalism with constitutionalism (Sanín-Restrepo and Araujo, 2020). In South Africa, this manifests in the criminalisation of land occupations, mass evictions, and state violence against resisters – all beneath constitutional legality. Resistance is encrypted as crime; dispossession as property rights; imperialism as development.
Globally, the human rights architecture – the UN Charter, the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the
International Criminal Court – performs universal protection for the most powerful while systematically dispossessing and massacring the ‘Rest’. In Gaza, Sudan, Congo, and Iran, Western powers arm perpetrators while indicting others. Grosfoguel’s colonial-cum-genocidal ladder – ‘Christianise or I kill you; Modernise or I kill you; Disarm or I kill you’ – finds its 21st-century form in rights enforced through drone strikes, assassinations, and economic warfare.
The decolonial antidote is decryption: unmasking how human rights, the constitution, and the rule of law function as instruments of domination and machines of death. As long as the grand simulacrum holds, George Orwell’s pigs will continue to walk on two legs.
- Munyaradzi Mushonga is the Global Academic Director for the Decolonial International Network (DIN). He enjoys working at the margins of disciplines in an undisciplinary way.