Coined in 2017 to describe Chinese lending in the Global South. A geopolitical strategy in which a creditor nation or institution extends loans to a borrowing nation to enhance the creditor’s political influence and economic interests in the developing world. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank are often accused of debt-trap diplomacy for lending programs that require borrowers to undergo structural adjustment or privatization, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.

Credited to Aimé Césaire, who wrote that “colonization works to decivilize the colonizer,” this is the theory that the techniques developed by governments to enforce imperial control abroad will eventually be turned on their own populations by those same governments. 

The theory that some workers in the imperial core are bought off with a share of the profits extracted abroad and so come to defend the system that pays them. Friedrich Engels coined the phrase for the English craft unions; Vladimir Lenin took it up in 1916 to explain why Europe’s socialist parties, having vowed for decades to oppose imperialist war, voted for war credits in August 1914.