Reshaping the seized space for long-term control: settler colonialism, redrawing of administrative-territorial boundaries, Russification of education and toponymy, rewriting of history and control of memory. The goal is to make a return to independent existence unthinkable for the next generations.
| ID | Name | Description | |
| T0053 | Abduction of People | Aggressors may carry out covert or overt violent abductions of political leaders, civic activists, journalists, and ordinary members of the Indigenous people. In the active phase of a conflict, this technique serves the operational neutralization of defenses by physically eliminating potential organizers of resistance. In the long term, enforced disappearances are used to consolidate the occupation regime, as they create an atmosphere of unpredictable terror and paralyze the society's will to mount systematic protest. | |
| T0146 | Administrative Corruption and Extortion | Aggressors may use their military-administrative apparatus and monopoly position in seized or colonized territories to create a system of shadow levies and systematic extortion. Representatives of the occupation administration artificially erect bureaucratic, logistical, and legal barriers, forcing the Indigenous population to pay unregulated bribes to exercise basic rights — to conduct trade, to move freely, or to keep their property. This practice is used for the direct extraction of benefits through the illegal enrichment of the metropole's apparatus at the expense of the local population's resources. At the same time, it serves as an instrument of institutional consolidation of control, as it turns arbitrariness into the norm and demonstrates to the colonized society its absolute lack of rights before the aggressor's officials. | |
| T0030 | Administrative-Territorial Division | Aggressors very often alter administrative boundaries within a captured region. In the course of implementing this technique, traditional systems of local governance are forcibly abolished, while the seized lands are fragmented and integrated into the colonizer's standard bureaucratic grid, which irreversibly destroys the historically formed social ties within the society. For example, many borders in Africa are the result of struggles between colonial powers. The borders of the union and autonomous republics of the USSR were established by Moscow for administrative convenience and were changed in accordance with the decisions of the Moscow leadership. | |
| T0017 | Annexation of Territories | Aggressors may carry out the forcible and unilateral annexation of another state's territory. Such actions are accompanied by the complete abolition of the sovereignty of the captured entity and the final integration of its lands into the occupier's legal and economic space through the issuance of corresponding manifestos or the staging of sham electoral procedures. | |
| T0121 | Artificial Famine | Aggressors may artificially create conditions of mass famine through the forcible seizure of food, the destruction of agricultural infrastructure, and the blocking of escape routes. This form of indiscriminate terror physically exterminates the population, suppressing ongoing revolts, while simultaneously clearing the demographic landscape of the colonized territories. | |
| T0129 | Ban on National Names | Aggressors may use civil registration institutions and religious establishments to forcibly change, adapt, or prohibit the traditional given names and surnames of the local population. This technique serves the deep consolidation of assimilation processes. Imposing the metropole's anthroponymic standards at birth or upon the issuance of documents deprives a person of their primary national marker and accelerates the dissolution of the indigenous people in the colonizer's demographic mass. | |
| T0015 | Bribery of Elites | Aggressors may use systemic corruption and the distribution of privileges, titles, and large-scale financial resources to win over members of the target state's top leadership, intelligentsia, and military ranks. This technique permeates every stage of colonization: from preparation for seizure (recruiting agents of influence) to the seizure of governance (sabotage during defense) and institutional consolidation (buying the loyalty of a puppet government). By encouraging the personal ambitions of the elite at the expense of national interests, the colonizer destroys the local population's capacity for organized resistance. | |
| T0101 | Censorship | Aggressors may impose strict control over all forms of public expression, book printing, and mass media. Banning the publication of literature without the sanction of appointed censors, filtering information, and repressing independent authors allow the colonizer to monopolize the information space. This prevents the spread of dissent and ensures that the aggressor's state ideology is imposed on the colonized society without alternative. | |
| T0139 | Construction of Fortresses | Aggressors may build fortresses, ostrogs (stockaded forts), and chains of defensive lines (military lines) on the territories of Indigenous peoples. This infrastructure physically cuts the local population off from vital resources (for example, lowland pastures), blocks communications, and serves as a protected staging ground for the permanent stationing of occupation troops and the subsequent resettlement of colonists from the metropole. | |
| T0046 | Creation of Economic Dependence | Aggressors may deliberately destroy or isolate the self-sufficient sectors of the colonized society's economy, replacing them with subsidies or critical supplies from the metropole. Artificially turning the region into a subsidized periphery critically dependent on the colonizer's external financing, energy resources, or export markets deprives the local population of the material base for political independence and makes organized protest economically impossible. | |
| T0141 | Creation of Economic Hopelessness | Aggressors may deliberately create and maintain unbearable socio-economic conditions (acute land shortage, crushing obligations, destitution) in the historical territories of an Indigenous people. This is done to force the population to flee physical and social ruin. As a result, the people 'voluntarily-compulsorily' join the colonizer's militarized structures (for example, the Cossack host or the regular army) or migrate en masse to dangerous imperial frontiers to settle them. This technique allows the empire to accomplish its military and colonization objectives by proxy, disguising state coercion as the victims' own 'free economic choice.' | |
| T0115 | Cultural Assimilation | Aggressors may apply comprehensive measures to displace and replace the unique cultural codes of the Indigenous people with the standards and traditions of the metropole. The artificial dissolution of the local culture within the aggressor's dominant culture makes it possible to sever historical continuity, deprive the colonized society of its national identity, and ensure its irreversible mental merger with the colonizing state. | |
| .001 | Replacement of the Native Language's Alphabet | As part of cultural assimilation, aggressors may forcibly change the graphic basis (alphabet) of the local population's language. Converting the script of the Indigenous people to the metropole's alphabet artificially cuts new generations off from the body of previously published national literature, historical documents, and cultural heritage, while simultaneously facilitating linguistic unification and creating the false impression of illiteracy and the absence of a written tradition before the arrival of the colonizers. | |
| .002 | Folklorization of the Native Culture | As part of cultural assimilation, aggressors may deliberately reduce the rich and multifaceted culture of the Indigenous people to primitive, entertainment-oriented, or exclusively rural folklore. Pushing local traditions out of the academic, philosophical, and urban spheres into the category of archaic ethnography allows the colonizer to artificially secure for its own culture the status of the sole bearer of progress and civilization. | |
| .003 | Cultural Chauvinism | As part of cultural assimilation, aggressors may systematically impose, through state institutions and media, the idea of the unconditional superiority of the metropole's culture over the culture of the colonized society. Cultivating a contemptuous attitude toward the art, traditions, and customs of the local population instills in it an inferiority complex, stimulating mass voluntary renunciation of one's own roots for the sake of successful integration into the aggressor's society. | |
| T0117 | Demographic Assimilation | Aggressors may deliberately alter the demographic and ethnic composition of a seized region in order to dissolve the indigenous people in a mass of settlers. Artificial transformation of the population structure allows the colonizer to marginalize the colonized society on its own land, strip it of its status as the demographic majority, and suppress its potential for national revival in future generations. | |
| .001 | Migratory Replacement | As part of demographic assimilation, aggressors may carry out large-scale, state-sponsored resettlement of loyal citizens from the metropole to the territories of the colonized society, while simultaneously encouraging or coercing the local population to emigrate. Artificially populating the region with colonists changes the electoral, cultural, and linguistic balance, providing a reliable base of social support for the occupation regime. | |
| .002 | Encouragement of Mixed Marriages | As part of demographic assimilation, aggressors may use administrative, economic, and ideological incentives to encourage marital unions between members of the indigenous people and settlers from the metropole. Deliberate promotion of mixed marriages accelerates the erosion of the local population's national identity, since subsequent generations in such families are, as a rule, raised in the linguistic and cultural paradigm of the dominant colonizing state. | |
| T0127 | Deportation | Aggressors may resort to the forcible mass expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their historical territories to remote regions. This practice physically neutralizes the potential for local guerrilla or political struggle and destroys the social structure of the people, freeing up lands for subsequent settlement by settlers loyal to the colonizer. | |
| T0008 | Deprivation of Agency | Aggressors may deliberately deny an Indigenous people the right to independent political, legal, and historical existence. At the ideological level, this manifests in the dissemination of narratives about the colonized society's lack of agency, which serves the legitimization of domination. At the diplomatic and administrative level, the technique is implemented through the unilateral abolition of sovereignty, the annulment or rewriting of previously concluded international treaties, and the shift of relations from equal footing to a format of direct diktat, which ensures the institutional seizure of governance and the legal consolidation of the occupation. | |
| T0045 | Destruction of Historical Memory | Aggressors may deliberately destroy the physical and intellectual objects that shape national identity: archives, museums, architectural monuments, and cultural institutions. Erasing material evidence of the past, desecrating historical burial sites, and forcibly removing national symbols from public space allows the colonizer to create a cultural vacuum, which is subsequently filled, with no alternative, by the artificial narratives of the metropole. | |
| T0044 | Destruction of Local Knowledge Systems | Aggressors may deliberately destroy the educational, scientific, and theological institutions of an Indigenous people. Eliminating local academic schools, banning the publication of literature, and officially declaring the works of local thinkers heretical or extremist allows the colonizer to artificially sever intellectual continuity. This deprives the colonized society of its own cultural foundation and creates a vacuum that is immediately filled by the educational and ideological standards of the metropole. | |
| T0140 | Destruction of the Natural Landscape | Aggressors may deliberately alter or destroy the natural landscape of the target region (for example, by carrying out large-scale felling of centuries-old forests or destroying natural barriers). This is done to deprive the Indigenous people of natural cover, to prevent mobile guerrilla warfare, to seize resources needed for survival (firewood, building materials), and to completely destroy the traditional physical space. | |
| T0038 | Economic Control | Aggressors may establish a complete monopoly over financial flows, taxes, and trade operations in the seized territories. Placing the region's economy under the colonizer's manual control allows it to redirect all collected funds into its own treasury, deprive the Indigenous people of economic independence, and rigidly tie their livelihood to the metropole. This phenomenon manifested most vividly in the USSR, where all aspects of the economy were subordinated to the state, and all legal economic activity, up until the last few years of Soviet rule, was planned and regulated by the USSR's Gosplan from Moscow. | |
| T0114 | Educational Assimilation | Aggressors may use the education system in seized territories as a fundamental instrument for reformatting the identity of children and youth. The deliberate replacement of the educational environment, curricular standards, and language of instruction allows the colonizer to raise the next generations of the Indigenous people in a paradigm of unconditional loyalty to the metropole. | |
| .001 | Imposition of Asymmetric Bilingualism and Optionality | As part of educational assimilation, aggressors may create administrative conditions under which the study of the metropole's language becomes strictly mandatory, while the native language is relegated to the status of a secondary elective. The artificial creation of organizational barriers to studying the local language instills in young people a perception of their native speech as marginal and unprestigious, encouraging mass voluntary abandonment of its study. | |
| .002 | Financial Discrimination Against Teachers | As part of educational assimilation, aggressors may establish unequal pay conditions, rewarding teachers who teach in the language of the metropole while artificially lowering the pay rates of, or withholding bonuses from, teachers of the local language. The creation of financial inequality squeezes national cadres out of the education system and economically coerces schools into adopting the colonizer's standards. | |
| .003 | Conversion of Schools to the Metropole's Language | As part of educational assimilation, aggressors may carry out a total, forced conversion of the teaching process in all educational institutions to the colonizer's language. Depriving the Indigenous people of the right to educate their children in their native language leads to a rapid rupture of cultural continuity and the complete integration of the local population into the aggressor's information space. | |
| T0043 | Erasure and Renaming of Place Names | Aggressors may carry out the deliberate replacement of the historical geographic names, street names, city names, and region names of the Indigenous people with toponyms tied to the culture, ideology, and history of the metropole. Erasing the original names allows the colonizer to visually and mentally integrate the seized lands into its state space, and to deprive the colonized society of the physical markers of its national identity and historical memory. | |
| T0120 | Extermination Based on Identity | Aggressors may carry out the targeted physical extermination of people solely on the basis of their national, cultural, or political affiliation. Mass repressions, extrajudicial executions of the intelligentsia, and systematic terror pursue a dual goal: to immediately suppress active resistance and to preemptively eliminate the social base capable of preserving and transmitting the national code into the future. | |
| T0130 | Financial Incentives for Assimilators | Aggressors may institute, at the state level, a system of special allowances, increased salaries, and bonuses for the military and bureaucratic apparatus for the successful implementation of denationalization policy in colonized regions. This technique is used to consolidate power. Direct economic bribery of its own officialdom allows the colonizer to motivate the lower-level apparatus toward a more aggressive and proactive displacement of the language, culture, and institutions of the indigenous people. | |
| T0035 | Forced Passportization | Aggressors may mass-impose their citizenship and issue the metropole's state-standard documents to residents of occupied territories. Coercing the Indigenous people into obtaining new passports under threat of losing basic rights, medical care, or property allows the colonizer to artificially integrate the population into its legal framework, convert them into the status of its own subjects, and justify the continued retention of the region as the "protection of its citizens." | |
| T0147 | Forced Registration of Subjecthood | Aggressors force the leaders of colonized societies to formally codify their subordinate status in law. This process takes place under economic or military pressure, and the terms of the pre-drafted treaties are not open to negotiation. To ensure legitimacy in the eyes of the local population, the colonizer often demands that an oath of allegiance be sworn according to the religious customs of the subjugated peoples themselves. A historical example of this practice is the shert — an oath of allegiance whose legal codification was often accompanied by the surrender of hostages from among relatives or the local nobility. In some cases, citizenship of the metropole is a necessary condition for freedom of movement, for the ability to go to court, or for not being expelled on the grounds of illegal presence in territory annexed by the colonizer. | |
| T0125 | Forcible Removal of Children | Aggressors may carry out the forcible removal and mass transfer of children from the occupied group into the colonizer's cultural environment (boarding schools, adoption). Such actions may be classified as an act of genocide aimed solely at severing the bond between generations, forced assimilation, and the long-term demographic erasure of the colonized group. | |
| T0099 | Hostage-Taking | Aggressors may carry out the forcible capture and detention of civilians or non-combatants. These actions are used for the operational neutralization of defenses (blackmailing resistance forces, shielding troops). At the consolidation stage, this technique may become institutionalized as a system of taking members of the elites and high-ranking figures (the "amanat" system), whose detention serves as the state's guarantee of the local population's loyalty and of the prevention of anti-colonial revolts. | |
| T0041 | Implantation of Officials and Military Personnel | Aggressors may carry out the mass relocation of their administrative and military apparatus to colonized territories. Stationing regular military garrisons and appointing loyal officials from the metropole allows the colonizer to establish strict physical and bureaucratic oversight, preemptively suppress nascent resistance on the ground, and integrate the region into its own state system, displacing local institutions of self-governance. | |
| T0151 | Imposition of Alien Governance | The occupation administration artificially deprives subordinated societies of the right to self-governance, appointing loyal representatives of foreign elites over them. Unlike the creation of puppet governments (T0037), this technique does not aim to simulate a civil conflict or to create the appearance of a legitimate local authority. The use of alien overseers is employed by the metropole for open domination, the destruction of the Indigenous people's traditional social ties, and the uninterrupted mobilization of resources. | |
| T0036 | Installation of a New System of Governance | Aggressors may forcibly replace legitimate bodies with their own bureaucratic and administrative structures. The introduction of the metropole's administrative standards allows the colonizer to fully integrate the seized region into its legal and political domain, depriving the local population of the right to self-governance. | |
| T0032 | Legal Segregation of the Population | Aggressors may introduce discriminatory norms at the legislative level that restrict the basic rights of the Indigenous people compared with representatives of the metropole. This technique is used for the institutional consolidation of control. Creating artificial barriers in access to education, government positions, property ownership, or freedom of movement (including the creation of zones of artificial settlement) allows the colonizer to marginalize the local population and fix its subordinate status in the social hierarchy being constructed. | |
| T0113 | Linguistic Assimilation | Aggressors may deliberately displace and marginalize the native language of the Indigenous people, replacing it with the language of the metropole. The systematic narrowing of the local language's sphere of use in public, cultural, and everyday life allows the colonizer to sever the bond between generations, deprive the colonized society of the most important marker of national identity, and accelerate the process of its cultural absorption. | |
| .001 | Legislative Ban on the Native Language | As part of linguistic assimilation, aggressors may prohibit, at the state level, the public use of the Indigenous people's language. The issuance of official decrees, the criminalization of book printing, and the banning of theatrical performances and public speeches in the native language deprive the local population of legal mechanisms for preserving, transmitting, and developing their culture. | |
| .002 | Exclusion of the Native Language from Official Use | As part of linguistic assimilation, aggressors may forcibly convert the operation of all state, judicial, and administrative institutions exclusively to the language of the metropole. Creating a language barrier between the bureaucratic apparatus and the Indigenous people artificially marginalizes the local population, restricts its access to public services, and forces it to switch to the colonizer's language for social and career survival. | |
| T0128 | Liquidation of National Civic Organizations | Aggressors may carry out the forced dissolution, prohibition, and criminalization of the activities of independent educational, cultural, scientific, and charitable societies of the indigenous people. In the acute phase, this technique is used to neutralize defenses, depriving society of legal structures for horizontal self-organization. In the long term, it serves to consolidate control, since the liquidation of national civic institutions makes the legal development of national culture and the formation of independent elites impossible. | |
| T0126 | Prevention of Births | Aggressors may deliberately block the biological reproduction of the colonized group in order to gradually reduce its demographic potential. The method consists of depriving people of the physical ability to conceive or carry a child. This is implemented through direct medical violence, such as involuntary sterilization, or through the systematic creation of an environment unsuitable for pregnancy and childbirth. The use of this technique makes it possible to weaken the community in the long term while avoiding the mass physical elimination of the current generation. | |
| T0037 | Puppet Government | Aggressors may artificially create and install fully controlled organs of power in occupied territories. Forming a puppet government allows the aggressor to simulate an internal civil conflict for the initial seizure of governance, and then to rule the region by proxy for long-term institutional consolidation. | |
| T0116 | Religious Assimilation | Aggressors may deliberately destroy, substitute, or integrate the spiritual institutions and beliefs of an indigenous people into their own dominant religious system. Using religion as an instrument of unification allows the colonizer to establish a rigid ideological dictate, destroy the independent spiritual authorities of the local population, and impose submission upon it through the sacralization of the aggressor's power. | |
| .001 | Forced Conversion to the Metropole's Religion | As part of religious assimilation, aggressors may apply physical, administrative, or economic coercion to convert members of the colonized society to the colonizer's confession. Depriving the local population of freedom of religion under threat of repression, deprivation of rights, or confiscation of property ensures the accelerated erasure of cultural and religious boundaries. | |
| .002 | Imposition of the Metropole's Holiday Calendar | As part of religious assimilation, aggressors may forcibly replace the traditional spiritual, commemorative, or agricultural calendar of an indigenous people with the festive cycles of the metropole. Eradicating local commemorative dates and synchronizing time with the metropole allows the aggressor to completely reformat the everyday rhythm of the local population's life and embed it into its own state-ideological matrix. | |
| .003 | Ban on Worship in the Native Language | As part of religious assimilation, aggressors may categorically prohibit the use of the indigenous people's language in religious rites, sacred texts, and spiritual education. Displacing the local language from the sacred sphere cements its status as second-rate, severs the spiritual bond between generations, and accelerates the linguistic absorption of the colonized society. | |
| T0142 | Restriction of Settlement Geography | Colonial authorities often impose legal or administrative bans on settling in places of traditional residence or on resettlement. This practice is used to prevent the Indigenous population from accessing resources important to the colonizers, e.g., rivers; to force the Indigenous population into emigration due to the absence of economic and social prospects and the high cost of housing; to create conditions for the migration of groups preferred by the empire to the new territories; and, finally, to reduce the capacity for organized resistance. | |
| T0031 | Restriction of Sovereignty | Aggressors may impose terms that radically curtail the political rights and independence of a local government. Through a categorical ban on conducting an independent foreign policy, depriving an Indigenous people of the right to freely elect their leaders, and direct interference in domestic legislation, the aggressor methodically transforms a self-governing entity into a fully controlled, rightless province. | |
| T0042 | Rewriting of School Curricula | Aggressors may carry out the systematic replacement of educational standards in occupied territories, forcibly introducing textbooks and teaching materials produced in the metropole. Imposing new curricula in history, literature, and language allows the colonizer to raise successive generations of the local population in a paradigm of unconditional loyalty to the aggressor state, erasing their national memory and forming an artificial identity. | |
| T0100 | Seizure of Religious Institutions | Aggressors may establish direct forcible and administrative control over local religious institutions, depriving them of canonical independence and subordinating them to their own spiritual centers. The elimination of independent jurisdiction makes it possible to remove authoritative national institutions (seizure of governance) and to use the religious apparatus for the long-term imposition of loyalty and the ideological consolidation of the occupation. | |
| T0109 | Sham Expression of Popular Will | Aggressors may organize sham electoral procedures (referendums, elections) under conditions of occupation, absence of freedom of speech, and military pressure. The imitation of democratic processes allows the colonizer to formally legalize the regime or the annexation process, ensuring the legal and political consolidation of control over the territory in the eyes of its own society and the world community. | |
| T0149 | Slave Trade | Aggressors, or the governors they appoint, may carry out the commercial sale of members of a forcibly subjugated Indigenous people into slavery. This practice is used both for the direct illegal enrichment of the occupation apparatus and for the physical depletion of the colonized society's demographic potential through the permanent removal and export of people beyond the lands of their historical residence. | |
| T0022 | Terror | Aggressors may use systemic, demonstrative, and large-scale violence against the local population. This form of radical pressure is used to neutralize defenses in the active phase of a conflict and for the subsequent consolidation of the occupation regime. Carrying out mass extrajudicial executions, public reprisals, and torture is aimed at the total psychological breaking of the colonized society's will, the physical suppression of resistance, and coercion into unconditional submission. | |