Systematic exploitation of the colony's resources: natural wealth, labor, human and cultural capital, territory. This includes forced mobilization into the aggressor's army, removal of valuables, and appropriation of achievements – the colony exists as a resource base for the metropole, not as a subject of its own development.
| ID | Name | Description | |
| 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. | |
| 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.' | |
| T0051 | Creation of Hazardous Industries | Aggressors may site environmentally harmful enterprises, raw-material extraction facilities producing toxic waste, or landfills for the disposal of hazardous materials on seized territories. Shifting destructive industrial burdens onto the lands of the Indigenous people allows the colonizer to enrich the metropole and safeguard its own environment while cynically ignoring the catastrophic consequences for the health of the local population and the environment of the colonized region. | |
| 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. | |
| T0052 | Expropriation of Resources | Aggressors may carry out large-scale and systematic confiscation of natural, financial, and material assets in the captured territory. In the course of implementing this technique, industrial equipment is removed, the treasury is seized, food is confiscated, and mineral resources are exploited without restraint, solely for the extraction of benefits and to meet the needs of the metropole. | |
| T0049 | Forced Mobilization | Aggressors may forcibly conscript members of the Indigenous people into their own armed forces to take part in combat operations (including against their own compatriots). This technique is used to extract benefits by exploiting the local population as a free human resource. At the same time, it serves the purposes of neutralizing defenses: by sending men to distant fronts, the colonizer deliberately depletes the region's demographic and military potential, depriving the society of its capacity for self-defense. | |
| T0057 | Labor Exploitation | Aggressors may forcibly conscript the local population into heavy, dangerous, or unpaid labor in the interests of the metropole. This technique serves the direct extraction of benefits through the use of free or extremely cheap labor for the implementation of the colonizer's state megaprojects and military or industrial needs. At the same time, this practice is used for the neutralization of defenses: the removal of the able-bodied population from the region's economy and labor under conditions associated with high mortality physically exhaust the society and reduce its demographic potential. | |
| T0148 | Predatory Raids | Aggressors may organize armed attacks on the settlements of an Indigenous people for the purpose of looting, seizing material valuables, driving off livestock, and taking civilians captive. This practice depletes the demographic and economic potential of the colonized society, deprives people of the resources needed for survival, and creates a zone of constant physical threat around the metropole's installations. For example, fortifications built by the regular army often became 'a base of operations for their raids on... Chechen auls, for looting and taking the local population captive'. | |
| T0102 | Resource Exploitation | Aggressors may establish an uncontrolled and exhausting regime of exploitation of the natural riches, infrastructure facilities, and productive potential of the seized region. Pumping out mineral resources, illegal resource extraction, and using food reserves in the interests of the metropole deprives the Indigenous people of the economic base for independent existence and redirects all the region's wealth toward the enrichment of the colonizer. | |
| 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. | |
| T0066 | Sale of Territory | Aggressors may conduct commercial transactions transferring seized lands, together with the Indigenous people living on them, to the control of third states in exchange for financial compensation. In carrying out such a diplomatic-economic operation, the colonizer treats the territory purely as a liquid asset for replenishing its own treasury, while the sovereignty, rights, and national interests of the local society are completely and demonstratively ignored. | |
| 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. | |
| T0056 | Taxation | Aggressors may establish direct control over the fiscal system in seized territories, redirecting levies collected from the local population straight into their own treasury. Introducing new taxes, shifting the financial burden of imperial wars onto the shoulders of an Indigenous people, and artificially lowering the social status of local residents in order to subject them to maximum economic taxation allow the colonizer to systematically siphon off resources and exhaust the region's economy. | |
| T0112 | Theft of Cultural Property | Aggressors may carry out the systematic looting, unlawful confiscation, and removal of historical artifacts, works of art, archives, and relics from seized territories. This technique is used for the direct extraction of benefits by enriching the metropole's collections while simultaneously depriving the colonized society of its material historical foundation. | |
| T0067 | Use as a Buffer Zone | Aggressors may deliberately use captured territories as a buffer between themselves and external threats. This technique serves the extraction of benefits by ensuring the long-term military and geopolitical security of the colonizer. Such a practice makes it possible to create a protective gray zone that absorbs external strikes and shifts the costs of any conflicts exclusively onto the colonized peoples, while shielding the aggressor's central regions. | |
| T0134 | Use as Cannon Fodder | Aggressors may use unarmed, untrained, or deliberately poorly equipped members of the colonized people (civilians or forcibly mobilized persons) for frontal assaults. This technique is used to directly and physically deplete the enemy's ammunition, reveal its concealed firing positions, and clear minefields with human bodies. Unlike the use of a "human shield" (T0111), where people serve as passive cover to protect the aggressor's troops, here the colonized population is actively used as free, single-use expendable material ("cannon fodder") to preserve the personnel reserve of the metropole's troops. | |