Tainted love: Domestic abuse, imperial violence, and patterns of control

Introduction: Intimate to imperial violence

Abusive tactics naturalize violence across scales, from intimate partner relationships to state border enforcement and colonial expansion.

Whether through physical force, exploitative legal frameworks, or narratives framed as protection and care, the outcome remains the same: elimination, exploitation, and control.

This abuse follows some predictable patterns. For example, the likelihood of psychological control preceding physical violence (O'Leary 2001), protection rhetoric masks domination (Kaplan 1998), and spatial control produces differential treatment justified through victim-blaming narratives (Rowe 2004). These patterns aren’t coincidental, but structural.

This review organizes existing literature and ideas on imperialism around recurring strategies of domestic violence. Examined will be how patterns of domestic abuse such as psychological degradation, isolation, surveillance, and narrative control function similarly across intimate relationships and imperial projects. Research draws from existing scholarship on settler colonialism and imperialism, as well as patterns in abusive relationships and narratives around domestic violence.

For your own good: Isolation, surveillance, and control of movement

O'Leary's (2001) empirical review demonstrated how psychological aggression in intimate relationships can exact effects as deleterious as physical abuse, while almost always preceding physical violence. Recurring strategies of interpersonal abuse were identified: verbal denigration (insults, ridicule), isolation and control (restricting access to resources, monitoring behavior and movement), and dominance behaviors (ordering partners around, treating them as servants). Findings revealed psychological aggression, threats, and manipulation predict later physical aggression; with a shocking 72% of women in physically abusive relationships rating emotional abuse as having greater negative impact than physical abuse. The rate at which psychological abuse precedes physical abuse offers a warning for imperialist study: emotional and verbal control mechanisms normalize and excuse violence before physical force ever enters the picture.

Before violence can be normalized, those targeted must first be categorized as less than fully human, less deserving of safety and dignity. Conceptual emptying is introduced as a first step in colonization, where indigenous people are made invisible or categorized as valueless before physical removal (Kundnani and Kumar 2015). Colonizers fabricate discovery of dark, unknown lands, conceptually emptied of humanity and existing culture so their 'wilderness' might be brought to order. Abusers take similar steps to isolate victims; often rewriting history to paint them as the problem and gradually chipping away at their social circles, sense of self, and freedom. This behavior doesn’t happen all at once, but escalates over time (O'Leary 2001).

Whether in intimate or imperial contexts, surveillance was never meant to protect those being watched. It instead produces compounding vulnerability by creating categories of people coded as inherently suspicious or dangerous, restricting movement and autonomy, and twisting those circumstances as evidence for further restriction. Kundnani and Kumar (2015) argue surveillance systems, rather than simply observing pre-existing differences, actively produce racial categories that justify ongoing oppression; enforcing compliance and punishing resistance. Surveillance operates as both a mechanism of control and a tool for producing categories justifying that control.

This surveillance-as-control finds parallels in intimate partner violence. O'Leary's (2001) research documents how psychological abuse includes dominance and isolation tactics: restricting access to resources, monitoring behavior, limiting contact with others, and restricting access to social support or other resources. These controlling behaviors not only observe the victim's movements; they produce a restricted reality, causing immense psychological harm and using symptoms of that harm to justify further control. Victims isolated from friends and family, prevented from working, and monitored constantly are portrayed as dependent, withdrawn, irrational, unwell, or unable to function without their abuser. This opens them up to further isolation and control, as well as devaluation. Zooming back out, Kundnani and Kumar (2015) demonstrated how surveillance produces race as a sociopolitical category through systems like the U.S. census, gang databases, and terrorist watchlists; creating a closed loop where security threats justify surveillance, surveillance reveals threats, and threats justify more surveillance.

Spatial surveillance and control operate to produce different privileges of mobility. Borders aren’t just physical boundaries, but sites determining who can move freely and who faces monitoring, detention, and violence (Rowe 2004). For example, anti-immigration discourse frames racialized migrants as threats requiring monitoring and control, while simultaneously creating and upholding conditions that make migration necessary (ex., economic exploitation and political intervention) and profitable (ex., exploitable labor). Immigrants who cross the border become simultaneously hypervisible to state surveillance systems and invisible as rights-bearing humans. Kundnani and Kumar's (2015) warning that "if real change is to be brought about, the racial history of surveillance will need to be fully confronted—or opposition to surveillance will once again be easily defeated by racial security narratives" applies to resistance across these scales. We can’t resist abuse while accepting existing categories and narratives justifying and covering it up.

Gendered narratives and imperial nations as abusers

Dominant narratives typically portray globalization and capitalism as enabling upward mobility for women in the global South, yet this framing obscures how imperial economic structures perpetuate gendered violence. Chew’s (2022) research on the Philippines shows how US military and economic interests continued their exploitation, contributing to ongoing abuse both at the governmental and home level while acting as a protector/liberator.

Domestication as a process involves conquering and taming the so-called wild and foreign, thus connecting domestic ideology to imperial efforts. Language of home, safety, and civilization operate across scales to naturalize this xenophobic violence. These narratives were deployed to colonize western territories and sanitize violence of American expansion into a shared origin story (Kaplan 1998). The concept of domesticity united (white) men and women as national allies against racialized others, making demarcations of otherness (non-whiteness) more determining than gender divisions.

Racialization as abuse: Structural dehumanization and categorization

By exploring constructions of U.S. nationalist rhetoric, Rowe (2004) examines violence against racialized bodies. Manmade borders are described as not merely physical, but sites that produce different mobilities and lived experiences. Anti-immigration discourse inverts violence by projecting blame onto racialized bodies, legitimizing state-sanctioned violence while creating an exploitable labor force (Davis 2003). This inversion demonstrates victim-blaming strategies operating at the state level; with abusers blaming victims for their own oppression and ongoing harm while positioning themselves as protectors of order and safety. Political, economic, and state control mechanisms combine to create compounding exploitation (O’Leary 2001).

Wolfe (2006) proposes the term 'structural genocide' to capture ongoing elimination that happens through laws, policies, and institutions over long periods, without always requiring mass killing events. For example, while settler colonialism always seeks to eliminate Indigenous populations, it doesn't always use methods we typically associate with genocide (mass killings, concentration camps, etc.). Elimination is what makes settler colonialism what it is, and genocide is just one method among many: this violent act can be accomplished through forced assimilation, legal frameworks, policy, and what may appear otherwise to be peaceful and legitimate means. That’s because the goal isn’t always explicitly to kill, but to get maximum exploitation with minimal resistance.

What are the ethical, political, and material differences if the outcome is elimination either way? It feels a lot like trying to quantify whether physical abuse is worse than psychological abuse, as though one is any less of a trauma. Both cause profound, long-term harm, and the severity is contextual and complex. With intimate partner violence being as prevalent as it is, at what point do we begin to consider intimate partner violence as it’s own form of genocide?

Compounding harm: Intersectionality and domestic violence

The structural violence that shapes racialized women's lives operates simultaneously at intimate and imperial scales, compounding harm through overlapping systems of oppression. To be a woman in an imperial country means to be surrounded by domestic violence. For racialized women, these experiences compound at every level in oppressive structures that mirror and perpetuate dynamics found in intimate partner violence. Delgado & Stefancic (2017) describe intersectionality as the overlapping identities create unique experiences of oppression. Microaggressions, 'like water dripping on sandstone', erode that sense of identity and cause immense harm over time. Chew (2022) demonstrates how economically marginalized survivors experience repeated cycles of abuse throughout their lives, beginning with childhood violence, continuing through exploitation of domestic work, and persisting in intimate partner relationships. Pathways these individuals may use to seek safety or economic opportunity (including migrating to escape abusive situations) are themselves shaped by structural violence, creating conditions where victims can’t find home, livelihood, and freedom in the same place.

Just as an abusive partner shifts responsibility onto the victim, imperialist states force economically marginalized women to compensate for the state's abdication of its obligations. Abuse simultaneously diminishes victims' worth while exploiting various forms of their labor (whether emotional, sexual, reproductive, or paid): “Urban poor women live at the intersections of interpersonal gendered and state violence at the hands of armed forces” (Chew 2022). This control manifests in many forms: privatization and austerity measures increasing women's unpaid caregiving burdens; globalization's downward pressure on wages pushing women into precarious informal economies as the state refuses to redistribute resources to dispossessed populations; and militarization violently enforcing territorial boundaries and resource extraction.

The legal system itself becomes weaponized by abusers who smear victims in court proceedings and drag out divorce, custody, or protection order cases to further traumatize and financially devastate their targets. Similarly, immigration detention facilities trap survivors in impossible positions, where cooperation with law enforcement through mechanisms like U-visas requires engagement with the same state apparatus that surveils, detains, and deports their communities.

Narrative control: Revisionist history

Once legal and social structures establish who can be harmed with impunity, narrative control determines how that harm will be remembered, justified, and perpetuated.  Abusers throughout history have weaponized storytelling to invert responsibility and position themselves as victims or protectors rather than perpetrators. Victim-blaming, protection narratives, surveillance, emotional exploitation; these can operate similarly in domestic violence and nationalist motivations (Ireland 2011). Whoever controls the archive controls the dominant understanding of the past. Narratives of domesticity and home protection from those in power naturalize violence, painting control to sound like care rather than domination. These tactics cause victims to internalize harmful, silencing attitudes and feelings of shame/blame. Deconstructing this rhetoric in individual relationships shows it to be similar to framing of imperial expansion throughout history as protective rather than exploitative.

The way we tell stories, even ones we tell ourselves, can be weaponized. Imperialist nostalgia (Rosaldo 1989) operates through a "pose of innocent yearning" that simultaneously captures people's imaginations while concealing complicity with brutal domination and erasure. Colonizers mourn destruction of the cultures and ways of life they themselves have transformed and destroyed. This mirrors how abusers position themselves as victims, mourning relationships they destroyed while obscuring their own agency and accountability.

Museums, historical databases, even current media; these trusted sources of information are not neutral. They're all funded by someone and thus serve someone's interests. Ireland’s (2011) discussion of museums as "official depositories of history" describes how abusive narratives become institutionalized on a large scale. Unitary language sanitizes and propagandizes violent military history through tourism industries, museums, memorials, and historical texts. They decide which events matter, which sources are reliable, and which stories are worth telling (surprise: in their version, the military is always the hero).

The same acts described with different terms create completely different understandings of what happened: perpetrators become mourners and violence becomes a regrettable necessity to be painted over. If we can recognize this in our personal and national histories, can we learn to rewrite them?

Unitary language, gaslighting and victim blaming

Unitary language sanitizes and propagandizes violent history through avenues like tourism, museums, memorials, and historical texts. This mythology requires maintenance and reinforcement through euphemisms, passive voice, and strategic omission of harms. The past is manipulated to justify the present; so when the U.S. invades, it's for national security, economic interests, and/or spreading democracy. When the "other" resists; they're savage, irrational, terrorists violent for violence's sake. This inversion allows those in power to maintain narratives of American innocence and exceptionalism while creating exploitable labor forces and justifying border militarization. This erases the obvious fact that resistance to occupation is in itself political.

In intimate partner violence, abusers use sanitized language to obscure responsibility and avoid accountability. Recognizing patterns across contexts reveals how power maintains itself through language that obscures ongoing harm and makes domination appear benevolent. Abusive behaviors O'Leary (2001) identifies include not just physical restrictions but heavy control of the narrative. Abusers insult, ridicule, and engage in verbal denigration in ways that break down and rewrites the victim's reality. Recurring criticism, erasure, and emotional abuse cause partners to develop low self-esteem and fear, outcomes parallelling colonial narratives create populations that internalize their own supposed inferiority. When victims do resist or leave, they’re blamed for the relationship's failure or called dismissed as irrational (O'Leary 2001), mirroring how resistant colonized populations are labeled as savage or violent rather than as justified in their opposition (Ireland 2011).

Ocean’s rise, empires fall: Resisting erasure and misinformation

Power maintains itself by obscuring systemic harm, inverting responsibility, and making domination appear like protection. Just as abuse can look the same across systems and scales; so can resistance strategies. This recognition is important for contemporary resistance, because resistance requires not just opposing individual acts of violence but challenging narrative frameworks that make violence appear justified, natural, or protective. Counter-narratives disrupt power structures by making visible what has been obscured and by validating experiences dominant narratives deny. They require access to suppressed or alternative sources of knowledge, depend on communities that can validate counter-narratives, and work by making visible what systems of abuse require to remain hidden.

Resistance strategies that work across scales share common features: they require access to suppressed or alternative sources of knowledge, depend on communities that can validate counter-narratives against dominant stories, and work by making visible what systems of abuse require to remain hidden. We cannot address intimate partner violence without confronting imperial systems that produce vulnerability through border enforcement, economic exploitation, and surveillance. Nor can we resist imperial violence while accepting the intimate forms of domination that train us to see control as care and protection as justification for harm. Recognition of these patterns is only the first step in building resistance movements that challenge abuse wherever it operates.