This chapter aims to provide a means to understand how governance systems and institutions perpetuate colonial and racialised systems of governance and rule. In addition, it argues that traditional forms of collective action, such as social movements, provide short-term resistance to these institutions. However, their long-term efficacy seems unable to contend with the continued reproduction and reinvention of racialised governance systems. The chapter argues for a shift away from viewing racist institutions from a modernist-reductionist lens and, instead, view them as a complex adaptive system whose emergent property is coloniality. Viewing coloniality as the emergent outcome of the complex adaptive system of racialised governance systems, procedures, and practices hidden under the guise of pure procedural justice provides an avenue to begin theorising modes of resistance more strongly associated with institutional resistance rather than collective. The paper first revisits contemporary work related to understanding the relationship between Sylvia Wynter’s ideal descriptive statement of the human and shows how institutions of governance have continuously reproduced hierarchical epistemological and ontological constructions between the ideal and non-ideal. Secondly, the paper argues that while this work remains useful, its implicit reliance on viewing racist institutions through a modernist-reductionist lens limits our scope and ability to conceptualise them as emergent and thus incapable of being reduced and resisted at their component level. Lastly, the chapter, through the perspective of complex adaptive systems and the author’s framework, shows how these institutions can be altered through interventions intended to produce emergent decolonial outcomes meant to contend with coloniality in the long term and suggest forms of institutional resistance required to, at least in theory, begin this process.