Global Re-disordering: Time to Create a People-Centred World

The year 2025 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the ending of the Vietnam War (1954–75).  As we mark this anniversary, the echoes of Cold War violence and imperial ambition reverberate in today’s fractured global order, demonstrating that the triumph of liberal democracy was built on a foundation of violence, repression, and racialised economic warfare. The Vietnam war exposed the brutality of the post-war consensus which cost the lives of millions of Vietnamese people, and extensive environmental destruction caused by the use of Agent Orange as part of the US’s defoliation campaign. Despite the military supremacy of the US, the Vietnamese people defeated them in battle. This defeat was assisted by the widespread international opposition to the Vietnam War. Civil rights leaders in the United States and student groups on American university campuses were at the forefront of the movements for peace.[i]

In South Africa, in 1948, a white supremacist apartheid state was established resulting in the forced transfer of millions of Black and Brown South Africans to so-called ‘townships’, to rural Bantustans, and their confinement to inhumane labour regimes and the enactment of extreme violence against those who protested. Presenting itself as the main bulwark against communism in the region, the apartheid regime was supported militarily, politically, and financially by the US and the UK until a popular movement led by Nelson Mandela finally overthrew it in1994. 

These two historical events are important for understanding the current moment. In the US, just over two months after taking office in January 2025, the Republican Party and its President have moved against oppositional voices. Using executive powers, the Trump Administration has detained and forcibly repatriated university students to stifle peaceful protests, low-paid undocumented migrant workers doing essential jobs, and asylum seekers fleeing the consequences of years of US destabilization. Indeed, the Administration is seeking to overthrow the neoliberal free market globalization that the US had championed as the hallmark of democracy, to return to a world dominated by protectionism for national capitalists, and to reinstate global white supremacy. Western commentators have raised the alarm that this constitutes an upending of the 80 years of the liberal (post Second World War) global order, both economically and geopolitically. 

The stability of the liberal order in the West has rested on the production of disorder in the global South. For most people in the global South, the promise of peace, economic and political security, and the achievement of western-style consumer lifestyle failed to materialize. Their quest for self-determination was frustrated by western-supported destabilization and wars. Twenty-first century increases in asylum seekers and migration to the global North are the direct result of neocolonial policies and the perpetuation of warfare under the guise first of anti-communism and later the ‘war on terror’. To understand the dichotomy between peace and economic security in the West and destabilization in the South, we need to return to history.

Capitalist wars 

The majority of the world has lived disordered lives since the global expansion of Europeans. The political make-up of the world - the majority of nation states, their peoples, and economies - is largely a consequence of European colonialism that began over 400 years ago. European capitalism that emerged in this period was supported by the ordering of humans into racial hierarchies, with Europeans racialized as white at the top. Race science justified genocides, land dispossession, extreme labour exploitation, and impoverishment. Europeans repeopled the world causing the migration of millions of people, whether as settlers, enslaved peoples, indentured workers, refugees and displaced peoples. Europeans’ military might and ideological dominance ensured conquest and domination and the extraction of resources by European capitalists. 

Rapacious competition between European capitalists culminated in the First and Second World Wars that wreaked havoc globally and ushered in a desire for peace, stability, and greater equality between European peoples.  In 1945, a compromise was reached in Europe between the capitalist class and the working people who fought to maintain their political independence.  In the UK, the British working class were able to attract certain concessions:  a national health service, state provision and subsidizing of water, energy, transport and housing. Many still preferred to seek their fortune in white dominated settler colonies, such as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Americas. Black and Brown people who fought in the war were however denied concessions, and some brutally killed. For example, those of the French West African Force at Thiaroye in Dakar, Senegal, in 1944,[ii] when returning soldiers, denied their wages before being demobbed, mutinied and were slaughtered by the French. Better treatment for veterans was not extended to racialized others.

The world order that emerged post 1945 maintained European and American global hegemony.  The US, having helped Europe to win the war, established its military dominance globally, securing European and American capitalists. The American capitalists extended their reach into European countries and into former European colonies. The US and Europe dominated the global institutions that emerged - the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (1944) set up to assist in the rebuilding of post-war Europe, and later became the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (1944), and, in 1947 the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) that became the World Trade Organization in 1995 to police the global free market.   

For many, the United Nations (UN) is perceived as what it implies: a global institution in which all nations are equal, which sits above states and promotes democracy, peace and the human rights of all peoples. What they do not know is the power imbalances[iii], the Euro-American dominance in the Security Council, and the veto power the US exercises. It was the newly independent Global South states and their people in the UN who fought to ensure that new post-war charters and declarations, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, did not apply only to white people of the Global North, but embraced all peoples in this vision of a liberated future[iv]. 

Yet the immediate post-war period marked the era of decolonization with liberation movements seeking political dispensations that recovered and asserted the right and humanity of Black and Brown people vis a vis the colonial state and European imperialism.  The 1955 meeting of Asian and African postcolonial states at Bandung in Indonesia was an attempt to chart an alternative global South third pathway, one that was non-aligned to the West or the Communist bloc.[v] The term ‘third world’ which was a liberatory term to signal that another world is possible, was picked up by western media and institutions and became stigmatized and associated with poverty, subjection and less-than-human. 

This was also the time of the civil rights movement in the USA, when Black Americans sought equality in a racist state. We cannot talk of order, without recognizing the implications of that ‘order’ for those considered to be outside the geographies of the West and the realm of Western humanity.  While ‘peace’ reigned in Europe and the Americas, civil war and low intensity warfare was perpetrated against global Majority populations. This included the assassination of pro-people, pro-liberation leaders, such as Patrice Lumumba, Prince Louis Rwagasore, Thomas Sankara, and Samora Machel. Ludo de Witte documents the role the US, UK, and Belgium played in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba[vi]. His teeth were taken as trophy to Belgium, and it was not until 2022 that they were returned and interred in the DR Congo[vii]. Vincent Bevins’ book, The Jakarta Method, documents how the establishment and refinement of the CIA anti-communist destabilization strategy developed in 1965-66 to overthrow the  progressive Indonesian government of President Surkano, was deployed globally against people-centred governments in Chile, Brazil, Guatemala and Congo, shaping the world since the 1960s.[viii]  People-centred leaders were replaced by brutal dictators, often sponsored by the West, think of  Suharto in Indonesia,  Pinochet in Chile, Moi in Kenya, Mobutu in Zaire.

Even for those countries that joined the Western capitalist sphere, the processes of colonial extraction were maintained. Development initiatives stifled and corruption was encouraged. The post-Second World War peace dividend that led to a period of economic growth in the West did not spread globally.  In 1965, the American economist and National Security Adviser WW Rostow produced a book entitled the Stages of Economic Growth [ix], that convinced  people in the Global South, and plenty of school and university students in the global North that social progress to western modernity would occur in five stages, along an upward trajectory- from traditional society- through two stages of ‘take-off’, then a ‘drive to maturity’, before reaching the nirvana of ‘the age of mass high consumption’ – as in Europe and the US; that is if people, liberated from colonial rule, would just be patient and follow the guidance provided by their former oppressors, instead of that coming from the East – the communists.  The subtitle of Rostow’s book - a non-communist agenda, said it all.  He was a rabid anti-communist, and the book was published at the height of the Cold War. 

The allure of western modernity was such that poor people convinced themselves that it was their inadequacies and later their corrupt leaders’ fault that they could not partake of the fruits of modernization, even when resources and capital flee their countries to enhance the standard of living of those they are expected to mimic. Social and economic progress along the Western path remains an illusion – traded by tricksters - convinced of their superiority.

Neocolonial economic relationships, civil wars, and ideas about being civilized, modern, developed, and the promotion of Christianity, especially American Pentecostal denominations, kept Western and White supremacist ideological control over former colonies and their peoples. Africans in the continent and in the diaspora who have suffered the most generationally from European unravelling of their lives, have sought and imagined new world orders beyond the fragile colonial legacy nation-states and their new border regimes.  Their quest is for geopolitical and geoeconomic relations based on norms derived from solidarity and recognition of an equal humanity.

The Disorder of Neoliberal Globalization 

When, in 2025, commentators in the West speak of disorder that President Trump tariffs will produce, they are referring to the disruption of the neoliberal order - the global economic restructuring enforced by Western financial institutions and governments from the late 1970s, in their attempt to restructure capital accumulation after the 1970s recession. The geographer David Harvey, in A Brief History of Neoliberalism[x], describes neoliberalism as a philosophy that argues that all human needs can be satisfied through the operation of a totally free market, unmediated by the state; that is unfettered by geography and national trade controls. Individuals could accumulate wealth through satisfying their needs, as opposed to those extended family, community, and society.  Samir Amin terms the spread of this neoliberal ideology ‘the liberal virus’. [xi]

In fact, Margaret Thatcher (UK Prime Minister 1979-1990), one of the architects of neoliberal policy making said, in 1979, ‘there was no such thing as society’[xii]. Following her election victory in 1979 and what was known as ‘the winter of discontent’, she agreed to the promotion of US neoliberal ideology and rolled out the privatisation of government services and attempted to crush the trade unions.  A minimalist state and footloose capitalists led to deindustrialization in the global North, and job losses as manufacturers shift production to cheaper sources of labour in the global South, whilst offshoring their wealth to many of the British tax havens. As inequalities rose in the UK, the media and politicians demonised the working poor as lazy, feckless and welfare cheats - terms later weaponised against asylum-seekers and migrants, as the economic situation of the working poor deteriorated. 

It was much touted in the 1980s and1990s that Africa was the only continent that would not gain from globalization.  In the postcolonial period, African economies, such as Nigeria gained some surplus capital initially from oil price hikes of the 1970s, whilst Zambia’s economy collapsed when copper prices reached rock-bottom.  From then indebtedness to global North banks and the IMF and the World Bank led to the undermining of national sovereignty as these institutions exerted and continue to hold enormous power over national economic and social policy making.  From the 1980s to now, these international financial institutions pushed the introduction and maintenance of neoliberal policies in the global South, whose economies and people became guinea pigs for the austerity measures that were to boomerang back to the North in the twenty-first century.

Structural Adjustment Programmes, as Austerity was then known, was a crime against humanity. It severed the social contract that nationalist governments had with their citizens. With the argument that the state was the problem and needed to be rolled back, citizens were subjected to near instant impoverishment, especially among the middle class who lost state jobs, and suffered wage freezes. Cutbacks on services, privatization of water, health services, education (introduction of school and university fees) were justified by the argument that state institutions were inefficient, not that debt-servicing and the economic measures introduced by the IMF and World Bank deprived them of the funds to run effectively. To substitute for the state, global North governments (donors) encouraged the proliferation of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) from the North and Southern-based ones, claiming to be able to deliver better services than the state.

When citizens protested and demanded political accountability and change, the West promoted the idea of ‘good governance’. The argument went that these one-party states were run by corrupt kleptocratic leaders and needed to shift to ‘good governance’ – reducing their abuse of human rights, not the democratic representation that people sought. To quell the uprisings across the African continent, the West allowed multi-party elections to take place, producing what the sociologist Thandika Mkandawire called ‘choiceless democracies.’[xiii] The effect was that changing a political leader did not make significant alterations to economic policy, as for their political survival and individual self-enrichment, these leaders had to follow the blueprint set by the IMF and World Bank. Unforeseen was how the removal of state responsibilities to its citizens intensified corruption and capital flight. In Africa’s Odious Debt, James Boyce and Léonce Ndikumana estimated that capital flight from Africa has amounted to some 700 billion US dollars since the 1970 and sequestered in global North’s offshore tax haven and property markets.[xiv] Most people came to expect nothing from the state, except probably a minimal level of security, and even that was not forthcoming.

In the 1990s, with imperial destabilization and interventions, wars ensued across the African continent and while economists argued whether the causes were elite greed or grievance of the poor, or even atavistic ethnic rivalries, thousands died, millions were either displaced as refugees, or the newly coined term, internally displaced peoples (IDPs). Others fled the devastated economies to seek work elsewhere. 

While Africans crave for peace and economic security, the peace negotiations sponsored by the West ensured that neoliberal policies were entrenched. People-centred peace became elusive, and aggrieved African military (some former rebels) and police could find new global roles in UN peace-keeping missions in Africa and African diaspora countries, such as the Burundians and Ugandans in Somalia and more recently the Kenyans in Haiti.  In 2025, the UN had six peacekeeping missions in Africa and nine special operations. The UN’s overall budget for global peacekeeping from July 2024 to June 2025 amounts to $5.6 billion US dollars.[xv].  ‘Neoliberal peace’ means that for the bulk of the people in post-conflict countries inequalities remain high, displacement is still a feature of life, urban youth unemployment is high, and rural people are vulnerable to their land being captured by state elites for externally sponsored agricultural modernization or conservation projects. When eking out a living is near impossible, migration through hazardous environments is a risk worth taking.

The ending of the Cold War and the IMF conditionalities imposed on Russia and Eastern Europe provided the conditions for the creation of the Russian oligarchs.  In Asia, the Asean countries developed new modes of cooperation that gave them protection from the financial shocks of 1997 and 2008.  The African peoples were then caught in a new international division of labour. The economic transformation of China and its incorporation into the WTO created another pole that by the beginning of the twenty-first century there were new multilateral economic relations. Africans were now at the bottom of a new international competition.   

With deindustrialization in the global North, and the emergence of the low-wage service sector, the poor citizens of global North countries found it increasingly difficult to achieve the standard of living that they perceived to be the norm – the lifestyles promoted by advertisements. The near culling of the trade unions diminished the opportunity for collective bargaining for better wages and working conditions. Mobilised against their own interests, a sizeable section of the working people of Europe and the US turned to populist ideologies that blamed the problems produced by neoliberalism on refugees and immigrants from the global South -those impoverished people fleeing wars and structural adjustment policies and struggling to improve their livelihoods by taking on low-age, zero-hours employment. With the aging demographic profile in countries such as Spain, Germany and Italy, European states cannot reproduce capital without migrants, so it is in the interest of the working class to fight for all labour, including migrants.

Exposing the inhumanity and the racism at the heart of the European capitalist project

On 2 September 2015, the drowned body of a two-year old boy, Alan Kurdi, was washed up on a beach in Turkey.[xvi] He had fled war-torn Syria with his Kurdish family and boarded a flimsy inflatable dinghy to get from Turkey to seek sanctuary in Greece. Such a perilous journey occurred because European states had decided that they had had enough of racialized brown and Black refugees and closed almost all legal routes to asylum. Alan Kurdi was one of the 3600 people who drowned in the Mediterranean that year.  At the time of writing, 31,764 migrants have been missing in the Mediterranean since 2014.[xvii]

Western interventions have been directly responsible for the refugee-producing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Sudan.[xviii] Although framed as ‘wars on terror’, they were attempts to restructure liberal capitalism by capturing access to oil and other  resources.[xix]  In fact, they were temporary solutions to the ongoing crisis of neoliberal capitalism, from which emerged the authoritarian popular alliance that has produced the Trump presidencies in the USA. This alliance is based on demonizing those who seek refuge in imperial centres from imperial wars at the periphery.

Global North states have introduced an avalanche of policies to curb the flow of what they term ‘illegal migrants’ (asylum is now a dirty word) and have used a complicit media to promote hatred of the other. Such policies have included stricter border controls, forced detention, forced repatriation, offshoring responsibilities, such as agreements with North African countries to halt the movement of migrants (even when the conditions they are held under amounts to enslavement), and the digitization of migrants crossing between African countries, leading to the promotion of draconian migration regimes between African countries. 

In the 1980s and 1990s, African refugees would request for the UN to intervene and save them from the horrors of war; now, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is unable to exercise its mandate (protecting people fleeing persecution) at the heart of Europe. Only white Ukrainian refugees, fleeing the intensified hostilities between Ukraine and Russia since 2022, have benefitted from the international refugee agreements that European states are signatories to. The scale of the deaths in the Mediterranean, the English Channel, and the Mexican/US border has made it clear to many that racism is at the heart of the European and American project, despite 80 years of the language of human rights promotion and development aid. Western capitalists will neither save Africans nor will it save its own poor and working-class citizens

Constructing new relations for the peoples of the global South

Looking back to the Bandung conference, it was clear that the decolonization movements, besides immediate self-determination, wanted a new post-colonial world order. The issue going forward, in 2025, is whether the working peoples should allow further manipulation by capital as it seeks to restructure itself globally, causing further suffering through exploitation, immiseration, militarization and wars as mechanisms for accumulation, or instead mobilize for an economic and political dispensation that ensures and protects their security, their well-being and that of the planet. In 2019, a study by the Tax Justice Network ‘found the UK and its “corporate tax haven network” to be by far the world’s greatest enabler of corporate tax avoidance, with scores of its territories and dependencies landing in the top 10 offender list’.[xx] These territories included the British Overseas Territories of British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, Anguilla, the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey. Tax avoidance has implications for the lives of the working people in the UK, but also for the citizens in Africa as destinations of illegal capital flight from the continent. This is one issue on which working peoples in the global South and global North can form alliances to tackle and build solidarity. 

On 2 April 2025, just before Pambazuka went to press, the President of the United States announced sweeping tariffs on US imports from veritably every country in the world. These tariffs include a universal import duty of 10 per cent on all products and reciprocal tariffs that vary by country. For example, China faces a 34 per cent tariff, the European Union 20 per cent and India 6 per cent. According to Fitch Ratings, the new U.S. tariffs are the highest in more than a century. This weaponization of trade and the general insecurity of the Make America Great Again Regime in the USA is reminiscent of the recursive processes of economic depression, trade wars, currency devaluations, military expansionism and warfare that humanity witnessed after 1929. Then these issues could only be resolved by warfare. In this era, the multidimensional challenges noted above are now compounded by the push to save the planet earth from environmental destruction.

The global South, especially Africa, is poised to bear the brunt of this re-disorder. The post-colonial history of Africa, and of many countries in the global South, has been one of the inabilities to achieve self-determination, of endless wars, and low-intensity violence perpetuated to maintain an unjust world economic system. This has been aggravated by the imposition of neoliberalism with its illiberal dehumanizing policies, and which have now boomeranged back to the global North, with terrible consequences for human rights.  It is in the interests of working peoples in the global North and South to work together against the next capitalist onslaught.

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