WeeklySA_AdminGLOBAL SYSTEM: Western domination wanes as international law collapses and a new world order emerges…
By Kalundi Serumag
The world has changed. It has changed many times before. What makes this moment different is that it marks the end of Western Caucasian dominance that began in 1492, when Europe’s elite classes discovered vast territories and peoples they could plunder to enrich themselves and their states.
This time, one white power will not replace another. What we are witnessing is the exhaustion of a system—political, economic, legal and moral—that defined global order for more than five centuries.
International law, and the institutions designed to uphold it, are now approaching their deathbed. The question facing the world’s weaker nations is stark: what happens when even the minimum protection once offered by these structures disappears? For Africa, this is no longer an abstract concern.
The people of Gaza have revealed a brutal truth to the world. A militarily superior power can now openly declare its intention to annihilate an entire population—demolishing towns, schools, hospitals and homes, bombing refugees, extinguishing family lineages, and weaponising starvation—and face no meaningful consequence.
That this has continued for years without effective intervention has exposed the complete collapse of the post-1945 international order. The global system—states, international bodies, religious institutions and civil society—has proven unable or unwilling to stop it.
Any small or militarily weak population sitting on resource-rich land or sea should take note.
This moment signals the end of the era inaugurated by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. While that era was always compromised—by apartheid South Africa, the occupation of East Timor, or the Vietnam War—Palestine was its original failure and now stands as its epitaph.
The abandonment of international human rights law is part of a wider breakdown. Long before Gaza, the United States withdrew from foundational agreements such as the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, dismantled post–Cold War security arrangements with Russia—laying the groundwork for Ukraine—and shattered global trade norms with unilateral tariffs.
These were not isolated acts. They formed a pattern.
The West’s response to Gaza, including sanctions against Francesca Albanese, the UN-appointed expert documenting human rights violations, has stripped it of moral authority. This is why the Global South has not rallied behind Western efforts to isolate Russia in the way it did during earlier conflicts such as the first Gulf War. Cynicism toward Western hypocrisy has hardened.
The decline of the West is not cyclical or superficial. It is structural.
Capitalism itself is being artificially sustained by war. The arms industry has become the system’s life-support machine—explaining the fury directed at anyone exposing its role. Outside the war economy, much of Western finance is hollow. Financial instruments circulate among the same elite players who have exhausted their consumer base. Industrial production no longer underwrites the lifestyles promised to Western populations.
This has produced a crisis of value.
In response, the United States has turned to pension funds—among the last pools of undisturbed capital—pressuring them to absorb private equity stock. Pension managers now face a dilemma: invest and buy junk, or refuse and accelerate economic collapse, weakening the dollar in which those same pensions are held.
While the West declines, Asia rises—but on different terms.
Between five and seven of the world’s twenty most economically powerful nations are now in Asia. China and India alone account for 36 percent of the global population and roughly 20 percent of global GDP. They have prospered by participating in global markets without bearing the cost of policing the system. China, in particular, benefited from international labour standards, intellectual property frameworks and secure maritime trade routes without underwriting their enforcement.
Yet all rising powers share one need: resources.
As global competition intensifies, demand for raw materials and extractive labour is increasing. If a country holds resources but lacks the power to defend them or negotiate fair value, those resources will be taken—by a declining West, a rising East, or a third cluster of cash-rich states in West Asia, including Turkey and the Gulf monarchies.
Africa, meanwhile, remains trapped.
The continent controls little and dominates nowhere. Political sovereignty is largely symbolic; economic ownership remains external. Africa’s population is thinly spread across the world’s second-largest landmass, and where large-scale industry exists, it is rarely owned by Africans themselves. There is hope in the expanding BRICS coalition, but it remains young and uneven. Some members are far more powerful than others, and history teaches us that “mutual benefit” collapses when the strong want what the weak possess.
A global law of the jungle is therefore the more realistic assumption—and Africa must plan accordingly. Resource-driven conflict already stretches across the Sahel from the Atlantic to the Horn. Sudan and the Alliance of Sahelian States have been hit particularly hard, with Nigeria close behind. Long-running crises persist in the Congo Basin, Mozambique, Uganda and South Sudan.
Africa’s response must be collective and unprecedented—on a scale not seen since Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, or perhaps even earlier.
How does this begin?
First, Africa must stop treating this as a problem of individual states. External powers do not see African “countries”; they see obstacles to resources. France backs militias in the Sahel, the UAE funds warlords in Sudan, American corporations encourage proxy destabilisation in the DRC, and China deploys financial diplomacy continent-wide.
Many African states themselves are complicit—binding their populations to debt, repression and externally dictated policy.
Second, Africa must feed itself and prevent others from controlling its food systems. This is not new wisdom; Thomas Sankara and Dani Nabudere warned of it decades ago. Yet dependence persists.
Third, Africa must audit itself—not merely through GDP but by fully accounting for productive capacity and untapped resources. Promising initiatives are emerging: independent refineries, new energy projects, mineral nationalisation and industrial localisation in countries such as Nigeria, Namibia, Mozambique and parts of the Sahel.
Fourth, Africa must develop real defensive capacity. Modern warfare has entered a new era, as seen in Ukraine. Control of satellites, drones, artificial intelligence, robotics and precision weapons now determines battlefield outcomes.
This demands a revolution in knowledge production—technical, scientific and strategic.
At present, Africa’s leadership has outsourced almost everything: economic policy, research, mineral extraction, logistics, finance and even imagination. What research exists is often fragmented, foreign-controlled or chronically underfunded.
Africa must build integrated, independent centres of knowledge and planning—coordinated, resourced and sovereign. Ironically, Africa holds latent advantage.
It has the world’s youngest and fastest-growing population, vast resources, and deep cultural coherence that can still be mobilised. The last two centuries fractured African societies intellectually and spiritually, delaying progress.
The rising generation is different.
After witnessing migrant deaths in the Sahara, slave markets in Libya, racial abuse in the Gulf, and persistent discrimination in the West, young Africans understand the world as it is—not as it claims to be.
What they need is systematic access to skills, knowledge and confidence.
The future belongs to them. Invest in Africa’s youth, and they will take care of the rest. – The Elephant News
Comment
Heal the World – Stop the Wars
As we close the chapter on 2025, the world stands scarred by conflict, division and a rising anxiety about what lies ahead.
Wars that began as territorial disputes have become grinding humanitarian disasters. Tensions that once simmered beneath the surface now explode daily across television screens and social media feeds, reminding us of our collective fragility.
From Gaza to Ukraine, Sudan to Haiti, and in quieter conflicts across the continent and beyond, human beings continue to bleed for causes they did not choose, shaped by political wills they will never meet, and paying prices they never agreed to.
“Stop the Wars” may sound idealistic, even naïve, but history shows that great changes begin with simple truths. War destroys far more than infrastructure: it rips apart generations, reshapes culture, and deadens hope. It fractures childhoods, fuels displacement, weaponises poverty, and widens geopolitical hatred.
Peace, by contrast, builds. It offers the space where economies stand, education thrives, and democracy breathes.
For South Africans, the call to heal the world resonates deeply. We know conflict. We know division. We have lived through injustice shaped by race, power and violence. But we also know reconciliation. One of our greatest gifts to the world was not only freedom, but forgiveness — proof that people who once faced each other across barricades could rebuild side by side. Our democratic story is imperfect, yet miraculous. Today we must ask: what do we, as a nation and as individuals, do with that legacy?
Healing the world begins in smaller places. While we cannot command nations to lay down their weapons, we can challenge attitudes at home — towards refugees, migrants, minorities, the poor and powerless. Violence is not only found in artillery shells; sometimes it is hidden in legislation, inequality, online hatred and the daily erosion of dignity. South Africa must also rediscover peace within. Gender-based violence, corruption, crime, political intolerance and widening inequality are internal wars demanding an urgent ceasefire. Healing the world means healing ourselves: strengthening social bonds, deepening accountability and rebuilding trust in democratic institutions.
The year ahead carries symbolic weight. In 2026 we mark 50 years since the Soweto Uprising — a reminder of young people who rose not for war, but for justice and dignity. Their courage should inspire a renewed commitment to peace.
As we enter the New Year, we at Weekly SA Mirror reaffirm our mission: to humanise, not dehumanise; to challenge, not inflame; to illuminate, not sensationalise. We will continue to hold power accountable, amplify the marginalised and deepen conversations about South Africa’s shared future. Our hope is simple: may the world put down its weapons — literal and metaphorical — and raise its children instead. May the global leaders choose dialogue over dominance, courage over fear, and wisdom over pride.
As we bid farewell to 2025, we call upon every reader: be a peacemaker. Your voice matters. Heal the world. Stop the wars. Begin at home. Begin now.
