Global apartheid is a term for a concept of how

Global North Global North and Global South are terms that denote a method of grouping countries based on their defining characteristics with regard to socioeconomics and Global politics, politics. According to UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the Global S ...

countries are engaged in a project of "racialization, segregation, political intervention, mobility controls, capitalist plunder, and labor exploitation" affecting people from the

Global South Global North and Global South are terms that denote a method of grouping countries based on their defining characteristics with regard to socioeconomics and politics. According to UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the Global South broadly com ...

. Proponents of the concept argue that a close examination of the global system reveals it to be a kind of apartheid writ large with striking resemblance to the system of racial segregation in

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. Its Provinces of South Africa, nine provinces are bounded to the south by of coastline that stretches along the Atlantic O ...

from 1948 to 1994, but based on borders and national sovereignty. The concept of global apartheid has been developed by many researchers, including Titus Alexander,Titus Alexander, Unravelling Global Apartheid: An Overview of World Politics, Polity Press, 1996 Bruno Amoroso, Patrick Bond, Gernot Kohler, Arjun Makhijiani, Ali Mazuri,

Vandana Shiva Vandana Shiva (born 5 November 1952) is an Indian scholar, environmental activist, food sovereignty advocate, ecofeminist and anti-globalization author. Based in Delhi, Shiva has written more than 20 books. She is often referred to as "Ga ...

, Anthony H. Richmond,

Joseph Nevins Joseph Nevins is an American author, activist and associate professor of geography at Vassar College in New York. Background Joseph Nevins studies socio-territorial boundaries and mobility, imperialism, global apartheid and forms of political v ...

, Muhammed Asadi, Gustav Fridolin, and many others. More recent references are in Falk's ''Re-Framing the International'', Amoroso's ''Global apartheid: globalisation, economic marginalisation, political destabilisation'', Peterson's ''A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy,'' Jones's ''Crimes Against Humanity: A Beginner's Guide'' and ''Global Human Smuggling'' by Kyle and Koslowski, and ''New Social Movements in the African Diaspora: Challenging Global Apartheid.'' and Bosak's ''Kairos, Crisis, and Global Apartheid''

Origin and use

The first use of the term may have been by Gernot Koehler in a 1978 Working Paper for the

World Order Models Project The world is the totality of entities, the whole of reality, or everything that exists. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the world as unique, while others talk of a "plu ...

. In 1995, Koehler developed this in ''The Three Meanings of Global Apartheid: Empirical, Normative, Existential''. Its best known use was by

Thabo Mbeki Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki (; born 18 June 1942) is a South African politician who served as the 2nd democratic president of South Africa from 14 June 1999 to 24 September 2008, when he resigned at the request of his party, the African National Cong ...

, then-President of South Africa, in a 200
speech
drawing comparisons of the status of the world's people, economy, and access to natural resources to the apartheid era. Mbeki got the term from Titus Alexander, initiator of Charter 99, a campaign for global democracy, who was also present at the UN

Millennium Summit The Millennium Summit was a meeting among many world leaders, lasting three days from 2000, held at the Headquarters of the United Nations, United Nations headquarters in New York City. Its purpose was to discuss the role of the United Nations ...

and gave him a copy of ''Unravelling Global Apartheid''.

Concept

Alexander argued that apartheid was a system of one-sided protectionism, in which the rich white minority used their political power to exclude the black majority from competing on equal terms, and warned that "the intensification of economic competition as a result of greater free trade is increasing political pressures for one-sided protectionism." Alexander claims there are numerous ''pillars of global apartheid'' including: *veto power by the Western minority in the UN

Security Council The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations (UN) and is charged with ensuring international peace and security, recommending the admission of new UN members to the General Assembly, an ...

*voting powers in the

IMF The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a major financial agency of the United Nations, and an international financial institution funded by 191 member countries, with headquarters in Washington, D.C. It is regarded as the global lender of la ...

and

World Bank The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and Grant (money), grants to the governments of Least developed countries, low- and Developing country, middle-income countries for the purposes of economic development ...

*dominance of the

World Trade Organization The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an intergovernmental organization headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland that regulates and facilitates international trade. Governments use the organization to establish, revise, and enforce the rules that g ...

through effective veto power and ‘weight of trade’ rather than formal voting power *one-sided rules of trade, which give privileged protection to Western agriculture and other interests while opening markets in the Majority World *protection of ‘hard currency’ through the central banking system through the

Bank of International Settlements The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is an international financial institution which is owned by member central banks. Its primary goal is to foster international monetary and financial cooperation while serving as a bank for central bank ...

*immigration controls which manage the flow of labour to meet the needs of Western economies *use of aid and investment to control elites in the Majority World through reward and punishment *support for coups or military intervention in countries which defy Western dominance More recently, scholars such as Thanh-Dam Truong and

Des Gasper Des Gasper is a development studies academic. He works as a professor of ''Human Development, Development Ethics and Public Policy'', at the International Institute of Social Studies in the Erasmus University Rotterdam Erasmus University Rot ...

, in''Transnational Migration and Human Security'' and Kyle and Koslowsk in ''In Global Human Smuggling,'' analyse the rise of migrant smuggling and human trafficking in terms of the "

structural violence Structural violence is a form of violence wherein some social structure or social institution may harm people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs or rights. The term was coined by Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, who intr ...

generated by the escalation of border interdiction by states as part of the system of global apartheid." Political demands for

protectionism Protectionism, sometimes referred to as trade protectionism, is the economic policy of restricting imports from other countries through methods such as tariffs on imported goods, import quotas, and a variety of other government regulations ...

and physical barriers between the West and the Majority World, such as President Trump's proposed wall between Mexico and the US as well as barriers round the EU follow similar economic pressures to those which entrenched apartheid in South Africa. Law scholar Dimitry Kochenov argues that

citizenship Citizenship is a membership and allegiance to a sovereign state. Though citizenship is often conflated with nationality in today's English-speaking world, international law does not usually use the term ''citizenship'' to refer to nationalit ...

and

nationality law Nationality law is the law of a sovereign state, and of each of its jurisdictions, that defines the legal manner in which a national identity is acquired and how it may be lost. In international law, the legal means to acquire nationality and for ...

is a form of apartheid that creates unequal protection that would never be accepted within the borders of any liberal democracy. "Like slavery, like sexism, like racism, citizenship knows no justification once you leave the purview of those few whom it unduly privileges."

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Global Governance International relations World government

Governance Governance is the overall complex system or framework of Process, processes, functions, structures, Social norm, rules, Law, laws and Norms (sociology), norms born out of the Interpersonal relationship, relationships, Social interaction, intera ...

Global issues Apartheid Global inequality

Origin and use

Concept

See also

References