Global apartheid is a term for a concept of how Global North countries are engaged in a project of "racialization, segregation, political intervention, mobility controls, capitalist plunder, and labor exploitation" affecting people from the Global South. 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 from 1948 to 1994, but based on borders and national sovereignty. [1]
The concept of global apartheid has been developed by many researchers, including Titus Alexander, [2] Bruno Amoroso, [3] Patrick Bond, [4] Gernot Kohler, [5] Arjun Makhijiani, [6] Ali Mazuri, [7] [8] Vandana Shiva, [9] Anthony H. Richmond, [10] Joseph Nevins, [11] Muhammed Asadi, [12] Gustav Fridolin, [13] and many others. More recent references are in Falk's Re-Framing the International, [14] Amoroso's Global apartheid: globalisation, economic marginalisation, political destabilisation, [15] Peterson's A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy, [16] Jones's Crimes Against Humanity: A Beginner's Guide [17] and Global Human Smuggling by Kyle and Koslowski, [18] and New Social Movements in the African Diaspora: Challenging Global Apartheid. [19] and Bosak's Kairos, Crisis, and Global Apartheid [20]
The first use of the term may have been by Gernot Koehler in a 1978 Working Paper [21] for the World Order Models Project. In 1995, Koehler developed this in The Three Meanings of Global Apartheid: Empirical, Normative, Existential. [22]
Its best known use was by Thabo Mbeki, then-President of South Africa, in a 2002 speech, drawing comparisons of the status of the world's people, economy, and access to natural resources to the apartheid era. [23] 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 and gave him a copy of Unravelling Global Apartheid.
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." [24]
Alexander claims there are numerous pillars of global apartheid including: [2]
More recently, scholars such as Thanh-Dam Truong and Des Gasper, inTransnational Migration and Human Security [25] and Kyle and Koslowsk in In Global Human Smuggling, analyse the rise of migrant smuggling and human trafficking in terms of the "structural violence generated by the escalation of border interdiction by states as part of the system of global apartheid." [26] Political demands for protectionism and physical barriers between the West and the Majority World, such as President Trump's wall between Mexico and the US as well as barriers round the EU [27] [28] follow similar economic pressures to those which entrenched apartheid in South Africa.
Law scholar Dimitry Kochenov argues that citizenship and nationality law 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." [29]
Citizenship is a membership and allegiance to a sovereign state.
Autarky is the characteristic of self-sufficiency, usually applied to societies, communities, states, and their economic systems.
Globalization or globalisation is the process of interaction and integration among people, companies, and governments worldwide. The term globalization first appeared in the early 20th century, developed its current meaning sometime in the second half of the 20th century, and came into popular use in the 1990s to describe the unprecedented international connectivity of the post–Cold War world. Its origins can be traced back to 18th and 19th centuries due to advances in transportation and communications technology. This increase in global interactions has caused a growth in international trade and the exchange of ideas, beliefs, and culture. Globalization is primarily an economic process of interaction and integration that is associated with social and cultural aspects. However, disputes and international diplomacy are also large parts of the history of globalization, and of modern globalization.
Free trade is a trade policy that does not restrict imports or exports. In government, free trade is predominantly advocated by political parties that hold economically liberal positions, while economic nationalist and left-wing political parties generally support protectionism, the opposite of free trade.
The Group of Eight (G8) was an intergovernmental political forum from 1997–2014. It had formed from incorporating Russia into the G7, and returned to its previous name after Russia was expelled in 2014.
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. Proponents argue that protectionist policies shield the producers, businesses, and workers of the import-competing sector in the country from foreign competitors and raise government revenue. Opponents argue that protectionist policies reduce trade, and adversely affect consumers in general as well as the producers and workers in export sectors, both in the country implementing protectionist policies and in the countries against which the protections are implemented.
Forced displacement is an involuntary or coerced movement of a person or people away from their home or home region. The UNHCR defines 'forced displacement' as follows: displaced "as a result of persecution, conflict, generalized violence or human rights violations".
Dependency theory is the idea that resources flow from a "periphery" of poor and exploited states to a "core" of wealthy states, enriching the latter at the expense of the former. A central contention of dependency theory is that poor states are impoverished and rich ones enriched by the way poor states are integrated into the "world system". This theory was officially developed in the late 1960s following World War II, as scholars searched for the root issue in the lack of development in Latin America.
Economic nationalism or nationalist economics is an ideology that prioritizes state intervention in the economy, including policies like domestic control and the use of tariffs and restrictions on labor, goods, and capital movement. The core belief of economic nationalism is that the economy should serve nationalist goals. As a prominent modern ideology, economic nationalism stands in contrast to economic liberalism and economic socialism.
Apartheid was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s. It was characterised by an authoritarian political culture based on baasskap, which ensured that South Africa was dominated politically, socially, and economically by the nation's minority white population. Under this minoritarian system, white citizens held the highest status, followed by Indians as well as Coloureds and then Black Africans. The economic legacy and social effects of apartheid continue to the present day, particularly inequality.
Unequal exchange is used primarily in Marxist economics, but also in ecological economics, to describe the systemic hidden transfer of labor and ecological value from poor countries in the imperial periphery to rich countries and monopolistic corporations in the imperial core due to structural inequalities in the global economy.
An economy is an area of the production, distribution and trade, as well as consumption of goods and services. In general, it is defined as a social domain that emphasize the practices, discourses, and material expressions associated with the production, use, and management of resources. A given economy is a set of processes that involves its culture, values, education, technological evolution, history, social organization, political structure, legal systems, and natural resources as main factors. These factors give context, content, and set the conditions and parameters in which an economy functions. In other words, the economic domain is a social domain of interrelated human practices and transactions that does not stand alone.
Prior to the arrival of the European settlers in the 17th century the economy of what was to become South Africa was dominated by subsistence agriculture and hunting.
Postcolonial international relations is a branch of scholarship that approaches the study of international relations (IR) using the critical lens of postcolonialism. This critique of IR theory suggests that mainstream IR scholarship does not adequately address the impacts of colonialism and imperialism on current day world politics. Despite using the language of post-, scholars of postcolonial IR argue that the legacies of colonialism are ongoing, and that critiquing international relations with this lens allows scholars to contextualize global events. By bridging postcolonialism and international relations, scholars point to the process of globalization as a crucial point in both fields, due to the increases in global interactions and integration. Postcolonial IR focuses on the re-narrativization of global politics to create a balanced transnational understanding of colonial histories, and attempts to tie non-Western sources of thought into political praxis.
The word destabilisation can be applied to a wide variety of contexts such as attempts to undermine political, military or economic power.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the broad, interdisciplinary subject of globalization:
Raphael Malcolm Kaplinsky is an Honorary Professor at the Science Policy Research Unit and an Emeritus Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. In 2024 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He was an active and well-known opponent to Apartheid in South Africa during the 1960s, and played a leading role in 1968 in the Mafeje affair. Kaplinsky was not allowed to return to his country of birth until Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, after which he played an active role in policy development at the national and regional levels. He spent the bulk of his professional career at the University of Sussex where he led research programmes on industrial and technology policy and on Global value chain. He led and participated in a number of Advisory Missions to governments in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe.
The Quality of Nationality Index (QNI) ranks the quality of nationalities based on internal and external factors. Each nationality receives an aggregated score based on economic strength, human development, ease of travel, political stability and overseas employment opportunities for their citizens. The QNI was created by Dimitry Kochenov and Christian Kälin, chairman of Henley & Partners.
Apocalypse 2000: Economic Breakdown and the Suicide of Democracy is a 1987 novel by English economists Peter Jay and Michael Stewart.
Allegations of apartheid have been made about various countries.
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