Global Dialogues

Can a veneer of civility coexist with broken systems? Too often they do. The cruelty of our age is not always loud. It does not only appear in dictators’ fists or generals’ threats. It is disguised as shiny policy, spoken in conferences with words like “freedom,” “progress,” and “development.” In global discourse, I hear Africa described as poor, corrupt, and fractured. Rarely do I hear about the global institutions that profit from their fragility. This silence itself is a form of cruelty.

Cruelty today thrives in obscured and insidious ways. Aid is often advertised as generosity, yet it is driven by donor strategic interests rather than community needs. Wars are fueled by arms manufactured in donor states, and then the same actors arrive with humanitarian aid to “save lives.” Migration is criminalized, though displacement is rooted in centuries of extraction and the destruction of cultural institutions. Even looted funds from African governments find a haven in Western banks, while ordinary citizens are stigmatized as corrupt by donor rhetoric and global media stereotypes. These contradictions are tolerated because they are normalized and packaged as neutral development practices.

We deceive ourselves when we tolerate this indifference: applauding aid without recognizing its built-in tradeoff of financial sovereignty or teaching economic and governance frameworks while ignoring stolen wealth in foreign accounts allows cruelty to masquerade as ethics. Even the language of unity can be cruel when it demands conformity from the Global South while absolving the Global North of accountability.

But cruelty need not define our global politics. We can imagine three alternatives: rooted honesty, co-creation, and solidarity. First, honesty in politics requires admitting complicity in broken systems, whether through arms sales, tax havens, or exploitative contracts. Second, co-creation implies treating the Global South not as a passive recipient but as an architect of global solutions. Third, solidarity must mean recognizing shared vulnerability: pandemics, climate change, and inequality tie us together, whether in Kinshasa or Kathmandu, Kyiv or Kansas City.

The opposite of cruelty is not neutrality but transformative solidarity: an ethic of accountability, equality, and dignity. Politics that refuse to exploit weakness for profit and instead build in partnership with those once silenced. To call out cruelty in our world is to refuse illusion. It is demanding that the systems that benefit from fragility take responsibility, to insist that compassion is not pity but justice, and that love in politics begins with listening when undiluted voices from the Global South speak.

Linda Uzoamaka Christopher (SFS'26) is a senior in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.