From Gaza to COP29: The 9 Types of Violence Wealthy Countries are Inflicting on the Global South
At a protest for Gaza in Mexico City, the placard reads, “From Congo to Mexico, from Sudan to Palestine, our world will be free.” Photo by Tamara Pearson.
The wealthy, imperialist countries of the Global North are committing a long list of crimes against people in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. From bombing, to environmental destruction, through to media erasure, the powerful economic and political entities of the Global North are intentionally generating and maintaining catastrophe, then normalizing it.
But now in particular, what was once obscured by a thick, gluttonous veil of macho white Hollywood fairy tales and flimsy, arrogant narratives of bringing democracy to a barbaric Global South, is now harder to deny with the genocide in Gaza and the ongoing planet pillaging.
My latest novel, The Eyes of the Earth, decodes the more human and personal aspects of this plundering, and reveals the people resisting it, in beautiful and magical ways. Below though, is an overview of the nine key types of structural violence being committed.
1) The death industry
The uninhibited killing in Gaza is both an intentional genocide, a land grab, and a profit project for the arms industry. Israeli-based defense firm Elbit Systems reported higher second-quarter profits in August and plans to open a new munitions facility in southern Israel, while Israel has been testing and using new weapons in its wars, then trying to sellthat tech at various global arms fairs. US arms manufactures, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, RTX, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and L3Harris – saw their profits soar past expectations this year.
Elsewhere recently, the US is building five new military bases in Somalia, and has struck a number of cities in Yemen. European transnationals are supplying weapons and ammunition for the war in Yemen. The US has been driving military intervention in Haiti.
The Global North uses such wars to maintain its hegemony and control over regions and resources. In 2023, total military expenditure was US$2.4 trillion, with the US the biggest spender, at almost half of that. Over 80% of the top 100 arms corporations are headquartered in the Global North.
2) Global North pollutes and over consumes, Global South suffers
Another COP, and the Global North and big business are focusing on defending their economic interests over defending our planet. As with last year at COP28, when there was an agreement to transition away from coal, oil, and gas, but wealthy nations then went on an oil and gas exploration spree, this year they are also weaseling out of any real commitment, let alone facing their responsibility for the harm to the Global South. This year, fossil fuel lobbyists have received more passes (1,773) to COP29 than all the delegates from the 10 most climate-vulnerable nations combined (1,033).
Meanwhile, the situation in poorer countries is going from bad to worse. From Cape Town to Cairo, drought, severe floods, and storms, are destroying lives, crops, biodiversity, infrastructure, and livelihoods. While disasters are also hitting the Global North, poorer countries lack resources for recovery.
The Global North is consuming excessively, while much of the Global South faces scarcity. The North outsources its pollution to the South; using coerced trade agreements, Global South countries are often forced to have weaker environmental regulations, which corporations then take advantage of. Companies like Smithfield Foods for example, produce pork in Mexico – leaving locals without water and contaminating the soil and water sources – then exporting much of that pork to the US. Richer countries shift water shortages to poorer regions by importing water-intensive products like vegetables, fruit, and meat. At the same time, countries like Nigeria have become an e-waste dumpsitefor Europe and the US; with impacts on locals’ health and the environment.
The Global North is responsible for an estimated 92% of greenhouse gas emissions, the US alone for 25% of global emissions, South America for just 3% and Africa for less than 4%. However, eight of the ten countries most affected by climate change are in Africa. For the loss and damage caused, the Global North will owe US$192 trillion by 2050, or $5 trillion a year.
3) Resource robbery
There is an ongoing transfer of wealth from the Global South to the North, where the South is used as a reservoir of resources and low-paid labor, which North corporations convert into profits that stay in the North. Inequality between wealthy and poor countries is not natural: it is constantly being created and reinforced.
Israel isn’t just bombing Gaza, it also wants to plunder its offshore gas reserves, and in late October 2023, the government announced that it had awarded natural gas exploration permits to Israeli and foreign corporations. Multinationals are stealing minerals and materials from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While corporations like Apple, Samsung, Huawei exploit Congo’s cobalt, the people there suffer from forced labor and human trafficking, child labor, hazardous working conditions, and extreme environmental harm.
This type of looting – both historic and in the present – on land stolen from Indigenous people and using enslaved labor, has funded infrastructure in the Global North, while it has been part of genocide, dispossession, famine, and mass impoverishment in the South. Today, the Global North drains commodities worth US$2.2 trillion a year from the Global South – enough to end extreme poverty 15 times over, and from 1960 to today totaling US$62 trillion.
4) Unfair trade
Related to, and facilitating resource robbery, Global North countries use their advantages to implement subsidies and tariffs that favor their corporations. These measures and unfair trade regimes provide protections for Northern investors, promote privatization, and formalize arbitration mechanisms that defend corporations and override Southern countries’ sovereignty and local laws.
Unfair trade gave the US’s rice and corn agroindustries the upper hand, so the US’s corn flooded Mexico and its rice flooded Haiti, and small farmers in both countries couldn’t compete and had to migrate en masse to the cities, leading to large swathes of informal housing or urban slums.
Likewise, Africa’s ten million cotton producers earn an average of US$400 – $550 a year, collectively losing around US$250 million annually to heavily-subsidized cotton producers in the West. Unfair trade deals between the European Union and Africa also mean that Africa’s food exports are uncompetitive against the €50 billion spent on keeping European food produce cheap. Subsidy-driven surpluses of European milk are powdered and sent to Africa, decimating its dairy industry, and the same happens with wheat, leaving Africa a net food importer.
The South loses 14 times more in such unequal trade, than it receives in aid.
5) Global wage apartheid
Major fashion corporations like Zara, H&M and GAP are using unfair practices in their use of factories in Bangladesh. These factories then struggle to pay the minimum garment workers’ wage, which increased last year to 2,500Bangladeshi taka per month (US$104.60). Working weeks are are 48-72 hours, while a single shirt from Zara sells for US$129. Garment workers in the US receive a mean monthly wage of US$2,698 – 25 times Bangladeshi workers.
The massive pay gap between the Global North and South is accompanied by huge differences in working hours, workplace conditions, access to holidays and other benefits, and how menial and physically exhausting the work is. Such differences can not be attributed to a lower cost of living (as purchasing power inequality between countries demonstrates) and are entirely about discriminating based on country.
6) Running the world
Despite the US’s role in the genocide against Gaza, it asserts the moral authority to police other countries through measures like sanctions and intervention. All the countries the US is sanctioning in various ways are in the Global South (Afghanistan, Myanmar, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Nicaragua, North Korea, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen) – sanctions which have everything to do with punishing countries for non-compliance with its impositions, and nothing to do with human rights. The US’s six decades of sanctions against Cuba have caused ongoing harm to people there, and CEPR estimates that the sanctions on Venezuela alone, by limiting access to food, medicine, and other imports, have resulted in at least 40,000 deaths.
At the same time, the US is pressing countries like Peru to rethink Chinese involvement in its critical infrastructure, as the US doesn’t want China to gain geopolitical clout in Latin America. This comes as the US also supported an anti-left coup and the consequent coup government in Peru.
The list goes on and on. The US supported the right-wing military coup in Honduras in 2009, intervened in Haitian elections the following year to get a pro-US right-wing victory, and backed a soft coup against Brazil’s Rousseff. It poured billions into Plan Colombia, that displaced millions and lead to thousands of deaths, and it trained military personal involved in counterinsurgency campaigns in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Colombia. Meanwhile, the measly “aid” that Europe sends to Africa after having plundered it, comes with conditions that destroy people’s own socioeconomic models and replaces them with the neoliberal model.
All of this is a violent disregard for autonomy. Such policies are unempowering, erase identity, override local agency, and subjugate the Global South in a clear continuation of colonialism.
7) Criminalizing the fleeing victims
Exemplifying this type of controlling behavior, Trump announced that he would impose tariffs on Mexican imports to the US if Mexico did not reduce the number of migrants (or “criminals and drugs” in his words) arriving at the US’s southern border. Besides the fact that the US shouldn’t use economics to dictate Mexico’s migration policies, migration – especially of refugees – is not something that can just be stopped.
The Global North’s response to people fleeing their homeland, usually as a consequence of the above-mentioned types of violence, is to criminalize them, endanger them through militarized borders, and deny their right to asylum.
At the US border with Mexico, there is a negation of due process, and people fleeing for their lives are forced to wait in Mexico for months. These migrants can’t work, nor afford accommodation, and face kidnapping, extortion (usually multiple times along the way), rape, torture, and being killed. They, and other refugees and forced migrants globally are also vulnerable to extreme exploitation and trafficking, including forced labor (there are 22 million forced laborers, including forced sex work).
Last year, the UK adopted the Illegal Migration Act which stops people who have to arrive without prior permission from accessing asylum and then expels them. Italy has been going so far as to crack down on organizations that save migrants’ lives at sea, and the EU as a whole has, as of December 2023, agreed on a new Migration Pact to prioritize deterrence over human rights, including a regulation that allows countries experiencing a “mass influx” to derogatefrom rights obligations.
8) Slaves to debt
Another way the Global South is both controlled, and kept in poverty, is through debt. Protesting Kenyans have recently managed to force the president to withdraw a bill that would raise taxes, but they were clear that it was the IMF driving such austerity policies, waving placards such as “We ain’t IMF bitches” and “Kenya is not IMF’s lab rat.” Likewise in Nigeria, such austerity, thanks to pressure from a US$2.25 billion World Bank loan, has seen Nigerian unions striking. And just days before the DRC’s elections last year, the IMF provided a disbursement because it wasn’t worried about who would win the election, knowing that any party would feel obliged to maintain its neoliberal economic agenda, including privatizing electricity, and mining codes that cater to Global North corporations.
The IMF and World Bank are controlled by the Global North, particularly the US (the US is the largest shareholder of the World Bank and a US citizen is always president of it). Loans are provided to countries that were once wealthy in resources, culture, and knowledge, but having been ransacked by colonialism, were plunged into material poverty. Now, many countries are dependent on foreign spending and have to offer cheap labor and resources to attract it.
Public debt in the Global South is growing twice as fast as other countries, with such countries paying US$847 billionlast year just in net interest. Some 54 countries last year spent at least 10% of government funds on debt interest payments, and 40% of the world’s population live in countries that have to spend more on such payments than on education or health. Most countries have paid off their debts over and over. In Mozambique for example, one aluminum shelter that was built with loans and aid money, is now costing the country £21 for every £1 that the Mozambique government initially received.
10) Racism and erasure in information and entertainment
And finally, all of the above are sustained by the entertainment, media, and other information industries and systems, with narratives that justify such inequality and violence, including Hollywood’s racist tropes and the news’ boycott of the Global South.
Euro- and US-centrism abound – the Global North and whiteness are the default, the correct, and the heroes. My novel, The Eyes of the Earth, has different heroes and tells a different story, as does a lot of other alternative content. But Hollywood is dedicated to other-ising the Global South and portraying it as a simple, pathetic, dirty and dangerous place This narrative dominates, as Hollywood accounts for around two thirds of total box office take in the international film industry.
The news, meanwhile, just plain overlooks the Global South. For example, the German Tagesschau on public broadcaster ARD had 462 reports on the US, 394 on the EU, 174 on France, and none on most African countries, and less than 10 on countries like Bolivia, Chile, and Sudan, in 2022. The Global South, despite representing 83% of the world’s population, only made up 4.4% of eAustrian Zeit im Bild (ZIB)’s lead stories.
The good news
Though less covered by the media, and despite the hardships and odds, there is resistance and resilience throughout the Global South, and solidarity with Gaza, for example, has been incredible in many Global North countries also.
With the gluttonous twins, Trump and Musk, practically running the US and beyond, in cahoots with corporations, arms and petroleum industries, and others, it is now at least crystal clear that this class is unwilling and incapable of providing environmental and human justice.
