We are living at a political turning point whose consequences reach far beyond any single country. The last elections in the United States, and the popular endorsement of an agenda rooted in right-wing religious conservatism, marked more than a routine change in leadership. It signalled a deeper rupture in how power, belonging, and vulnerability are understood. A political vision once considered fringe has moved decisively into the centre of global influence. What is unfolding is not merely a US domestic shift, but a global one that is reshaping norms, institutions, and the language through which injustice is and isn’t recognised and named.
This moment matters because it consolidates trends that have been steadily gaining ground: the return of authoritarian and colonial power logics, the erosion of the liberal world order, the selective application of international law, and the growing contestation of democratic norms. When powerful states model selective legality, disdain for multilateralism, and contempt for equality, they signal that an erosion or denial of democracy carries few consequences.
We are witnessing renewed attacks on transformative politics for social justice, women’s rights, LGBTQI+ communities, migrants, and those already pushed to the margins of legal protection. These attacks unfold against a backdrop of long-standing global crises: structural inequality, climate breakdown, violent conflict, displacement, extractive economic systems, and a global financial order that reproduces colonial hierarchies.
The global order is in flux, and trust in solidarity and collective solutions is fraying. It is within this geopolitical landscape that the decision by US authorities to grant refugee status to white South Africans must be understood. Through an executive order based on a false notion that South Africa is committing genocide against its white minority, the US instituted a fast-tracked refugee programme for white Afrikaners while simultaneously dismantling asylum protections for countless others. Presented as a sovereign prerogative, this policy change raises an alarm about the selective interpretation of persecution under the United Nations 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and 1967 Protocol, in particular the assessment of claims, the construction of credibility, and the instrumentalist use of internationally recognised protection standards in ways that undermine their universality.
In a world marked by mass displacement, those identified as urgently in need of refugee status - the people fleeing war, famine, repression, or climate collapse – are no longer recognised as such. Instead, protection is granted to the descendants of those who engineered apartheid with bureaucratic precision, leaving the most vulnerable without protection. Protection, in this logic, is not granted where need is greatest, but where familiarity and perceived legitimacy align.
A changing of the rules exposes how historically privileged powers retain the capacity to manipulate and instrumentalise international systems to their advantage. The flexibility with which vulnerability can be reinterpreted demonstrates that global protection frameworks are not fixed moral commitments but contested terrains shaped by geopolitical power. In this sense, the redefinition of persecution is not merely a domestic administrative act; it is an assertion of authority over the normative order itself, revealing how dominant states continue to govern the terms on which protection, legitimacy, and humanity are enjoyed.
When the US, a state with disproportionate influence over global norms, redefines who qualifies as persecuted and thus deserving of protection, this has global influence on how vulnerability is defined and recognised, globally. As a consequence, the demand for structural redress by those who are actually oppressed is seen to persecute their former oppressors, who are now recast as victims. As a consequence, those who once benefited from the racial capitalism of apartheid, are now narrated as endangered minorities. In this sense, the US policy shift signals a broader reconfiguration of the global order—one in which those at the top of established hierarchies are reframed as victims such that the logics of white supremacy is presented in the language of state protection. In this way, the architecture of racialised global power is not dismantled—it is recalibrated.
South Africa sits at the centre of this narrative reversal and its international pressures, while at the same time facing unresolved internal political and socio-economic challenges that undermine the country’s ongoing project of transformation and accountability. Trump-era foreign policy has intensified diplomatic tensions by recasting white Afrikaner’s loss of political and economic dominance as persecution, in order to rewrite the history and violence of apartheid and deny the need for equality and redress. This lies at the heart of our concern. For, a population group that benefited for decades from an internationally condemned system of racial domination is now portrayed as an endangered minority. The language of genocide, minority rights, and refugee protection is weaponised to defend historic privilege. Whiteness is reframed as vulnerability. Equality is cast as danger. Historical accountability becomes discrimination. The perpetrator–victim narrative is symbolically reversed.
These dynamics of reversal are not limited to race. Gender has become a central instrument, given how the figure of the endangered white woman and the threatened white family has long been mobilised in imperial and colonial narratives to justify racial violence, expansion, and repression. Contemporary anti-rights movements draw on these old tropes by claiming protection for women, children, and ‘the traditional family’, to reinforce racial hierarchies, restrict reproductive rights, and criminalise LGBTQI+ communities. Moreover, feminist language is appropriated to defend these exclusions while gender-based violence is invoked to stigmatise migrants and queer existence is presented as moral decay. These narratives, rooted in imperial logics, position colonised populations as inherently violent, hypersexual, or uncivilised, while centring white heteronormative families as embodiments of civilisation. Such weaponisation of identities must be unequivocally condemned, as it distorts genuine struggles against patriarchy and violence in service of racial supremacy and authoritarianism.
None of this occurs by accident. It is politically enabled not only by the current US administration but also by a broader transnational anti-rights movement adept at appropriating the language of rights protection to entrench systems of exclusion. South Africa, in many ways, foreshadowed this global moment. For years, on the periphery, disinformation campaigns framed land reform and racial redress as existential threats to white survival. Narratives of ‘white genocide’ circulated transnationally long before they were elevated by US executive action. The reversal of perpetrator and victim was rehearsed in the digital networks of right-wing movements. What we now witness is an amplification of these ideas, incubated over time and consolidated at the level of US state power.
As a green political foundation committed to justice, equality, international solidarity, and the integrity of international law, we at Heinrich Boell believe it is essential to interrogate and document this moment.
Our work centres African perspectives not as a gesture of inclusion, but as an analytical necessity. Post-colonial societies like South Africa are too often treated as objects of moral judgment rather than as sites of political insight. Yet it is precisely here, where struggles over history, power, and redistribution are most visible, that the contradictions of the global order are laid bare. We believe that creating spaces for such African perspectives is a democratic responsibility, recognising that democracy is not negotiated solely at the ballot box or in international summits, it is also contested through narratives, norms, and decisions about whose suffering counts.
By critically examining how power is reframed as peril, this Dossier is an invitation to resist the rewriting of injustice, to defend the universality of human rights, and to insist that accountability, rather than nostalgia for dominance, remains at the heart of any global order seeking to be just.
We hope that the reflections and analyses shared in the Dossier will inspire deeper political clarity, principled solidarity, and renewed commitment to democratic accountability.
Kealeboga Maseru, Programme Manager, Democracy and Social Justice,
Layla Al-Zubaidi, Deputy Director, International Department
Paula Assubuji, Director, HBF Cape Town
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