International Politics

This article analyses how the white genocide myth functions as a media and political strategy that recentres whiteness while erasing black suffering from global narratives of violence and risk. Focusing on digital moral panics and US refugee discourse, the article discusses how white vulnerability is amplified while black victims of violence are rendered invisible.

This article examines how white Afrikaner identity has been strategically invented and reinvented, obscuring its origins in conquest, appropriation, and apartheid power. The article explores how humanitarian language and historical erasure are mobilised to reframe redress and land reform as persecution, aligning Afrikaner grievance with global far-right politics.

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.

Rising global inequality and escalating debt crises are hitting Africa hard. This dossier explores key challenges and the reforms needed to build fairer international financial structures.

This year’s G20 process has felt like a rollercoaster: exhilarating highs, exhausted lows, and constant questions looping in our heads: Is this process meaningful? Can we influence it? Will the United States derail everything?  In this piece, Elin, the International Climate Politics Hub G20 Coordinator, shares her own reflections on the challenges and possibilities of engaging the G20 from a civil society perspective, particularly on issues of climate, energy, and food justice.

This article was written by Professor Adekeye Adebajo, part of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung Southern Africa offices G20 engagement process and efforts. It reviews the first eleven months of South Africa’s presidency of the G20 (November 2024–November 2025).