The following is the draft of an article I’m submitting to a student newspaper, and which I thought would interest readers. Although this isn’t discussed explicitly in the article, it’s an attempt to flesh out the way that imperialism destroys lives even when it’s not doing anything obviously destructive – just be its continued existence as a system.
So without further ado:
There is a tendency, when discussing the overall state of the world economy, to say that while most areas of the world are growing, Africa is an exception, where ‘normal’ economic growth is being held back by political instability and conflict. For much of the recent few decades sub-Saharan Africa’s economies have actually shrunk, and certainly much of the reason for this is the civil wars, coups, and insurgencies that have plagued the continent. Yet I disagree with the tendency to separate this from the rest of the global economy as an anomaly, an extraneous factor interfering with normal economics. Rather, I wish to argue, this recurrent violence is an integral part of and consequence of those economics.
