Abelardo de la Espriella, Colombia’s incoming far-right president, has announced he will scrap his country’s planned Palestinian embassy, reopen Colombia’s embassy in Jerusalem, and shutter fifteen other diplomatic missions in the same stroke. This right-wing foreign policy “reset” is undoing Gustavo Petro’s ethically correct break with Israel, and that includes Petro’s alignment with South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice. As president-elect, Espriella is eager to integrate Bogotá with Washington and Tel Aviv before he has even taken office.

The United States could not kidnap Gustavo Petro, the way Trump orchestrated with the popular and democratically elected Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. But corporate powers could unleash the data dogs to undermine yet another progressive and popular South American president. Espriella is aligning Colombia into the cabal of right wing puppet parties that now includes Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay, Guatemala, and Panama… all aligned with the Greater Israel program. No one should believe for a moment that these are popularly elected presidents.

The razor thin margins in these elections evoke another democratic crisis in which privately managed digital infrastructures increasingly inserts itself into our public institutions, and the number of election results that are lost by tiny percentage points, suggest that voting instruments like Smartmatic could play a role as they were accused of doing in the Philippines, or in the case of Colombia, BlackCore, an Israeli cyber-intelligence firm. There are layers of data management companies that can be manipulated just enough to carry right wing Israeli and US aligned candidates, funded and benefitting the largest asset management investment firms. At a time when the world largely condemns Israeli genocide and has a tremendous distrust of the United States, it is difficult to believe that popular votes support candidates that back Israel’s genocide and land grabs, or Washington’s illegal neocolonial aggressions.

Understanding that there are other issues that voters may be sensitive too like unemployment, drug cartels, security and the like, these are issues that are systemically manipulated—if not manufactured by large corporations, as they were in Venezuela, when U.S. industrials like Kimberly-Clark and other foreign corporate investors left when Venezuela began to nationalize their resources and began to expropriate key industries. And this is the problem with the well financed cabal of neoliberal industries and information peddlers. Under these kinds of capitalist conditions, democracy is measured within a closed system that privileges profit over people and planet.

The lesson from Cambridge Analytica that helped carry the win for Trump and Brexit as well as compromised elections in Kenya, Trinidad and Tobago, and St Vincent and the Grenadines, should have been understood as an early warning Zero Hour for democracy rather than as isolated conspiracies. While this article may not provide the evidentiary smoking gun over voting manipulation, it presents a far more fundamental question of causation and correlation.

At what point does a recurring pattern of razor-thin electoral victories, privatized digital infrastructure, political data operations, AI governance, and the convergence of financial and technological power cease to be understood as unrelated coincidences and instead warrant investigations and regulations into the emergence of a new hegemonic order in which wealth accumulation, digital infrastructure, and political authority are organized through common institutional architectures rather than through democratic institutions alone.

That genie has been let out of the bottle, proving that the political value of data is no longer democratic participation but the preservation of hegemonic systems of wealth accumulation and political control. Election systems, digital identity, cloud infrastructure, financial accounting, and AI governance is deepening its convergence into a common institutional architecture through which information is authenticated, integrated, and transformed into political and economic authority.

The latest announcement from the dark empire that I call AUMerica—the "Assets Under Management" empire, financed in part by BlackRock's more than $15 trillion asset portfolio, and enforced geopolitically by the United States—suggests how profoundly financial power has become intertwined with digital infrastructure. With reports that BlackRock-backed investments are financing major AI data center expansion, now owning 80% of Meta’s AI data center, alongside its holdings in companies such as Palantir and its recent acquisition of Preqin, voting risks becoming little more than a gratuitous gesture if the institutions that govern data, finance, and digital infrastructure increasingly shape the conditions under which democratic decisions are made. In that framework, the convergence of financial power, data governance, and ideological projects, including Zionism and Christian Nationalism, becomes more consequential than the outcome of any single election.

This doesn’t mean that there are no alternatives. Saint Lucian voters, for example, rejected external election manipulation and the progressive Unity Labour Party won in a landslide— not by a razor thin margin.

These global unregulated data firms have turned democratic systems into a casino parlor where the house always wins. And when the consolidation of data not only undermines our public institutions, but also reinforces institutionalized murder with programs like Lavender and Where’s Poppa?, not to mention illegal ICE raids, kidnappings, and murder where agents are largely acquited with impunity. A society cannot permit the institutions that govern data to become insulated from promoting basic liberties and distributive justice, an ethics of law outlined by John Rawls, otherwise, the concentration of informational power risks becoming a concentration of political power beyond democratic control.

This system is condoning genocide and ecocide under the eschatological logic of religious fundamentalism. Are we supposed to believe that these abrupt power shifts taking place under the aegis of “democratic elections” signal public consent for governments of atrocity?

Elections matter, behold WAICO

157 of the world’s 193 UN member states recognize the State of Palestine. China recognized Palestinian statehood in 1988 and has never wavered from it, leveraging Israel’s deepening isolation to position itself as Palestine’s most powerful external patron.

On July 17, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the creation of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) and called for joint efforts to build a just and equitable system for global AI governance.

The establishment of WAICO recognizes an important constitutional principle: governance must precede deployment. Before artificial intelligence becomes embedded across civilian administration, finance, health care, critical infrastructure, and military systems, states must first establish common institutions capable of governing its development. That governance, however, cannot remain confined to questions of technical cooperation alone. It must develop alongside a complementary framework that distinguishes between beneficial, civilian applications of AI and applications that should be restricted or prohibited under international humanitarian law. International cooperation provides the institutional architecture just as humanitarian law provides the legal architecture. Both are necessary if AI is to become an instrument of peace rather than another domain of strategic competition. The problem, however, remains with the Israel-U.S. cooperation. As long as they continue to embed Zero Hour AI technology into their alliance, China is the one country equipped to build a defensive architecture to counter Israel-US land and resource grabbing applications, while promoting equitable international standards.

This is where WAICO should be understood as the beginning of a larger institutional framework evolving in close coordination with the work already undertaken by the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA), the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and UNESCO. Those institutions are developing principles concerning meaningful human control, autonomous weapons, AI ethics, and the protection of civilians.

Additionally, interfaith based institutions, the IF20—the G20 Interfaith forum—has been producing a series of ethics based webinars seeking to understand the role AI can play in environmental, and ethics-based governance. As a tool, Arthur Lyon Dahl summarizes, “just as nuclear science produced both nuclear power and atomic bombs, AI can open new perspectives for civilization or trap us as passive consumers — both outcomes requiring strengthened global governance.”

Representing the majority of human’s in this world, interfaith, is precisely the venue through which we need wrestle religious governance away from the hypocrisy and self-interest that undermines the very foundation of our systems of justice and belief: religious nationalism in general, and in our current global crisis, Zionism and Christian Nationalism, with their particular brand of eschatological capitalism.

Regional integrations form a third pillar upon which to build an international AI governance structure. Whether the G20, ACP, ASEAN, Mercosur, the European Union, BRICS, the African Union, or an integration of Small Pacific Island States, or other regional organizations, some of these regional cooperations may already possess established mechanisms for regulatory cooperation, technical standards, development finance, trade, and dispute resolution, providing the practical governance layer through which international AI principles can be translated into regional implementation while respecting different legal traditions and development priorities.

WAICO along with other international cooperations offer the foundation for an international governance system that promotes scientific and technological cooperation while establishing clear legal boundaries against the military misuse of artificial intelligence. Governance, in this sense, is not a passive administrative exercise. It is an active program for development and peace.

The WAICO agreement also reveals the work that remains. It does not yet contain explicit prohibitions on AI-assisted target selection, autonomous weapons, predictive surveillance, or systems reportedly used in contemporary conflicts, such as Israel’s AI-assisted targeting programs publicly known as Lavender and Where’s Daddy? Nor does it distinguish systematically between categories of AI according to their operational risks.

In the context of development priorities and risk, effective governance requires more than broad principles. It requires institutions capable of classifying AI applications, encouraging beneficial innovation, and prohibiting technologies whose foreseeable use is incompatible with international humanitarian law. The next stage of international AI governance should therefore integrate institutional cooperation with binding legal standards governing specific military applications, as well as the privatization of data extraction that is harmonizing between National Accounting Systems, the Sustainable Development Goals, and the Environmental-Economic Accounting.

This distinction is equally important for understanding the emerging multipolar order. As the Russian BRICS expert council has observed, the establishment of WAICO does not by itself create an alternative global order for artificial intelligence. The international system remains in a period of intense technological competition, and no comprehensive framework for AI governance has yet emerged. For that reason, “BRICS countries view WAICO less as a finished institution than as one component of a broader effort to reduce technological inequality, strengthen sovereign technological capacity, and participate more fully in shaping the future architecture of global AI governance.” The constitutional institutions are beginning to take shape. The legal norms governing their use remain under construction.

There remains a third layer of governance that neither WAICO nor the current humanitarian frameworks fully address. Artificial intelligence does not govern itself. It depends upon accounting systems, identity systems, cloud infrastructure, and data standards that determine what information is collected, authenticated, valued, and made available for automated decision-making. Governing AI therefore requires governing the institutional architecture from which AI derives its authority. The future of international AI law will depend not only on regulating algorithms but on establishing constitutional principles for the governance of data itself.

This is where accounting assumes constitutional importance. Accounting no longer serves merely to record economic activity after it occurs. It increasingly determines what information enters the system, how reality is classified, what assets exist, how they are valued, who verifies them, and who possesses authority over the resulting decisions. Artificial intelligence does not determine these categories. It inherits them. The quality of governance therefore depends less upon the sophistication of AI than upon the institutions that establish the standards by which data are collected, verified, and interpreted.

For that reason, the emerging contest between competing economic architectures is not fundamentally about technology. It is about institutional authority. The question is who will define the protocols through which information becomes knowledge, knowledge becomes policy, and policy becomes economic power. The struggle over accounting standards, digital identity, cloud infrastructure, AI governance, and development finance should therefore be understood as different expressions of the same constitutional question. Who governs the data by which society governs itself?

Opening of the Spectral Session

PRESIDENT OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY (Malaprop President Annalena Baerbock of the 80th UNGA): The Assembly convenes an extrasensual session, not to hear from states, but from two spectacles summoned by the weight of the hysterical question this corpulent body cannot escape: whether the history the powerful write about themselves is the history that happened. We welcome the ghost of Karl Marx, who will argue as the historicist, as one who asks about ownership, labor, and markets. And we welcome the ghost of Karl Popper appears as the historian, writing, “there is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life… and one of these is the history of political power,” and the history of power politics is “nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder.”

Herr Marx, the floor is yours.

Opening Statements

MARX: Madam President, delegates. I wrote in The German Ideology that “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” I say this not to claim prophecy but to insist on method: you do not understand an epoch by what it says of itself. You understand it by its mode of production, its property relations, its division of labor. I wrote elsewhere, in the Eighteenth Brumaire, that people make their own history, but not under circumstances they choose. Circumstances are given and transmitted from the past.

If we apply this to Yalta, for example, the historical chronicle can be reduced to describing three men who discussed spheres of influence. The historicist asks: whose factories stood, whose factories lay in rubble, whose army had bled at Kursk and Stalingrad and Belarus, and whose had crossed an ocean to arrive largely intact? Roosevelt and Churchill did not grant Stalin a security zone out of generosity. They recognized a material fact already established on the ground by eight million Soviet dead.

Georg Lukács, in History and Class Consciousness, showed why the bourgeois historian cannot see this: reification. He mistakes the categories a system produces about itself: NATO as “defensive;” the Marshall Plan as “reconstruction;” the European Coal and Steel Community as a “peace project,” for the totality of social relations underneath them. Lukács called this the inability to see the thing as a process, as a relation between people mediated by objects, rather than the objects themselves. NATO is not a fact of nature. It is a settlement over who controls the coal, the steel, the currency, strategic resources and energy.

The historian who begins with the treaty text and ends there has confused the treaty with the transformation it authorized.

POPPER: Madam President. I did write The Poverty of Historicism, and I will not disown a syllable of it here, even against the spirit of the man for whom I coined the term. Historicism — the doctrine that history unfolds according to knowable laws toward a predetermined end — is not merely a scientific error. It is an invitation to tyranny, because whoever claims to have read the laws of history claims the right to accelerate them by any means, over any objection, against any individual who stands in the way.

I do not dispute that power leaves material traces, that ownership matters, that the Marshall Plan opened markets for American exporters as surely as it rebuilt the ports in Rotterdam.

The historian’s method, beginning with documents, testimony, and declared intent is discipline. It is the only method that can be checked, falsified, revised when new evidence appears. The historicist’s method, for all its talk of material relations, has a way of already knowing the answer before the archive is opened: capital exploits, therefore this event is exploitation; empire expands, therefore this alliance is empire. That is not history. That is theology with footnotes.

And here I invoke Madam President, against my old adversaries and in fairness to them, Ernst Bloch — a Marxist, yes, but one who understood in The Principle of Hope that the future is Noch-Nicht-Sein, the not-yet, radically open, undetermined by any iron law. Bloch’s utopian surplus is not the same as Marx’s “inevitable results.” If even the Marxist tradition’s own visionary insists the future is unwritten, then the closed determinism Herr Marx just recited to you is not historical materialism. It is prophecy borrowing the vocabulary of science.

Questions from the General Assembly

AMBASSADOR OF SOUTH AFRICA: Both honored Apparitions, my delegation brought this Assembly’s genocide case against Israel to the International Court of Justice. We are told by Western commentary that this is a security matter, a response to October 7th, a defensive campaign. The historian’s method, as Professor Popper describes it, would seem to instruct us to take the declared intention of self-defense at face value. Where does that leave Palestine trying to name what it has endured for decades under an apartheid regime and under occupation?

POPPER: Ambassador, you misread my method if you think it ends with the press release. The historian's discipline requires us to test declared intentions against the evidence of what was actually done, including proportionality, targeting patterns, displacement, and the systems your own delegation and others have documented, among them the AI-assisted targeting architectures known publicly as "Lavender" and "Where's Daddy," developed with the involvement of firms such as Palantir.

A stated intention repeatedly contradicted by observable institutional consequences is no longer an adequate explanation. It requires a different explanation. I will not suspend that standard for any government, including those I might otherwise have defended against Marx's historical determinism.

MARX: And I would only add: follow the money. Palantir’s largest institutional shareholders include the same asset managers. Assets under Management: firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street sit atop nearly every major arms manufacturer and reconstruction contractor on earth. The historicist does not need a theory of xenophobia, racism, or greed to explain a war. He needs a balance sheet. Land, water, gas fields off Gaza’s coast, as well as the reconstruction contracts that follow. Reductionist theories of war might be located to specific theaters, but they, in no small part, provide the understanding of why war does not end.

AMBASSADOR OF BRAZIL: My delegation signed the Fortaleza Declaration. We are asked constantly why Brazil will not simply align with Washington’s institutions. Professor Marx, you say follow the money. Professor Popper, does the historian’s method not also risk becoming a public rationale for whichever power currently holds the pen? This includes the 1944 Bretton Woods meeting as well as the sanctions regime evolving from the 1989 Washington Consensus.

POPPER: It can become a rationale, even one bound by legal settlement, Ambassador, if the historian stops checking the record against the outcome. That is precisely why I do not dismiss the New Development Bank or the Contingent Reserve Arrangement as propaganda. As new institutions, either they extend credit on terms less coercive than the IMF’s, or they do not. The evidence so far suggests they do. An open society does not mean a single-currency society.

MARX: I will take the rare gift of Professor Popper’s agreement and not waste it. The dollar-clearing system is not a neutral system. For example, the Bretton Woods of Keynes sought a non-national currency with the Bancor, while the United States co-opted this system and asserted the dollar as part of a Truman Doctrine proposal isolating the communist countries. The dollar had become a jurisdiction, and jurisdictions can freeze what they do not like. Renminbi settlement, the CRA, the NDB — these are not merely gestures toward “diversity.” This is not a Pepsi-to-Coke challenge. These new BRICS institutions are a counterweight against the ability of one treasury to decide who eats and who borrows.

AMBASSADOR OF INDONESIA: On Taiwan and the South China Sea — we in the Non-Aligned Movement are told China’s reserves, pipelines, and overland trade routes are evidence of coming aggression. Yet the power that can already close the Strait of Malacca calls its own patrols “freedom of navigation” Is this not the same asymmetry Professor Marx described at Yalta?

MARX: Precisely, Ambassador. Security becomes aggression when pursued by those outside the prevailing order, and defense when pursued by those who administer it. Those categories are not politically neutral. They are articulated by the naval power that supposedly guarantees the existing commercial order under its own rules, patrols the principal sea lanes, and remains outside the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea while expecting others to operate within the maritime order it administers.

POPPER: I concede the asymmetry in political language. I do not concede, however, that exposing one narrative automatically validates its opposite. To reject one account is not to prove another. Claims of containment and claims of encirclement must both be tested against the same evidence and judged by the same standard, regardless of the flag under which they are made.

AMBASSADOR OF LEBANON: My country has watched its south absorb strikes and incursions described abroad as “buffer zone security.” We have also watched a decade of dollar collapse engineered, in no small part, by a financial class tied to the same institutions Professor Marx names. What does the historicist say to a country asked to wait patiently for the historian’s footnotes while its territory is redrawn in real time?

MARX: I say what I said of Poland in 1945. The question was never sovereignty in the abstract. It has always been about the material settlement that followed war. Who would own the economy. Who would finance reconstruction. Who would command the security institutions. Who would define the legal order. Lebanon's tragedy is that both its domestic financial oligarchy and external powers have treated the state as an instrument for preserving property, protecting capital, and socializing the cost of private accumulation. As I have always argued, the problem with capitalism is not wealth itself. It is the concentration of ownership, which transforms the state from the guardian of the public into the guardian of accumulated capital.

POPPER: I will not let that stand as a complete answer, Ambassador, because your people did not ask to become a chapter in someone else's land grab. The historian's obligation is to document, in real time and by name, whose forces did what. That obligation does not require certainty about history's destination. It requires honesty about the facts before us. Professor Marx correctly reminds us that ownership and finance shape political possibilities. But historical explanation becomes ideology the moment it denies human agency. The concentration of ownership creates incentives. It does not abolish responsibility. Those who ordered the bombing, financed the factions, looted the treasury, or corrupted the institutions remain accountable for choices that were neither mechanically determined nor historically inevitable.

Advanced Economies Answer for the Record

AMBASSADOR OF THE UNITED STATES: With respect to both ghosts, this Assembly seems to have arrived at its verdict before the debate began. My government maintained NATO as a defensive alliance ratified by treaty, defended Ukraine’s sovereignty against an unprovoked invasion of a UN member state, and has been transparent about its institutions in a way closed societies have not. Where is the historicist’s evidence that this is empire rather than commitment?

MARX: Ambassador, I do not need to allege a conspiracy. I need only ask what happened to Ukraine’s land registry, its farmland, its pipelines, and its heavy industry in the years before and after the US-backed coup in 2014, and who held the contracts on them afterward. The World Bank itself documented the privatization and cadastre program as an “achievement.” An achievement for whom is the only question a historicist asks that a historian is trained to leave alone. And a big question we have not answered is what happened to the labor and farm organizers who disappeared shortly after the coup? Perhaps this Assembly has summoned too few ghosts. Besides Popper and me, where are the ghosts of the trade unionists who disappeared after coups? Where are the peasant organizers whose names no longer appear in the archives? Where are the students, journalists, clergy, and community leaders who vanished during counterinsurgency campaigns? They have testimony to give as well. History is not only written by those who survived long enough to publish memoirs.

POPPER: If they are to testify, let their testimony rest on evidence. Let every archive be opened. Let every disappeared person be named where the record permits. Let no government, whether capitalist, socialist, colonial, or anti-colonial, hide behind sealed files. An open society owes the dead the same honesty that it owes the living.

But to the Ambassador’s point, I will grant the Ambassador this much: Russia’s 2022 crossing of an internationally recognized border is a fact no amount of historicist context dissolves, and I will not let Marx’s method launder it into mere reaction. But I will not grant the Ambassador innocence either. NATO’s post-1991 enlargement, undertaken against assurances informally given and later disputed, and the IMF conditionalities attached to Ukraine’s association agreements, are on the record and falsifiable. The 2014 Washington-backed coup of democratically elected President Yanukovych, is also on record. A method that only interrogates the border crossing and never the decade of financial and military encirclement or political destabilization efforts that preceded it is not disciplined history. It is selective history.

AMBASSADOR OF GERMANY: The Coal and Steel Community, and the Union it became with the Maastricht Treaty is documented in its own founding texts as an explicit peace project, making war between France and Germany “not merely unthinkable but materially impossible.” How has this founding purpose now become suspect?

MARX: The purpose is sincere yet the outcome is still an expanding economic integration and political jurisdiction, Ambassador. Ask the delegates from the former state of Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia. Neither belonged to the European Union, yet both occupied the geopolitical frontier of an enlarging European order, standing adjacent to an expanding integration whose political, economic, and security architecture advances steadily toward the Russian Federation. One must ask whether Nato contains an imperialist mindset that seeks to reshape the strategic balance across the Eurasian continent.

Seventy-eight days of NATO sorties dissolved a non-aligned, federally socialist economy into privatized successor states queueing for EU accession. Czechia and Slovakia are now members, and in the case of Yugoslavia, it has been broken into seven countries, two of them—Slovenia and Croatia having already been granted accession. A peace project for its members can still be a dissolution project for its neighbors. From a historical materialist perspective, does it make sense to describe Russia's actions in isolation as aggression, while treating the preceding expansion of the European political and security order as merely the normal progression of European history?

POPPER: I would ask the distinguished Ambassador to subject the Kosovo intervention to the same falsifiable test applied to every other intervention discussed in this chamber. Did its stated humanitarian purpose correspond with the documented pattern of who ultimately acquired Yugoslavia's banks, ports, and industries? If the answer proves uncomfortable for the alliance, the historian's obligation is to report it, not to avert his gaze because the alliance is one’s own.

AMBASSADOR OF THE UNITED KINGDOM: Professor Marx invokes financialization as though it were unique to the West. Yet he has said nothing of the criminal networks — Epstein among them — that this Assembly’s own reporting shows implicated financiers and officials across multiple governments, some represented in this very hall. Is that not simply corruption, unrelated to his theory of capital?

MARX: It is not unrelated, Ambassador. It is the theory made visible through its victims of predation. Epstein’s links to Wall Street and Mossad suggests that he was a broker of access within the global financial system. His currency was more than just money, it was proximity, compromise, and the complicit silence around the real hauntology, the spectre of capitalism itself. He occupied the same social universe as financiers, politicians, royalty, intelligence figures, university presidents, and corporate executives because immense concentrations of wealth produce networks in which power becomes mutually reinforcing.

Every system built upon extraordinary concentrations of wealth also produces extraordinary concentrations of impunity. In this case, consider the gross criminality of children who are victims of that impunity in the Palestinian genocide, Epstein’s pedophelia network, and the missile strike that targeted and killed 121 school children and 26 teachers in Iran.

Now consider BlackRock. It does not traffic in human beings. It traffics in wealth accumulation. It aggregates pensions, sovereign wealth, university endowments, insurance reserves, and private capital into a scale of asset management unprecedented in history. It acquires influence through portfolios rather than through blackmail. Yet both belong to the same political economy. One accumulated illicit access through the exploitation of children. The other accumulates lawful ownership in an increasingly disparate economy. They may not be morally equivalent, but the trail of oppression and dispossession share the same predatory conceit and concentration of power. While one reveals how privilege can shield criminal conduct, the other reveals how ownership can concentrate economic and political authority across vast economic and social spectrums. Together they remind us that capital does not merely accumulate wealth, it accumulates influence, access, and the capacity to shape institutions in ways that transgresses upon the threshold and virtue of good governance.

That is why the scandal did not end with Epstein’s conviction or death. The institutions surrounding him largely remained intact. The banks remained. The foundations and universities remained. The boards and the entire architecture of concentrated ownership remained. BlackRock may not have created Epstein, but the same society that normalized unprecedented concentrations of wealth also proved remarkably capable of absorbing unprecedented moral scandal without materially having to redistribute its power.

I, as a historicist, therefore asks a different question. Why did the removal of one criminal leave the structure of elite access essentially untouched? Why did the scandal produce biographies, documentaries, and prosecutions, yet leave ownership, finance, and institutional authority almost entirely unchanged? The answer is that capital survives by individualizing guilt while preserving the relations through which power is reproduced.

POPPER: I offer no defense of any government, present company included. An open society survives only if its investigatory bodies can follow—or at least have access to follow these cases to whatever office it leads, without regard to flag. Historically, access to public records remain limited, and the public record acknowledges this. However, the historian cannot simply invent the missing chapters anymore than he would the missing pages. Institutional silence is itself a historical fact, but if you are arguing that the historian must record that silence as part of the evidence, then on that point, Professor Marx, we are in agreement.

AMBASSADOR OF JAPAN: On the framing of containment against China — is this Assembly to understand that any alliance among advanced economies is now, by definition, illegitimate, regardless of the security concerns of the states involved?

POPPER: No, Ambassador, and I would resist any reading of tonight’s proceedings that concludes that. Alliances are not illegitimate by definition. They become suspect only when their declared purpose stops matching their documented conduct — when “defense” always seems to require new bases, new debt-financed weapons purchases, and new roles for the same three or four asset managers who underwrite them regardless of which side of an alliance boundary they sit on.

MARX: I will only note, Ambassador, that BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street between them hold significant stakes in nearly every major defense contractor on every side of every alliance discussed in this chamber tonight. Containment is a policy. Diversified portfolio exposure to both the contained and the containers is a business model.

Closing Statements on Divine Mandates

MARX: Madam President, delegates — I close where the historicist must close: with the balance sheet, not the communiqué. Whether the flag flying over the reconstruction contract is American, Russian, Chinese, or Israeli, the historicist’s question is unchanged — who owns what remains when the rubble is cleared. I will say one thing I did not expect to concede in this chamber, and I say it because Professor Popper has, however grudgingly, met me on the ground of evidence rather than assertion tonight: the religious turn now visible in several advanced economies — a settler theology married to state power in one region, a Christian nationalist theology married to state power in another — is not a side issue to political economy. The promulgation of religion has never been just an “opiate of the masses” as I discuss in my Critique of Hegel. The task of philosophy is to unmask human self-alienation in its secular form. “The critique of heaven is transformed in the critique of the earth, the critique of religion into the critique of law, the critique of theology into the critique of our political economy.”

Dressing conquest in scripture removes it from the realm of falsifiable claims altogether. A land grab defended by treaty can be negotiated. A land grab defended by divine mandate cannot. That is a material danger to every state in this Assembly, and it is not simply a theological curiosity.

POPPER: And I close, Madam President, by conceding what my method requires whenever the evidence demands it. A theology that claims land, war, or surveillance by divine sanction has placed itself beyond falsification, which is to say beyond politics. It is a transgression against the open society itself. Whether it appears as a messianic settlement project in one place or a dominionist vision of national destiny in another, both belong to the oldest and most dangerous form of historicism. We should never trust those who claim already to know how history ends, and therefore claim the right to force its ending. On thais point, Professor Marx and I, who have disagreed throughout this session and for much longer before it, find no disagreement at all. Nor, I would add, is a network state that governs through continuous algorithmic surveillance of dissent a politically neutral technology. The operational architecture employed by Israel, together with the financing, investment, and commercialization of comparable systems by private capital, including the asset managers discussed this evening, represents an extension of political power into new technological forms. Like every other concentration of power, it must remain open to criticism, public scrutiny, and democratic restraint, lest we become a closed society in digital form.

MARX: Yes, yes, on that we are agreed. A world of several currencies, several development banks, and several regional blocs negotiating as equals may not be utopia. But it is safer than a world in which one financial system allocates credit, one navy secures commerce, or one theology claims supremacy over humanity. Whenever economic, military, or moral authority becomes sufficiently concentrated to exercise a veto over the rest of the species, history ceases to be governed by reciprocity and becomes governed by domination. Concentrated power always mistakes itself for universal reason and that is not security. It is hegemony.

POPPER: And that, Professor Marx, is precisely why every concentration of power must remain open to criticism.

Closing of the Session

PRESIDENT BAERBOCK: The Assembly thanks both spirits for a session in which the historian and the historicist quarreled over methadone and arrived, in the end, at the same warning: that the gravest danger before this body is not disagreement over the past, but certainty about the future dressed as density — whether written by a market, a party, or a scribbler. The session is clothed.

Soon, the United States Senate will decide whether to advance the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, legislation that will shape the country's military, intelligence, and technological architecture. Public attention has focused largely on defense spending and geopolitical competition, yet the bill also deepens the institutional integration of artificial intelligence, surveillance technologies, and strategic cooperation with Israel in ways that deserve far greater public scrutiny. The most important question before the Senate is therefore not how these capabilities will be used by today's government, but what future governments, operating under different political and moral assumptions, will inherit once this infrastructure has been built.

The danger is not just the technology itself but the political morality that governs it. The Christian Nationalism emerging in the United States increasingly replaces constitutional restraint with a doctrine of absolution and impunity. Political power is measured less by adherence to law than by the willingness to defend a leader against accountability.

The effort to elevate Donald Trump into a providential or savior figure against the predation that he shares with Jeffrey Epstein, illustrates this shift, but the problem extends beyond any individual. If Trump disappears from the political stage, there remains a fraternity of leaders prepared to exploit the same moral framework. Once virtue is defined by loyalty rather than constitutional principle, dissent becomes betrayal, opponents become enemies, and extraordinary powers become morally justified. In that environment, investments in companies such as Palantir and the continued expansion of artificial intelligence for surveillance, predictive analytics, biometric identification, and algorithmic profiling acquire a significance far beyond military innovation.

Israeli military's use of AI-assisted systems such as Lavender and Where's Daddy? demonstrates how rapidly algorithmic technologies can transform the identification of a population into the prioritization of human targets. The warning is obvious. As the most militarized global arm, the United States could invariably reproduce those programs and adopt campaigns of terror against any population. When you have a political movement grounded in religious certainty, moral impunity, and apocalyptic thinking, constitutional protections are tossed asunder and once that threshold is crossed, the distance between surveillance, political repression, and genocide becomes measured less by technology than by the whims—including the financial incentives of those who control it.

The illegal Zionist state should be the greatest example of why religious literalists are the most morally bankrupt and ethically compromised groups to wield power over any security or financial architecture.

The Pentateuch, or the first five books of the Torah or Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), contains approximately 5,800 verses. Around 3% of those verses promote extermination or dispossession, while more than 5% express ethical universalist principles. The remaining 92% consists of genealogy, legal instruction, covenant narratives, and historical accounts that do not advocate extermination. That the State of Israel is led by these Zionist literalists who privilege the minority tradition of conquest over the broader ethical tradition should serve as a warning of where the United States is headed brandishing a sword of Christian Nationalism.

Zealotry is advancing an eschatological end-of-times agenda. As trillion dollar asset management companies like BlackRock makes substantial investments in expanding AI systems for surveillance, predictive analysis, and algorithmic profiling, it is reasonable to ask how long it will be before these technologies, together with autonomous robotics and advanced weapons systems, are directed against activists, dissidents, or marginalized communities within the United States or anywhere in the world for that matter, as comparable technologies have been used against Palestinians and have assassinated leaders in Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen.

This concern becomes more immediate in light of the United States-Israel Framework for Upgraded Technologies, Unified Research, and Enhanced Security (FUTURES) Act of 2026. Cosponsored by terrorist Senators Ted Budd and Kirsten Gillibrand and Representative Ronny Jackson, the legislation seeks to expand military and technological cooperation between the United States and Israel. Its principal mechanism, the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, promotes joint research, development, testing, and deployment of artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, cybersecurity, intelligence platforms, and other advanced defense technologies.

This initiative is not simply some standalone proposal like the War Powers Measure that the Senate rejected in 2026. The US-Israel alignment has become a core provision incorporated into the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2027. It first appeared as Section 224 of the House version of the bill, and later renumbered as Section 219 in a subsequent House draft, and now appears as Section 1217 in the Senate version. This legislative approach embeds long-term technological integration within the annual defense authorization process, making it part of the institutional framework governing future military cooperation.

The statutory language emphasizes defense cooperation and technological innovation. And while it does not expressly authorize the domestic use of these technologies against American citizens, it is embedded in the institutional architecture created when governments invest simultaneously in artificial intelligence, biometric identification, predictive analytics, autonomous systems, cloud infrastructure, and integrated intelligence networks.

How much more of a pea-brain will it take to understand that once these capabilities exist, the political threshold for expanding their application becomes far lower than the technical threshold for building them.

Historically, programs established during wartime or periods of national emergency have frequently expanded into domestic intelligence operations. The monitoring of labor organizers, civil rights leaders, anti-war activists, environmental organizations, journalists, and religious communities was rarely justified as political repression when it began. It was justified as national security, which is the capture phrase for all things diabolical.

There has been an abundance of information around China’s oil strategy of recent, some of it sensible, most of it unremarkably a part of the western led China-bashing package, and as a whole, the glut of analysis has all been quite confusing.

That confusion should not be surprising considering our political climate. China is responding to an international economic system experiencing the United State’s own existential instability. Washington has increasingly treated tariffs, sanctions, financial restrictions, and executive orders as instruments of economic statecraft. Markets move according to abrupt policy reversals that seem to often reflect Trump’s domestic political calculations rather than any kind of long-term economic planning. Global asset managers, commodity traders, and financial institutions operate within this volatility, all profiting from uncertainty while governments and populations absorb the disruptions.

Most commentary therefore, continually asks the wrong questions. It asks why China accumulated strategic reserves, reduced oil imports, settled transactions outside the dollar, and absorbed part of a global supply shock. As a historicist, I ask a different question. What institutional conditions made these policies necessary, and what long-term project do they serve?

The answer begins with the changing political economy that emerged after the 2008 financial crisis and became institutionalized through the 2014 Fortaleza Declaration. China’s oil policy is best understood as one component of a broader transition toward a more multipolar financial and trading system rather than as an isolated response to either WW3 or a temporary energy disruption.

Tipping my hat to BRICS+ is the million dollar question

In a nutshell, market observers are ​puzzled over how and why the world’s biggest oil importer achieved a 40% oil reduction while maintaining energy stability.

“It’s the million-dollar question,” said ‌Michal Meidan, head of China Energy Research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. “There’s a massive level of uncertainty because we don’t fully understand what has happened.”

China’s decision to reduce oil imports during the US-Israel war provoking disruption of global energy supplies has been explained through several familiar Western theories. Some analysts describe it as protection against higher prices. Others call it a soft-power, western hawks wax war over Taiwan, leverage against Washington, or an attempt to control the global price of oil.

As addressed quite succinctly in this Max Fisher video, price explanation does not withstand the evidence presented in these analysis. China continued drawing from its reserves after market prices fell below the estimated replacement cost of those reserves. Had price protection been the objective, China could have resumed purchases at a profit. It did not. The soft-power theory also fails because China did not publicize its action and restricted exports of refined fuels to neighboring countries.

The Taiwan explanation reflects the habits of Western strategic analysis. It begins with the assumption that China’s economic planning must ultimately serve an anticipated invasion. This reverses the material sequence of any kind of rational timeline. Also, China has literally spent decades reducing exposure to maritime blockades, coercion, international kangaroo court decisions at the PCA, dollar sanctions, supply interruptions, and external control over essential commodities. China has taken well conceived measures to protect itself during peace as much as during war. Also, since the financial crisis in 2008, China has also protected the wider global trading system from a crisis produced by the very same states that claimed to guarantee it.

The more important development was China’s use of reserves, domestic production, alternative transport, electrification, coal conversion, trade with US sanctioned producers, and renminbi settlement to absorb part of a global oil disruption.

Most importantly, the financial architecture built under BRICS and later BRICS+ created an alternative system that prepared against a hegemon of manipulations and conceits, exacerbated by the tempestuous rantings of a lunatic disrupting global markets in alignment with the threnody of a collapsing neoliberal international order, caused by a generation of bipartisan US policy that largely upheld Israel’s Palestinian genocide and Zionist programs; fraternized with the predatory network surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, whose documented relationships with political, financial, and cultural elites exposed systems of impunity and institutional failure; and the backdoor promotion of global asset management schemes creating conditions like ICE detentions, financial enclosure, and the privatization of public assets.

Against this backdrop, BRICS+, particularly China, Russia, and Iran, expanded the use of renminbi-denominated trade and financial settlement to bypass the dollar-clearing system through which Washington exercises its sanctions regime and much of its extraterritorial financial influence. By settling transactions outside the U.S. banking system, these states reduced their exposure to asset seizures, payment restrictions, and secondary sanctions while demonstrating that international trade could continue without relying exclusively upon this predatory system.

The renminbi’s growing role rests not only on political willingness but also on economic reality. It is accepted because it can be used to purchase goods from the world’s largest manufacturing economy, making it a practical settlement currency for countries seeking to diversify trade while reducing dependence upon an imploding Western financial infrastructure.

What this demonstrates is that international trade can continue when predatory economic hitmen no longer controls the currency, banking, shipping routes, insurance contracts, and the political and moral leadership required to lead a global economy.

That is the material significance of China’s action, and it belongs to the institutional history of BRICS.

Centuries before the 15th century when Luca Pacioli wrote the mathematical books on accounting and double-entry bookkeeping, a caravan was pulling into a way-station somewhere between Baghdad and Samarkand, or Basra and Guangzhou. By the ninth century, during the third Islamic Caliphate, Ibn Khordadbeh had already mapped this world in his Book of Roads and Kingdoms: the caravanserais and their stages, the tolls, the distances, routes running from Mesopotamia through Persia and Central Asia to China, Korea, and beyond. This was not a periphery feeding some later European center. It was the center — a continuous, cross-continental infrastructure of trust, credit, and account that had already run for centuries through the Islamic Mediterranean and the Near East before double-entry bookkeeping was ever written down as a European innovation.

Caravan trade and the Islamic Mediterranean credit world.

Three books: First, Ibn Khordadbeh's Kitab al-Masalik wa'l-Mamalik (Book of Roads and Kingdoms), compiled for the Abbasid postal administration in two editions (c. 846 and c. 885 CE), catalogued caravan routes, way-stations, tolls, and distances across the Caliphate and onward toward China, Korea, and Japan. Another, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders, documents recovered from the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat and studied over decades by S. D. Goitein, preserves ordinary 10th-to-13th-century merchant correspondence: familial partnerships, deferred-payment credit, and business ties routinely crossing Jewish, Muslim, and Christian lines. And another that focused on contracts—or the mandatory obligations— that financed early trade expeditions in Italy is widely considered to derive from the Islamic qirad/mudaraba partnership, documented in the 8th and 9th century Abbasid world. Alexandria was the contact point between the Islamic Mediterranean trade world and Italian merchants, suggesting that the double-entry recording technique had Islamic accounting precursors long before Luca Pacioli's Summa de Arithmetica, which also includes algebra, another major contribution of Islamic scholarship later absorbed into the European canon.

From a historicist’s perspective, the caravanserai had long before done the work later credited to the ledger, and it did something a ledger by itself cannot: it accounted for the obligation, making it an early cross cultural practice across the map. The caravanserai sat at a threshold — the point where one community’s kinship and trade obligations ended and a stranger’s began — and that is also, not incidentally, what a totem does. As Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marcel Mauss demonstrated, a totem was never a wall separating a people from the world. Clan totemism organized exogamy, requiring marriage, alliance, and exchange beyond one's own group. Totems made strangers recognizable and obligation intelligible across difference. Marshall Sahlins later showed that kinship itself constituted an economic order grounded in reciprocity, while Karl Polanyi demonstrated that exchange remained embedded within social institutions even before markets claimed its autonomy. The caravanserai was not a totem, but it performed an analogous institutional function transforming strangers into partners by embedding exchange within recognizable social obligations.

It is this inheritance of credit-debit “bookkeeping” that we should seek to recover by tracing its history one layer further back. The political economy of the last five centuries did not emerge from nothing. Colonialism, followed by capitalism, inherited institutions that had long organized trust, obligation, exchange, and repair across societies. The caravanserai, the gift, the clan, and the commons all performed forms of accounting before accounting became a ledger.

The last five hundred years therefore should not be understood as the foundation of the modern world. They mark a rupture within a much longer history. Peoples accumulated obligations across generations, maintained reciprocal relationships with one another and along with the environments that sustained them, transmitted protocol and obligations as a transactional inheritance.

Colonialism and later capitalism tried to erase that history. It disembodied it by force, and then wrote the record so that the cut would read as a beginning. The privatized, financialized regime running the world today does not rest on a superior accounting technique. It rests on militaries, on genocide, on legal constructs, and on the seizure of land and resources. What might be considered an honest account is often a rupture of our humanity and calling it anything gentler is a conceit, and not even an innocent one.

This is why the myriad of global crisis cannot be understood simply as a failure of markets or finance. It is the consequence of an accounting system that records ownership while excluding the conditions under which ownership was acquired. Land and resources seized through legal conquest appears as legitimate property. Wealth accumulated through compliance regimes appears as capital. Ecological destruction appears as growth. The books balance because history has already been excluded from the account. Our materialist accounting should begin where the conventional ledger ends, by restoring the obligations that conquest erased, while measuring the rupture that modern political economy continues to treat as its foundation.

In a system where debits equal credits, double-entry’s reputation over balance is only a claim about the ledger’s internal arithmetic. It has never been a claim about the world. How do we determine whether the transaction entered is a perfectly balanced form of exchange or whether it is dubious revenue debited to a spurious receivable?

From Publication to Possession

The argument over who invented double-entry bookkeeping is really an argument over who gets to claim civilization itself. The bookkeeping method may never be traced through every stage of its passage from the Islamic world into Renaissance Italy. The routes of transmission are already known. For centuries, merchants, scholars, translators, and Franciscan missionaries carried books, maps, instruments, technologies, and commercial practices between China, the Islamic world, Africa, and Europe. The Renaissance did not emerge from an isolated European genius. It was assembled from a civilizational inheritance that Europe entered late, absorbed, renamed, and claimed as its own.

This was not an innocent misunderstanding. It established the intellectual method of colonialism. The same civilization that converted borrowed knowledge into proof of its own superiority soon converted inhabited lands into available territory. The Papal Bulls and Doctine of Discovery of the fifteenth century authorized Christian rulers to invade, seize, enslave, and dispossess peoples outside Christendom. Entire continents were entered into European law as objects of possession. Peoples with their own governments, economies, philosophies, and legal orders were reduced to populations awaiting assimilation, conversion, discipline, labor, or elimination. Europe appropriated knowledge, territory, and history, then returned them to the world under its own brand of civilization.

Western philosophy later performed the same operation. The rights of man, the rule of law, constitutional government, political legitimacy, and good governance were presented as European enlightenment. This history cannot survive comparison with the civilizations Europe and later the U.S. displaced. Confucius treated government as a moral obligation grounded in social order and public welfare. Mencius argued that rulers lost legitimacy when they failed the people. Kautilya developed a systematic account of taxation, administration, diplomacy, intelligence, war, and statecraft centuries before Machiavelli. Heraclitus conceived of the logos as an underlying order governing both nature and human society, a tradition later developed by Plato and Aristotle. None of these traditions emerged in isolation. They formed part of a wider Afro-Eurasian conversation about justice, authority, and the obligations of rulers that long predated Europe's claim to philosophical universality.

Western hubris embraced the philosophy and law that legitimized hegemonic power. The power to define civilization became the power to rank humanity against it ability to govern, dispossess, enslave, and devalue.

Colonialism was built with armies, ships, churches, banks, and trading companies. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, industrial capitalism, neoliberalism, and the emerging doctrine of the Network State belong to this same succession. Each stage reorganized the instruments of enclosure. Each claimed a higher form of reason, widening the jurisdiction of private power.

The modern financial order treats control over the accounting record as proof of ownership and its consistency as a proof of truth. The colonial ledger is where stolen land appears as property, coerced labor appears as value, destroyed societies appear as underdevelopment, and accumulated violence appears as wealth. The fraud does not disappear because the books balance. The balanced books are part of the fraud.

To be clear, a balanced ledger has never guaranteed an honest one. The difference has always depended on institutions with the authority to verify, define, and enforce what the ledger claims to represent. Without independent auditors, effective regulators, and executives constrained by law rather than incentive, accounting becomes little more than internally consistent fiction.

Enron’s books balanced the entire time. Enron concealed debt and inflated earnings through special-purpose entities such as JEDI, Chewco, Whitewing, and LJM that remained formally off its balance sheet while relying on Enron’s own stock. WorldCom, too, simply reclassified $3.8 billion in ordinary operating expenses as capital expenditures, spreading costs across future years instead of recognizing them immediately. Wells Fargo, Countrywide, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Volkswagen, General Electric, Valeant Pharmaceuticals, Steinhoff International, Purdue Pharma, and many others demonstrate that these failures are neither isolated nor confined to one industry. Corporate malfeasance is often described as exceptional, but the historical record suggests otherwise. Fraud may violate accounting rules, but the repeated concentration of misconduct across sectors raises a different question: whether the institutions responsible for verification have become subordinate to the institutions they are meant to oversee.

Structurally, this accounting fraud begins in the layer above the notation: in who was permitted to define “revenue” and “capital expense,” who signed off on the special-purpose entity, who chose not to look. The ledger is only as honest as the enforcement standing behind it — which is why the actual regulatory response to both cases wasn’t a new accounting identity, but Sarbanes-Oxley: new rules about who has to attest to the books, personally, under legal liability.

Marcel Mauss saw a version of this a century ago, studying gift economies that had no ledgers at all. In The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, economic obligation runs on three verbs — to give, to receive, and to reciprocate. What enforces the debt isn’t a court or a balanced book but the community’s power to withhold future standing from whoever refuses to repay. The totem, the clan mark, the name attached to a gift, functions the way a signature functions on a Western contract: it identifies who owes whom, and it only carries force because a community exists that will act on it. When you take away the community’s willingness to exclude, the totem simply becomes an artifact. When you take away the auditor’s willingness to qualify an opinion, the balance sheet is just a math exercise.

Anthropology is a side note for now, because we’re living in a world that has collectively built something Mauss never had to reckon with: the data economy. Carbon markets, ESG disclosures, land-use accounting, and data provenance all depend upon someone defining the baseline, measuring the obligation, and verifying the account. These functions no longer operate through kinship networks or reciprocal exchange. They operate through registries, auditors, rating agencies, certification bodies, and digital infrastructures.

The underlying question, however, has not changed. Mauss asked how obligations become socially enforceable. Today’s data economy asks who has the authority to define those obligations, verify their fulfillment, and require others to recognize the result. As economies have become more abstract, they have not really escaped reciprocity but, rather, institutionalized it through registries, auditors, certification bodies, and digital platforms.

A decolonial accounting matrix

In a decolonial accounting matrix, we begin with the baseline, because everything downstream depends on it, and the baseline is never neutral. In a carbon-offset scheme, in an ESG framework, in any system that measures a departure from some “natural” starting point, someone has to fix what that starting point is — and whoever fixes it has already made the entire subsequent accounting come out in their favor or against it. Call it x₀. The dominant framework treats x₀ as a technical measurement problem: pick a year, pick a satellite, pick a methodology. But what if a baseline is closer to a covenant than a measurement. It’s a community’s statement of what right relationship with a place, a resource, or an inheritance actually looks like — not a number extracted from the land, but an obligation the land and its people hold toward each other. Treat x₀ as covenant and the question “who sets the baseline” stops being a technical dispute among consultants and becomes the same question Mauss was asking about the totem: who has the standing to define the account, and is that standing recognized by the people the account is about?

The offset — xᵢ — is where the restorative obligation actually gets discharged, or doesn’t. In the dominant framework, an offset is a transaction: pay here, subtract there, net to zero, move on. But if the baseline is a covenant, the offset can’t be a transaction — it has to be a weave, an actual restoration of the relationship the baseline described, made by someone with a real obligation to the specific harm being offset. This is the difference between a corporation buying credits from a forest it will never see and a community repairing a relationship to land it actually holds. Nothing in the arithmetic distinguishes these two cases. They can produce an identical, balanced ledger entry. What distinguishes them is entirely outside the notation: whether the party discharging the offset is answerable to the party who set the baseline, or merely to an intermediary who profits from both sides of the trade.

Once again, at the risk of redundancy, this is the same fracture point that uncovered the double-entry scam at Enron. Every offset scheme has an intermediary — a verifier, a registry, a ratings agency, a bank structuring the trade — and that intermediary’s incentives determine whether the whole system is a restorative account or a laundering mechanism. Ask the same four questions of a carbon registry that you’d ask of an auditor: What is the baseline, and who set it? What is being measured, and with whose instruments? What is owed, and to whom? Who sits in the middle, and what do they gain from the deal closing?

An intermediary paid by the party seeking the offset, verifying a baseline that party also had a hand in setting, is structurally the same conflict of interest as an auditor paid by the company it audits. The instruments are new. The failure mode is the oldest one in accounting. And underneath both sits the same economic fact: the value in data markets was never the data. It's the compliance fee — subscription, transaction, verification charge, credit or allowance, whatever mechanism gets imposed — benefitting the intermediary sitting inside the conflict.

So what would it actually take to close that gap — not rhetorically, but as an operating system? Four questions, and none of them are answered by better math. Who pays: does financing flow from the party with the obligation, or does it flow from whoever benefits from the account looking clean? Who owns: does the data describing the baseline and the offset belong to the community it describes, or to whoever aggregated it? Who verifies: is verification held by a party accountable to the people the baseline covenant was made with, or by a party accountable to the intermediary’s balance sheet? And who is recognized: when a community produces its own account of what was taken and what has been restored, does any jurisdiction beyond that community have to honor it?

That last question is the one the current architecture has no real answer for, which is exactly why it matters. A community can keep a perfect account of dispossession and restoration — River, mountain, watershed, harvest, generation — and if no external jurisdiction is obligated to recognize that account as legitimate, it functions as memory, not as enforceable claim. The totems differ by place: clan, nation, river, mountain, ocean, village. But the underlying ledger — what was taken, and what is owed back — is one continuous account. And while I addressed this in a previous post on embodied time, right now it is held mostly in memory and oral record because the formal architecture of verification and recognition was built to run through everyone except the account-holder.

Closing that gap is an institutional problem. It needs financing that doesn't originate from the party being audited, technical infrastructure for measurement and verification that a community can operate rather than simply supply data to, and — the missing piece — jurisdictional recognition: some architecture, however imperfect, that treats a community-generated account of baseline and offset as legally recognizable. Without that third leg, the first two just relocate the old conflict of interest into compliance bureaucracy. A good example is New Zealand's 2017 Te Awa Tupua Act, settling a Treaty of Waitangi claim Whanganui iwi first filed in 1873, that declared the Whanganui River "an indivisible and living whole" holding all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person, able to sue and be sued, exercised in practice by two guardians, one appointed by the Crown and one by the iwi. The river became a plaintiff. That is not a metaphor for jurisdictional recognition. It is the thing itself.

The new architecture is forming

The propositions across the Decolonize Accounting substack is not so hypothetical anymore, and none of it requires imagining a system from scratch. Roughly, over the last decade, a working alternative architecture has been assembling itself alongside — not yet in place of — the postwar order. The New Development Bank (NDB), founded by BRICS in 2014, now counts eleven members after admitting Bangladesh, the UAE, Egypt, Algeria, Colombia, and Uzbekistan. The Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), launched by the People’s Bank of China in 2015 to clear renminbi-denominated trade outside the dollar system, connecting roughly 1,600 direct and indirect participants across more than 180 countries. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), has grown to 111 members spanning every populated continent — including France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and Australia, longtime pillars of the very order it’s sometimes described as challenging. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the largest trade bloc on earth by population, connecting ASEAN to China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand in force since 2022. And the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), a $100 billion mutual currency-swap facility BRICS states set up in 2015 as insurance against the kind of balance-of-payments pressure the IMF has historically attached conditions to.

The BRICS-led architecture does not reject Bretton Woods or double-entry accounting outright. It inherits institutions built within the same colonial order while attempting to recover forms of multilateralism that existed before the postwar system became organized around Cold War exclusion. Roosevelt’s conception of Bretton Woods envisioned a universal framework for reconstruction and development in which the Soviet Union was anticipated to participate. That possibility disappeared as the Cold War hardened under the Marshall Plan and the institutions of Bretton Woods increasingly became aligned with the strategic and financial priorities of the United States and its allies.

The institutional architecture now emerging around BRICS bears greater resemblance to that earlier multilateral vision than to the neoliberal order that followed. It is organized around multiple financial centers, multiple reserve currencies, multiple lending institutions, and multiple development pathways. Participation does not depend upon a single reserve currency or a single financial center authorizing international exchange.

The neoliberal order consolidated after 1989, when the Washington Consensus became the dominant framework for economic governance following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Liberalization, privatization, and fiscal restructuring became the conditions attached to development finance, while sanctions, financial restrictions, and currency pressure increasingly functioned as instruments of international policy. That order was historically contingent. It was not the inevitable or natural form of world trade.

Additionally, the piece of new governance missing from these new institutions is the one this Substack has been circling from the start: Neither NDB, nor CIPS, nor AIIB, nor RCEP, nor the CRA answers who verifies a community’s own account of what it has lost and what is owed back, or who is bound to recognize that account once it’s made. That is what the newly formed World Data Organization (WDO) proposes. BRICS is where we will find a jurisdictional layer for data sovereignty and community-generated accounts sitting alongside the financing, settlements, trade terms, and the insurance, rather than beneath any of them.

What would actually change the shape of the exchange is a rhizomatic accounting that is horizontal, multi-rooted, answerable to the alterity of every community and every intersecting claim inside it, rather than to a single capital, a single currency, or a single ledger that gets to call itself the account of record. That is not a rejection of institutions. It is what an institution finally answerable to the people and the environment accounts for would have to look like.

There is yet another wave of propaganda coming from western media lapdogs like Time.com’s China Is Already Trying to Control Who the Next Dalai Lama Will Be, and Foreign Policy’s latest analysis: A New Law Heralds China’s Fraught Ethnic Future. Relying on half-truths and quarter-truths, here remains another example of the West’s attempt to contain and curtail China’s rights-based program of environmental and economic policies that are shaping both the future of South-South cooperation and “discourse power”.

Here’s the argument as Chinese state media and NPC officials themselves make it, mostly drawn from Global Times’ coverage of the June 24 State Council press conference and the law’s own text/preamble (via NPC Observer, which translates directly from Xinhua and the statute): The law’s preamble states that China’s 56 ethnic groups form “a community of common destiny bound by intertwined bloodlines, common beliefs, cultural similarities, economic interdependence, and close emotional ties,” and that “ethnic unity is the lifeline of all Chinese people.” Li Hongzhong, NPC Standing Committee vice chairman, described its purpose as “fostering a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation” into the legal system so ethnic governance operates through law rather than ad hoc policy. Peking University’s Ma Rong called it “a basic law for implementing constitutional provisions, handling ethnic affairs, and conducting ethnic work” — in other words, framed as a legal-institutional upgrade, rather than a new departure from ethnic or indigenous rights.

The economic-legitimacy argument: Officials lean heavily on development statistics rather than rights language. Bayanqolu, chairman of the NPC’s ethnic affairs committee, cited that all 420 formerly poverty-stricken counties in ethnic minority areas and 31.21 million people across five autonomous regions plus parts of Guizhou, Yunnan and Qinghai have been lifted out of poverty. His rhetorical challenge to critics: “What other country or political party has achieved such results?” The argument is that poverty alleviation and infrastructure investment are the substance of “ethnic equality,” and that Western coverage ignores this in favor of politicized narratives.

The direct rebuttal of “assimilation” charges: officials explicitly reject the Western framing and offer specific counter-claims:

On Xinjiang, Chen Ruifeng (National Ethnic Affairs Commission director) called forced labor and forced relocation claims “extremely absurd,” and Global Times ran interviews with a Uyghur taxi driver and a multi-ethnic beef company’s hiring manager to support the claim that Uyghurs are voluntarily employed and thriving. On Tibet (Xizang), officials defended boarding schools as a practical response to sparse population and long travel distances, not cultural erasure — citing a Lhasa Middle School student whose commute would be eight hours by car, and a Tibetan-language teacher noting 70% of second-year classes still offer Tibetan-language instruction. This was pitched as a direct rebuttal to a BBC report alleging children are “isolated and brutally forced to forget their own language and culture.”

On the “cultural assimilation” charge more broadly, Chinese scholars quoted by Global Times (e.g., Wang Yanzhong of CASS) argue that Western critics are applying “Western-style ethnic nationalism and an absolutist view of minority rights” — i.e., that the accusation itself reflects a foreign conceptual framework (multiculturalism premised on group difference) being imposed on a state that has organized ethnic relations differently for millennia, and that this amounts to using ethnic affairs “as a containment tool in the international discourse arena.”

On the extraterritorial jurisdiction clause (Article 63) that alarmed Taiwan and diaspora groups, Beijing’s position — per Vice Justice Minister Hu Weilie — is that it’s “legitimate, lawful, necessary, and feasible,” consistent with international practice for prosecuting separatism abroad, and that Western media “misinterpreted” its scope; it targets “illegal acts,” not normal exchange, academic work, or trade.

Where this diverges from the FP-style framing: the NPC’s own legislative history (via NPC Observer, a neutral specialist tracker, not Western opinion media) does confirm the assimilationist genealogy — the law explicitly operationalizes Xi’s “Twelve Musts” doctrine and the “Four Pairs of Relationships,” including language describing Han-centric Zhonghua culture as the “trunk” and minority cultures as subordinate “branches and leaves,” a formulation from Xi’s own 2021 speech. So the Chinese state’s own doctrinal texts do contain the hierarchical framing that Western commentators call assimilationist; Beijing’s rebuttal isn’t that this framing doesn’t exist, but that “unity”/”integration” is being mischaracterized as forced erasure, and that material outcomes (poverty reduction, infrastructure, language-preservation gestures like the Tibetan curriculum quota) prove benign intent.

Beijing frames Western coverage of Xinjiang and Tibet not as reporting but as a front in what it calls a “discourse power” (话语权) struggle — the idea that the U.S. and its allies, unable to compete with China economically, wage an “public opinion war” to contain its rise by weaponizing human rights language. Global Times has run pieces arguing Western media’s “enthusiasm” for Uyghur rights is really “a way to demonize China” as a “geopolitical rival,” and Chinese diplomatic statements have characterized Xinjiang reporting as originating from “Cold War mentality” actors — intelligence agencies, “anti-China scholars,” and diaspora advocacy groups — whose claims are then “spread by mainstream Western media in a coordinated manner.” Beijing’s own term for camp facilities, “vocational education and training centers,” is central to this counter-narrative: the argument isn’t that the facilities didn’t exist, but that Western sources mischaracterized their function and scale.

This connects to a broader argument China makes about human rights concepts themselves. Officials — including Xi directly — have promoted a “path of human rights development with Chinese characteristics” that prioritizes the “right to subsistence and development” over the civil-and-political-rights framework the West emphasizes, arguing “there is no one-size-fits-all model” for human rights (a formulation from former FM Qin Gang). Framed this way, poverty alleviation statistics aren’t just PR, they’re offered as the primary evidence of rights fulfillment, positioned as superior to a Western framework Beijing calls selective and hypocritical given its own record (colonialism, indigenous policy, current treatment of migrants and minorities).

The South-South and BRI angle is where Beijing ties this together: Chinese state media and officials present the country’s development model — infrastructure investment, sovereignty-first noninterference, no political conditionality attached to aid — as an alternative for the Global South to Western-style development assistance, which typically comes bundled with governance and rights conditions. Xi’s “community with a shared future for mankind” principles embedded in his Global Governance Initiative (GGI) extends this to ethnic policy: domestic “unity and progress” is presented as a template validating the same sovereignty-over-conditionality logic Beijing offers abroad, and Western criticism of that domestic policy is simply an attempt to discredit China before it can reduce the privatization and financialization model of neoliberal corporate greed as the withering relic of empire.

The Slow Pan

Although the image above and the video trailer does not even come close to expressing the detailed nuance of Julie Mehretu’s painting, Congress, Trevor Tweeten’s video, Promises: Through Congress, was itself a remarkable map of how to read this work. It opened on a single seemingly miniscule point that is unrenderable in the above image. The camera holds there, then begins to move outward, and as it slowly widens the canvas in time with the Pharoah Sanders/Sam Shepard compostion, revealing itself not as one image but as an accumulation, migration, a systemic ebb and flow of indentured servitude, architectural plans layered under city grids, flight paths crossing gathered crowds, marks that read as violence in one register and liberation in another without ever resolving into a picture of either. Julie Mehretu’s Congress (2003) was made in the aftermath of September 11, and the painting treats a nation’s history of construction, erasure, and assembly as something still active rather than sealed into the past. Nothing in it is finished. The blueprint and the crowd occupy the same canvas, as if the chaos was a planned system. Watching the video’s achingly slow pan across that surface, the meaning arrives before it becomes representational. The viewer registers loss and assembly, theft and gathering, before any single mark can be named as human or the other as a lynching.

This is close to what a decolonial index is supposed to do. Not to picture the reef, the mataqali, the drought, the migration, or the labor, but to record what has been done to the watershed, the mangroves, or the lo'i, the māla, our cultivated gardens. While Mehretu's mark-making seems to inherit the gestural vocabulary of the Abstract Expressionists like Pollock and de Kooning, her process departs from theirs at the point of construction. She builds from drafted architectural plans, stencils, and layered vellum before any gestural mark goes down, a cartographic and structural discipline laid underneath the gesture rather than replacing it. The result is an obsessively rendered, detailed accounting of history, one that records extractive violence and the sheer will of liberation and recovery underneath it. A carbon offset or a natural capital estimate erases social and environmental value at the moment of compression. The numbers arrive clean. They should not. The math and the market should value the labor. They should not value the privatization or securitization of profits that flow beyond our shores. Mehretu's canvas does not arrive clean, and that is the point. The layering stays visible even at a glance, even from the widest distance the slow pan reaches. This essay treats Congress as a working model for what an index of embodied time would have to do if it were built to carry memory rather than discard it.

Two Kinds of Time

Clock time measures duration as a sequence of identical, interchangeable units. A second in the era of colonialism, erasure, and ecocide equals a second in 2026. This equivalence is the precondition for every modern accounting system, from wage labor to carbon credits to GDP. Embodied time works differently. It is the time of the body as it heals, grieves, gestates, labors, and remembers. A wound takes the time it takes. A season of drought does not end when a calendar says ninety days have passed.

Edmund Husserl described internal time-consciousness as a structure of retention and protention, a past-present-future construct where every “now” carries the trace of what came before and leans toward what has not yet arrived. “The horizon is filled with recollected events which are always new” (77). Henri Bergson called this durée or pure duration, unlike the spatialized time of clocks which chops history into discrete and identical units, how we measure love and trauma, for example, and the entire presence of our being, time is a continuous heterogeneous flow. “While showing how they have been misled, we shall see that time, conceived under the form of an unbounded and homogeneous medium, is nothing but the ghost of space haunting the reflective consciousness” (99).

In his analysis of “phantom-limbs,” Merleau-Ponty located the past-present-future construct in the body itself, arguing that the body is not an object moving through time but the medium through which time is lived, which he concludes is a form of repression (82).

Alia Al-Saji reads these philosophers together and finds the limit inside phenomenology itself. In “The Temporality of Life: Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and the Immemorial Past,” she shows that the time of the Phenomenology of Perception remains organized around the field of presence, so the past can appear only as a former present, ordered behind the now and retrievable in principle (182). Merleau-Ponty’s later revision required Bergson’s immemorial past, a past that was never present and cannot be summoned back as a data point. In “Too Late: Racialized Time and the Closure of the Past,” Al-Saji carries the analysis into the colonial situation with colonization operating on time itself, repressing the past of the colonized and rewriting it into a closed form (6). This closed past is instituted and inhabited, maintained by ongoing process rather than by memory alone (7).

The instrument of that maintenance is the accounting framework.

Frantz Fanon locates this administration of time at the scale of the worker and the nation. The colonized worker’s day belongs to the plantation schedule. The colonized nation’s development timeline belongs to the lending institution. “The bourgeoisie discovers its historical mission as intermediary…its vocation is not to transform the nation but prosaically serve as a conveyor belt for capitalism, forced to camouflage itself behind the mask of neocolonialism” (Fanon 100). This is the accountant as bean counter’s notion of time, the pathological violence of the administration.

Wrapping the philosophy of time should be Heidegger’s Being and Time, which radicalizes Husserl’s structure of retention and protention, leading to Heidegger’s claim that temporality is not first a structure of consciousness but the structure of Dasein’s existence itself, stretched between having-been, the present, and the futural, unified by care and oriented toward its own finitude. Heidegger was Husserl’s student, and he edited Husserl’s lectures on the phenomenology of internal time-consciousness for their 1928 publication. Being and Time stands as the fullest early twentieth-century statement of what embodied time is set against: not simply the clock, but the mode of existence that treats the clock’s time as the only time there is.

But we should remember that the Western philosophic tradition is enfolded in the colonial logic of the so-called age of Enlightenment, as European discovery begat the era of dispossession and genocide. Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, as well as Indigenous societies all recognized the hegemony of time that Western timekeepers promoted.

‘Okusitino Māhina’s account of tā-vā treats time and space as inseparable and relational, generated through social relation rather than imposed prior to it. Time, on this account, is already a social product before it becomes a variable. Mehretu’s canvas works the same way. The architectural plan and the crowd are not placed on a neutral timeline that precedes them. They generate the space of the painting through their layered relation to one another, the way tā and vā generate each other rather than sitting on either side of a fixed grid.

The Index as a Compression Machine

Rooted in a sociology of quatifications, there is a core triad of how modern data systems translate qualitative realities into actionable, scalable metrics. Discretization, Commensuration, and Aggregation are the invisible architecture behind how societies measures and manages everything. An index converts a heterogeneous field of qualities into a single ordered scale through three operations. Discretization cuts continuous experience into countable units. Commensuration makes unlike things comparable under a shared unit. Aggregation compresses many measurements into one number.

Discretization is the act of slicing continuous, flowing reality into distinct, countable, or categorical buckets. For example, converting a continuous flow of time into discrete hours, or grouping countries into categories like Advanced, Emerging, Developing, or Least Developing Economies based on Western constructs of GDP and the Debt/Aid matrix.

Commensuration is the process of translating fundamentally different, incomparable qualities into a single metric using a shared standard of value. For example, the SEEA’s ecosystem accounting framework converts pollination, flood protection, carbon sequestration, and cultural value into a common monetary unit through the exchange value concept, so a mangrove’s storm buffering and a factory’s output can sit on the same balance sheet.

Aggregation is the compression of many individual measurements into a single summary figure, discarding the internal variation of the parts that composed it. For example, a carbon credit collapses a specific hectare’s species composition, community labor, and multi-decade sequestration curve into one fungible unit, one metric ton of CO2 equivalent, that trades identically to a credit generated an ocean away under an entirely different ecology and entirely different relations of land tenure.

Mehretu’s painting performs a version of all three. Distinct historical moments are discretized into individual marks. Architecture, flight, and crowd are commensurated onto the same surface. The whole is aggregated into a single canvas a viewer takes in from one vantage point. The difference between this and a conventional index is what survives the compression. In Congress, the layers remain legible as layers. A trained eye can still trace the blueprint under the crowd. In a natural capital estimate or a carbon offset, the number that reaches the funder carries no visible trace of the durations it was built from. The compression is total. The seam is sealed rather than left open.

This is the actual site of political difference between a hegemonic index and a decolonial one.

Where Intemerate Accounting Sits Inside This Problem

Intemerate Accounting does not escape the index. It builds one. The Q equalization quotient, the resilience score, the micro-offset questionnaire perform discretization, commensuration, and aggregation on embodied and ecological process, the same operations Mehretu performs on architectural and political history. What can differ is whether the layering stays visible, the way it does in Congress, or whether it seals over into a clean number, the way it does in a World Bank estimate.

The “mat and weave” variables developed for the PCU curriculum try to hold this open. The mat, or x₀ names a fixed baseline. xᵢ names the individual strand, the particular contribution of a person or a practice, which keeps its own texture even after it is counted into the weave. The notation marks the seam rather than closing it, the way Mehretu’s marks stay legible as layered history rather than dissolving into a single tone.

Free, Prior, and Informed Consent is the mechanism that keeps the seam reopenable after the fact. A community’s standing right to say the baseline was wrong, the interval too short, the aggregation a form of erasure, is what separates an index built to be reopened from a compliance record that treats consent as a signature collected once and filed away. FPIC is what allows an index to function as a record of theft and restoration rather than as a laundering of both into a single reassuring number.

Duration as a Variable Rather Than a Residue

Most accounting frameworks treat time as the axis along which measurement occurs rather than as a quantity to be measured in its own right. A carbon offset is dated, but the date is metadata, not data, meaning that the interval of time recorded alongside the credit functions only as a timestamp for verification and trading purposes. It locates the transaction in a registry rather than value calculation itself. A ton of carbon sequestered over eighteen months and a ton sequestered over eighteen years register as the identical unit at the identical price, because the standard being priced is the ton, not the duration it took to produce it.

Intemerate Accounting treats duration itself as a resilience variable. How long did restoration take, relative to the community’s own account of what a reasonable restoration period looks like for that reef or that watershed. This reframes delay, which conventional accounting treats as inefficiency, as information about the specific temporality of the system being measured, the way a physician reads the pace of a wound’s healing rather than measuring it against a universal clock.

The journaling exercise built into the micro-offset methodology produces this record directly. Self-assessment over repeated intervals gives a person’s own account of their duration, in their own words, before it is translated into a number. Under a properly built data sovereignty regime, the record stays with the person rather than becoming the property of whoever built the index, the way the layers in Mehretu’s canvas remain the property of the history that produced them even after they are compressed onto one surface.

The Unresolved Problem

Diagnosing the compression does not remove it. Any index legible to a funder, a government agency, or a multilateral data governance apparatus will have to speak in discretized, commensurable, aggregated units, because that is the only language those institutions currently read. Standards built for comparability across firms and states get repurposed as the entry gate for recognition of ecological and social value, and the gate imposes the shape of the first purpose on everything that passes through it.

The honest position is not that Intemerate Accounting has solved the relationship between embodied time and the index. It is that the framework, like Mehretu’s slow pan across Congress, tries to keep the mechanism of compression visible and reversible rather than hidden and final, and that it locates the authority to reopen a closed number with the community that generated it rather than with the institution that received it. Whether that authority holds in practice depends on whether FPIC is enforced as a standing veto or degrades, as it usually does, into a signature collected once at the start of a project. A decolonial index succeeds to the degree that it still reads, at any distance the viewer stands from it, as a record of theft and restoration rather than as a settlement that closes the account.

Works Referenced

Al-Saji, Alia. "The Temporality of Life: Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and the Immemorial Past." The Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 45, no. 2, 2007, pp. 177–206.

Al-Saji, Alia. "Too Late: Racialized Time and the Closure of the Past." Insights, vol. 6, no. 5, Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, 2013, pp. 1–13.

Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by F.L. Pogson, George Allen and Unwin, 1910.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2004.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Harper & Row, 1962.

Husserl, Edmund. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917). Translated by James S. Churchill, Indiana University Press, 1964.

Māhina, ‘Okusitino. “Tā, Vā, and Moana: Temporality, Spatiality, and Indigeneity.” Pacific Studies, vol. 33, no. 2/3, 2010.

Mehretu, Julie. Congress. 2003, ink and acrylic on canvas, The Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith, Routledge, 1962.

Promises: Through Congress. Directed by Trevor Tweeten, featuring music by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra, The Broad and Whitney Museum of American Art, 2021.

According to an industry ESG website, the World Bank has just announced that it will retire its 45% climate finance target, the benchmark committing nearly half its financing portfolio to projects with climate co-benefits. The decision followed sustained pressure from the Trump administration, whose Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent argued in April that the target “breeds inefficiency, distorts economic decision making, and moves the Bank away from its core mission” of poverty reduction and economic growth. The Bank framed the move as a governance refinement, stating that its climate work “will remain firmly client driven,” suggesting that the clients referred to are the institutional investors and lenders like BlackRock, Vanguard, and supranational bondholders rather than the sovereign governments and principal constituencies that they fund.

The World Bank’s Climate Change Action Plans were explicitly framed as operationalizing commitments under the Paris Agreement, whose Article 9 requires developed country parties to mobilize climate finance for developing nations. The OECD reported in May 2026 that developed countries collectively mobilized $136.7 billion in climate finance for developing countries in 2024, the third consecutive year the $100 billion benchmark had been exceeded. The Rio agreements, the UNFCCC in 1992 and the Convention on Biological Diversity, established the legal architecture within which the Bank’s environmental financing has operated for three decades. The SDGs deepened that relationship, with the Bank positioning its Climate Change Action Plans as central instruments for delivering on SDG 13, 14, and 15. The World Bank dropped its internal 45% co-benefits target while the broader system was exceeding its own goals suggesting that the US administration is not correcting an underperforming mechanism, but rather dismantling an overperforming one, because the objective is to defund the framework itself.

The Bank has converted their binding accountability structure when Trump openly described the climate framework agreements as a scam.

To be clear, dropping a target while retaining the program is a data governance move. The 45% benchmark was an accountability mechanism producing a measurable output that would be audited, reported, and contested by OECD intermediaries. Without these intermediaries, climate finance becomes a discretionary category whose boundaries are set internally, shielded from external verification. The World Bank surpassed the 45% target for the first time in 2025, reaching 48% and delivering over $39 billion in climate finance. Removing the target at the moment of its first achievement is a withdrawal of the measurement apparatus at the point where measurement became inconvenient for the large scale wealth accumulators.

This matters beyond the World Bank’s own portfolio. The Bretton Woods institutions, World Bank, IMF, and the OECD statistical architecture that surrounds them, provide the political authority for the international accounting frameworks that govern how countries report climate action: the System of National Accounts, the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting, and their relationship to the Sustainable Development Goal reporting structure. When the United States weakens the World Bank’s climate finance mandate, it weakens the enforcement legitimacy of that entire harmonization structure without replacing it with anything. This should be seen as an opening for both new local and indigenous accounting indices, as well as BRICS-based finance. And while the Big Brother economies will continue to pursue their data hegemon on the Global South, this change will prove that the commitments are hollow empty promises built on quicksand— debt of the advanced economies.

The pattern here is familiar. When the Trump administration withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017, China accelerated negotiations that enhanced the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which entered into force as the world’s largest trading bloc, covering thirty percent of global GDP without US participation. When NAFTA renegotiation created structural uncertainty, Chinese supply chain investment in Mexico deepened. The logic is consistent across cases: US withdrawal from multilateral frameworks does not produce a vacuum. It produces a leadership transfer, and China has spent the last decade building the institutional architecture to absorb it.

On climate finance, China is better positioned in 2026 than it was in 2017. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has an operational project portfolio across sixty-eight member countries. The New Development Bank (NDB), despite post-2022 turbulence, remains functional. The Belt and Road Initiative’s green financing framework has been explicitly repositioned. The most significant development, however, is the World Data Organization, inaugurated in Beijing on March 30, 2026. The WDO represents a data and statistical standards governance layer that did not exist during Trump’s first term. If China moves to position the WDO as an alternative accounting and verification framework for climate and ecological finance, the World Bank’s retreat from its own targets accelerates the WDO, providing new opportunities for advancing alternative accounting systems.

The argument that China cannot credibly lead on climate governance because it remains a major carbon emitter misreads the nature of the competition. The competition is not over emissions records. It is over who controls the measurement infrastructure, the accounting standards, and the institutional frameworks through which climate finance is allocated and reported. China understands this, which is why the WDO’s mandate covers data governance and statistical standards, not environmental policy per se. The country that sets the accounting rules determines what counts as climate action, what counts as a carbon removal, and whose land generates whose carbon credit. That is the actual terrain.

For the Pacific, this matters in concrete terms. Yesterday’s post on the Green Climate Fund having recently approved $52.5 million for a Forest Landscape Restoration project in Fiji, was stated to generate an estimated 6 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in carbon removals. That number will enter Fiji’s Nationally Determined Contribution reporting, FAO’s portfolio metrics, and potentially carbon market instruments. And even though the press release announcing the project contained no data governance plan, no knowledge sovereignty protocol, no description of who owns the measurement infrastructure or the monitoring data, the turnaround on climate finance should finally inspire a no-confidence on western lending, and a complete rethink of what local and indigenous intermediaries can do.

The customary landowners whose forests generate that carbon figure are described as parties to “agreements,” need to understand how how values gets produced by the intermediary markets and how foreign dominated compliance chains absorbs it. The communities whose land makes these numbers possible must take leadership for its own data production.

This is not a problem specific to Fiji or to this project. It is the operating logic of the SDG-SNA-SEEA harmonization nexus applied to developing countries and small island states. The accounting apparatus encodes jurisdictional authority over ecosystems by determining which ecological relationships are legible to capital and which are not. Communities whose knowledge systems and governance structures fall outside the recognized accounting categories are systematically excluded from the financial flows generated by their own land and traditions.

The World Bank’s retreat from its climate finance target removes the one accountability mechanism that made the scale of those flows measurable. What replaces it, if anything does, will be determined by which institutional architecture moves fastest to establish alternative standards. China, through the WDO and BRICS+ statistical cooperation frameworks, has a structural opportunity to do exactly that.

The question for the Pacific is whether communities enter that new architecture on their own terms or on someone else’s. A Chinese-led climate finance system that reproduces the same data extraction logic as the GCF model would not be an improvement. The governance frameworks that would make an alternative genuinely different, community-controlled data sovereignty protocols, FPIC embedded in accounting structures rather than reduced to consent documentation, measurement systems that recognize customary relationships to land and sea as authoritative rather than supplementary, need to be in place before the WDO architecture hardens, not after.

The accountant leaving the room is an invitation to sit at the table and that situation is already underway. Pasifika—the ACP countries as a whole— need seats where both the accounting rules and debt rules were written, and develop our own tools to insist that local customary rules better reflect what communities actually know about the land and ocean that they traditionally govern.

Yes, the Black Paper — “1.4 Sedimentary Layers of Compliance, and the SDG-SNA-SEEA Harmonization Nexus.” This FAO/GCF press release is a near-perfect illustration of the Black Paper’s central argument, which is that the sequence and layers of compliance— particularly when it comes to environmental data— is colonial theft 5.0. (https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/green-climate-fund-approves--52.5-million-for-restoring-fiji-s-forest-landscape-to-support-food-security-and-livelihoods/en)

The carbon number without a data chain

“6 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent” appears as a project output with no methodology attached. No mention of which accounting standard produces that figure, who measures it, who verifies it, who owns the measurement, or how it enters national accounts. That number does not exist in a vacuum. It will be absorbed into Fiji’s NDC reporting, into SEEA accounts, into FAO’s own portfolio metrics, and potentially into carbon market instruments. The communities whose land generates that figure have no stated role in producing, auditing, or controlling it. The press release treats the number as a project deliverable rather than as a data product with a custodian. The Black Paper’s argument is that the SDG-SNA-SEEA harmonization nexus is precisely the governance mechanism that makes this invisible: the number gets produced, enters the compliance chain, and the question of who authorized its production is never asked.

“Agreements with customary landowners” is the only mention of tenure

Twelve thousand hectares of forest “will be protected through agreements with customary landowners.” That clause is the entirety of the document’s engagement with Fiji’s customary land system, which is one of the most elaborated iTaukei land governance frameworks in the Pacific. The mataqali, the vanua, the iTaukei Land Trust — none of it appears. What appears instead is an “agreement,” which in this context means customary landowners have been contracted into a project whose accounting architecture they did not design and whose data outputs they do not control. The land generates the carbon figure. The figure generates the GCF grant. The grant funds FAO and its partners. The landowners receive “benefits.” And these benefits will amount to slivers of a penny as the compliance chain will shift the value of environmental data to what the World Bank has already estimated will be over $100 trillion dollar Natural Capital economy.

The institutional chain is the compliance chain

FAO holds the GCF accreditation. The Fiji Development Bank is named as a GCF Direct Access Entity and co-financing partner. Fiji Hardwood Corporation and Fiji Pine Limited are key partners. This is the compliance chain made concrete: international fund, UN implementing agency, national development bank, state-owned commercial forestry corporations, then communities. Data and accounting authority flow upward through that chain. Benefits, framed as livelihood improvements and certification access to “higher-value markets,” flow downward. The Black Paper’s argument is that this structure encodes jurisdictional authority over ecosystems not through law alone but through the accounting standards that determine what counts as a carbon removal, what counts as a beneficiary, and what counts as resilience.

Certification is the tell

“The project will ensure long-term benefits by supporting communities and companies to meet certification standards and access higher-value markets for timber and non-timber forest products.” Certification in this context means FSC or equivalent, which is itself an accounting and verification system controlled by Northern-based standard-setting bodies. Communities are being brought into compliance with an external valuation framework, not given authority over how their forests are valued. That is natural capital logic operating through the language of livelihood support.

What’s absent, and why it matters

No data governance plan. No knowledge sovereignty protocol. No mention of who owns the measurement infrastructure, the monitoring data, the remote sensing outputs, or the carbon accounting records. The ADB document at least mentioned a centralized geospatial repository, which was honest about where the data goes. This press release doesn’t get that far. It produces a carbon number, names a beneficiary count, and stops. The data architecture is entirely invisible, which is exactly the point of the Black Paper: the harmonization nexus does its work precisely by making the accounting apparatus disappear behind the language of resilience, restoration, and food security.

The project may do some good on the ground. That’s not the question. The question that needs to be raised is who holds the data that proves it, who controls the numbers that enter the international accounting system, and whether the communities whose land generates those numbers have any authority over that process. This press release provides no evidence that they do, and because of that, I have little doubt that the harmonization of these compliance protocols are geared towards a $100 trillion wealth accumulation by the usual suspects: BlackRock and other multi-trillion dollar asset management cabals.

Last year I penned an article called AuM.ERICA: Assets Under Management, an exploration of a subject that has stuck with me, particularly now with the recent acquisition of Preqin by BlackRock. Note that if you don’t want to give BlackRock consent to your data search, I already have, and what follows appropriately wraps it.

We are mostly living in a data hell

The struggle for data sovereignty is often presented as a debate over privacy, cybersecurity, or technological regulation. The stakes are far greater. Data sovereignty concerns ownership of the social commons itself. Every search query, financial transaction, medical appointment, classroom interaction, social media post, photograph, message, and geolocation record contributes to an immense reservoir of information created through ordinary human activity. This information is generated collectively. It emerges from relationships, communities, institutions, labor, culture, and daily life. Yet the value derived from this collective production has become concentrated within a small number of technology firms, financial institutions, and platform monopolies whose combined market valuations exceed the economic output of most nation-states— including the U.S. if one accounts for government public debt.

The concern extends beyond questions of privacy. Data has become a foundational input into finance, healthcare, education, communications, logistics, insurance, and public administration. Every interaction generates information. Every piece of information can be transformed into an asset. Every asset can be incorporated into systems of valuation, prediction, and control. Economic inequality increasingly emerges from ownership of the infrastructure that captures and monetizes these flows of information.

This process resembles an enclosure movement for the digital age. Earlier enclosures transformed commons into private property. Contemporary enclosures transform human experience into proprietary data. Social interaction becomes a commodity. Public communication becomes an asset class. Human behavior becomes a source of rent extraction. Communities generate the value while institutions own the infrastructure through which value is captured.

The concentration of financial data infrastructure represents one of the most important developments in contemporary political economy. The issue is not simply the accumulation of wealth by large asset managers. It is the consolidation of the systems that measure, evaluate, and govern economic activity itself.

BlackRock’s acquisition of Preqin illustrates this transformation. Preqin functioned as critical infrastructure for private markets. Its databases connected pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies, private equity firms, and institutional investors across the world. Combined with BlackRock’s Aladdin risk management platform and eFront private markets software, the acquisition integrated market intelligence, portfolio management, risk analytics, and investment execution within a single ecosystem.

The significance of this consolidation lies in the growing dependence of financial markets on common datasets, algorithms, and risk models. Ownership of these systems conveys influence over how assets are evaluated, how risk is measured, and how capital is allocated. Financial governance increasingly migrates from public institutions toward privately controlled infrastructure.

This transformation has emerged alongside a profound shift in the structure of American capitalism. Wealth accumulation increasingly occurs through ownership of assets rather than production. Financial returns increasingly derive from management fees, data extraction, intellectual property rights, and platform control. The largest institutions no longer dominate individual industries alone. They increasingly own the systems through which industries interact.

The result is a political economy organized around assets under management. The largest asset managers exercise influence across housing, healthcare, energy, communications, transportation, technology, and finance simultaneously. Ownership becomes diffuse while control becomes concentrated. Shareholder power becomes institutionalized through a small number of financial intermediaries whose reach extends throughout the economy.

This concentration occurs during a period of growing fiscal fragility within the United States. National debt has expanded to levels that would once have been considered extraordinary. Public infrastructure deteriorates across many sectors. Household indebtedness continues to rise. Educational costs, housing costs, and healthcare costs increasingly exceed wage growth. Financial markets continue to generate record valuations while many communities experience declining economic security.

The contradiction reflects a broader restructuring of American political economy. Public institutions face fiscal constraints while private financial institutions accumulate unprecedented resources. Public authority contracts as private governance expands. Economic coordination increasingly occurs through asset managers, technology platforms, payment systems, cloud infrastructure providers, and data monopolies.

The development resembles a form of economic transition. The Soviet perestroika sought to reorganize a centralized political economy confronting institutional exhaustion. The contemporary United States faces a different crisis rooted in debt expansion, financialization, infrastructure decline, and political fragmentation. Public functions increasingly migrate toward private institutions whose legitimacy derives from market capitalization rather than democratic accountability.

The consequences are visible across every major domain of social life.

In finance, transaction data becomes a source of proprietary intelligence used to guide investment decisions and algorithmic trading systems. In healthcare, patient records become valuable datasets for insurers, pharmaceutical firms, and artificial intelligence applications. In education, learning platforms collect behavioral information that generates commercial value beyond the classroom. In communications, social interactions become monetized through advertising systems and predictive algorithms. In artificial intelligence, the accumulated language, creativity, knowledge, and cultural production of entire societies become training data for commercial models.

The underlying pattern remains consistent. Communities generate information through participation in social life. Institutions capture ownership of the infrastructure that records, stores, analyzes, and monetizes that information.

Digital identity systems and fintech platforms extend this process further. Governments and development institutions increasingly promote digital public infrastructure as a mechanism for financial inclusion, service delivery, and economic modernization. These systems promise efficiency and accessibility. They also create centralized repositories of behavioral, financial, and biometric information. The institutions that govern these repositories acquire significant influence over economic participation itself.

The implications are especially significant for developing countries. Digital infrastructure frequently arrives through partnerships involving multinational technology firms, financial institutions, development banks, and external service providers. Local populations generate the data. External actors often control the standards, platforms, software, and governance frameworks. Economic dependency increasingly operates through information systems rather than direct territorial administration.

The same dynamic is emerging within advanced economies. Citizens increasingly interact with public services through privately operated platforms. Communication depends upon privately owned networks. Commerce depends upon privately owned payment systems. Information storage depends upon privately owned cloud infrastructure. The distinction between public administration and private governance becomes increasingly difficult to identify.

Recent legal developments reinforce these trends. The United States Supreme Court’s decision shielding major investment funds from certain private lawsuits strengthens the position of institutional asset managers at a moment when their influence over economic life continues to expand. Legal accountability becomes more limited as economic concentration grows. Public oversight weakens as private governance assumes greater responsibility for economic coordination.

Democracy depends upon the existence of institutions capable of governing concentrations of power. The challenge posed by contemporary data infrastructure concerns the growing mismatch between the scale of private control and the capacity of democratic institutions to regulate it. Citizens generate the information that sustains the digital economy. Communities produce the knowledge, relationships, creativity, and cultural activity that underpin contemporary data systems. Ownership of the resulting assets remains concentrated within a narrow set of institutions.

The central policy question concerns ownership of infrastructure. The issue is not technology itself. Modern societies require sophisticated systems for communication, finance, healthcare, education, and administration. The issue concerns who owns the systems, who governs the data, who establishes the standards, and who captures the value generated through collective participation.

Data sovereignty emerges from this question. It represents an effort to reassert democratic authority over the infrastructures that increasingly govern economic life. Communities that generate data should possess meaningful rights over its use. Public institutions should retain authority over critical information systems. Financial infrastructure should function according to public objectives rather than exclusively private incentives. Digital governance should strengthen economic self-determination rather than deepen dependency.

The ownership of data infrastructure may become one of the defining political questions of the twenty-first century. Earlier eras were shaped by struggles over land, labor, industry, and natural resources. The present era is increasingly defined by struggles over information, algorithms, digital identity, financial networks, and the infrastructures through which economic reality is measured and governed. The outcome of this struggle will determine whether the wealth generated through collective human activity remains concentrated within a small number of institutions or returns to the communities whose lives create it.

The emergence of an alternative system, a Purgatory maybe…

The concentration of financial and data infrastructure also creates an opening for alternative approaches to accounting, governance, and development. Decolonial accounting begins from a different premise than conventional financial systems. It recognizes that value is created within communities, ecosystems, cultures, and relationships that often remain invisible within market-based measures. The emergence of the World Data Organization (WDO) presents an opportunity to establish a forum where alternative accounting frameworks can be developed, compared, and governed through international cooperation rather than financial oligopoly. Such a platform could support local data sovereignty, community-owned indicators, ecological-economic accounts, and methodologies that reflect the priorities of Indigenous peoples, small island states, peasant communities, and developing economies. Rather than treating data as a commodity to be extracted and consolidated, the WDO could help establish principles that recognize data as a shared social resource whose governance should remain accountable to the communities that generate it. In an era defined by the enclosure of information and the concentration of financial power, the development of plural accounting systems offers a pathway toward greater democratic participation, economic self-determination, and a more equitable distribution of the value created through collective human activity.

Corporations exist because the Continental states created them and gave them their Frankenstein powers in the first place. If corporations can participate in contributing to elections, imagine if an army of Frankensteins can be given the same powers… or in more futuristic terms, if AI powered robots are to be given the legal ability to decide our election. Hawaiʻi asks the prescient question, what it means to be human…

In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Citizens United v. FEC. The decision is often described as a campaign finance case. It was more than that. It marked a shift in how political power is understood in the United States. The Court held that corporations possess First Amendment protections that prevent government from restricting independent political expenditures. Money spent on political messaging became increasingly treated as protected speech. Corporate entities gained a constitutional shield for participation in electoral politics.

The consequences were immediate. Independent expenditure committees and Super PACs emerged as major actors in elections. Wealthy individuals, corporations, trade associations, and financial interests gained new avenues to shape political discourse. Elections became increasingly expensive. Political campaigns became more dependent on outside spending. Public debate became more vulnerable to those who possessed the greatest financial resources.

For many Americans, Citizens United was a legal dispute about campaign finance. For Hawaiʻi, the issue touches a deeper historical memory. The islands have long experienced concentrated economic power. Plantation corporations controlled land, labor, transportation, banking, and political institutions for generations. The overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom was carried out in the interests of commercial elites whose economic influence translated directly into political authority. The relationship between wealth and governance is not an abstract concern in Hawaiʻi. It is part of the historical record.

This history helps explain why Hawaiʻi has become the first state to directly challenge the foundations of Citizens United. In 2026, Governor Josh Green signed legislation that seeks to limit the political rights of corporations created under Hawaiʻi law. The legislation does not attempt to overturn Citizens United through a conventional campaign finance restriction. Instead, it advances a different argument. Corporations are creations of the state. Their existence depends on state charters and state law. If the state creates corporate powers, the state can define the limits of those powers.

The distinction should make your heart warm.

Citizens United treated corporations as speakers whose political expenditures are protected by the First Amendment. Hawaiʻi’s legislation asks a prior question. Why should an artificial legal entity possess political rights comparable to those of human beings in the first place?

Supporters of the legislation argue that corporations were created to organize economic activity. They were never intended to function as political citizens. They point to the growing influence of large corporations, asset managers, lobbying organizations, and financial institutions in shaping public policy. They argue that democratic systems cannot function effectively when economic power can be translated directly into political power.

Critics and nay sayers argue that the legislation is unlikely to survive judicial review. Federal courts remain bound by Citizens United and subsequent precedents. They contend that any attempt to restrict corporate political expenditures will ultimately collide with existing First Amendment doctrine. But fuck them, even if the corruption of power and law aligns with them. We have a better human truth than their self interest. People are no longer just defending their democratic rights, their defending their humanity. Following the logic of Citizens United, if we do not clearly define what is human, and what constitutes a democracy, then we are holding the doors open for an even uglier future.

This legal challenge will likely reach federal courts and while the outcome remains uncertain. The broader question, however, extends beyond constitutional law.

The dispute concerns the nature of democracy itself. Should political influence flow from citizenship or from capital accumulation? Should artificial entities possess political rights independent of the people who own them? Can democratic institutions maintain legitimacy when economic concentration becomes political concentration?

These questions have become increasingly relevant as financial power consolidates. A small number of investment firms now exercise influence over trillions of dollars in assets. Large corporations increasingly operate across multiple jurisdictions while maintaining substantial influence over legislation, regulation, media, and public discourse. Citizens United did not create these developments, but it provided a constitutional framework that accommodates them.

Hawaiʻi’s challenge therefore carries significance beyond the islands. The state is testing whether democratic communities retain the authority to distinguish between human rights and corporate privileges. It is asking whether political participation is an inherent characteristic of corporate existence or a power granted by society that can be withdrawn.

The courts may reject the Hawaiʻi argument. Citizens United remains settled precedent. Yet the legislation reflects a growing dissatisfaction with a system in which political influence often tracks economic concentration. The debate is unlikely to disappear regardless of the legal outcome.

For Hawaiʻi, the issue is rooted in a history shaped by Big Five land monopolies, plantation oligarchies, military expansion, and outside control of local resources. For the United States, it raises a larger question about the relationship between democracy and capital.

Citizens United assumed that corporations should be treated as speakers. Hawaiʻi asks the prescient question, what it means to be human… and when this is taken up in federal courts, I hope that this question becomes added to the discourse of the other foundational questions about Hawaiʻi statehood and military occupation.

There is something unsettling about looking at Pearl Harbor and Havana Harbor from space. Separated by thousands of miles, they appear almost like reflections of one another — deep-water ports, centers of commerce, military strongholds, strategic positions along expanding American trade routes. Both entangled in the rise of the United States as colonial hegemony.

In 1959 their histories diverged. While Hawaii surreptitiously became a fake state, Cuba became independent and has had to deal with the very real consequences of standing up to a bully. In the meanwhile, Hawaiʻi has been actively resisting its occupation, repairing its colonial history, and struggling to demilitarize. While there are some seemingly divergent histories, there are also such strong parallels that we need to call them out now, before the US uses its AI warfare to kill Raul Castro as the US-Israel joint attack did Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; or before US troops land to kidnap Castro as they did Venezuela’s president Maduro.

The Planters Already Knew

The Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly was published by the Planters’ Labor and Supply Company of the Hawaiian Islands. Its 1887 volume — the same year the Bayonet Constitution was forced on King Kalākaua, stripping the Hawaiian monarchy of effective power and extending voting rights to wealthy non-citizen foreigners — reads today as an operating manual for the emerging Pacific empire.

The planters tracked Cuban sugar prices, reported on Cuban central factory systems, and monitored U.S. Treasury Secretary Manning’s arguments for maintaining the sugar duty. They published tables showing the cost differential of Portuguese versus Japanese plantation labor ($263.88 and $92.75 per man, respectively), and they watched the reciprocity question with Washington the way a branch office watches its home office.

The numbers tell the structural story plainly. Hawaiian sugar exports to the United States went from 26 million pounds in 1876 to 216 million pounds in 1886. The Monthly attributed this increase to “entirely the treaty” — the Reciprocity Treaty of 1875, which gave Hawaiian sugar privileged, duty-free access to American markets in exchange for a strategic concession that the editors noted in passing as a minor item: “The proposition to give to the United States the exclusive use of Pearl River as a coaling station, so long as the Reciprocity Treaty shall continue in force, is understood to have originated from the American Government.”

Hawaii can terminate this treaty, the editors reassured their readers, on twelve months’ notice.

When Japan attacked the US military base at Pearl Harbor, twelve months’ notice was no longer an offer.

Cuba in the Same Ledger

Cuban sugar appears in that same 1887 volume alongside Hawaiian exports — arguably more as a market signal than a geopolitical construct. The Monthly reprinted Havana correspondence from the New Orleans Sugar Bowl tracking Cuban central factory development, the collapse of old plantation slavery, and Cuban planters’ petitions to their government to abolish export duties on sugar or reduce import duties on leading commodities. The price of Cuban centrifugals — 2¼ cents per pound — was printed for Hawaiian planters to study.

Sidney Mintz argued in Sweetness and Power that sugar was among the first truly global commodities, connecting plantations, shipping, finance, industrial labor, military expansion, and state power. The Planters’ Monthly confirms this on every page. The planters in Honolulu were reading the same commodity prices as the refiners in New York, and both were watching what Washington would do about the sugar duty.

The Spanish-American War of 1898 resolved the question for a generation. The United States forced a fake annexation on Hawaiʻi that year and intervened in Cuba. These events are usually taught as separate episodes, however, they really belong side-by-side in the same ledger.

Two Forms of the Same System

The United States acquired Hawaiʻi outright. Cuba was granted formal independence in 1902, but independence carried specific conditions. Through the Platt Amendment, commercial agreements, military basing rights, and financial leverage, Washington retained extraordinary authority over Cuban affairs. One territory was governed directly. The other was governed through dependency. Both were integrated into an economic order dominated by American capital, and sugar linked the two arrangements.

For decades, tariff schedules, quotas, trade agreements, and commodity prices determined the political futures of both places. The Hawaiian planters monitoring Cuban price movements in 1887 were participating in the same system that, by the twentieth century, had made American capital the structural authority in both the Pacific and the Caribbean.

1959 and the calendar for independence

The years following World War II produced an unprecedented wave of decolonization. The United Nations became the main arena for these debates, and the United States, as administering authority of Hawaiʻi, carried formal obligations under Chapter XI of the U.N. Charter — obligations to transmit information on territorial conditions and to move subject populations toward self-governance.

U.N. Resolution 742 (1953) established that one of the indicators of attained self-governance was “freedom of choosing on the basis of the right of self-determination of peoples between several possibilities including independence.” The Hawaiian plebiscite of June 27, 1959 offered two options: statehood or continuation as a territory. Independence was not on the ballot. Free association was not on the ballot. Commonwealth status, which ILWU Regional Director Jack Hall had advocated as recently as 1956, was not on the ballot.

The state insists that 94% of voters chose statehood. The actual numbers are more complex. Total eligible voters numbered 381,859. Total votes cast for Proposition 1 — the statehood question — were 140,744, with 132,773 in favor. That is 35% of eligible voters actively choosing statehood. An additional 30,639 people voted in the general election that day but abstained from the plebiscite entirely. On the island of Niʻihau, where the population was entirely Native Hawaiian, 70 voted no and 18 voted yes.

Professor Joseph F. Smith of the University of Hawaii wrote to Governor Quinn on the very day Congress passed the Admission Act, March 18, 1959, reporting the results of a study he had conducted: “I venture to predict that one of the most surprising features of our forthcoming election will be the number of votes opposing statehood, plus the number of ballots which will carry neither yes or no votes.” He observed that only three of the students he surveyed were actively in favor, “and the remainder were either apathetic, saying, ‘it will make no difference,’ or definitely opposed.”

This was the plebiscite that Dag Hammarskjöld accepted as satisfying the United Nations’ criteria for removing Hawaiʻi from the list of Non-Self-Governing Territories.

Compare Puerto Rico’s 1953 vote, which the United Nations accepted without significant controversy: out of 873,085 eligible voters, 640,714 went to the polls, and the ballot offered options for commonwealth, statehood, and independence. More than three-quarters of eligible voters participated. Hawaii’s process produced one-third participation and no independence option.

The South Africa comparison is also instructive. When the United Kingdom attempted to remove South Africa from the Non-Self-Governing list in 1949 based on a vote in which the majority of Africans did not participate, the General Assembly rejected the application. The racial logic of Hawaiian statehood — which Kamokila Campbell had warned would produce a Japanese-dominated “menace,” and which ILWU Local 142 proceedings in 1951 had opened to discussion of independence via the U.N. Charter — was a live debate that the plebiscite foreclosed rather than resolved.

January 1, 1959: Fidel Castro entered Havana.

March 18, 1959: President Eisenhower signed the Hawaiʻi Admission Act.

June 27, 1959: Hawaiʻi held its plebiscite.

August 21, 1959: Hawaiʻi became the fiftieth state.

December 12, 1959: The United Nations removed Hawaiʻi from its list of Non-Self-Governing Territories.

One year later, in December 1960, the United Nations adopted Resolution 1514, the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. Had Hawaiʻi still been on the list of Non-Self-Governing Territories when that declaration passed, the international conditions governing any future plebiscite would have been substantially different.

The Cuban Revolution collapsed one pillar of American commercial and strategic influence in the Caribbean. Statehood secured another pillar in the Pacific. The timing does not establish causation. It does establish that both events occurred inside the same period of geopolitical restructuring, and that the statehood process was completed just before the international legal framework for decolonization became considerably more demanding.

Sugar to Oil to Hegemony

The Planters’ Monthly understood, in 1887, that the reciprocity arrangement was not merely commercial. Pearl River was the price of market access. Market access was the mechanism of political integration. Political integration foreclosed the options that would otherwise have been available to the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi.

That logic did not disappear when sugar lost its centrality. It reappeared in the oil economy: strategic resources linked to military protection, economic interests inseparable from foreign policy, political systems reshaped around extraction and commercial access. Today the same structure operates through sanctions regimes, financial system access, trade rules, and permanent military basing arrangements.

Cuba has lived under the weight of that structure continuously since 1959 — an embargo that the United Nations General Assembly has voted to condemn every year for more than three decades.

Hawaiʻi sovereignty questions are not resolved. The legal record on the 1959 plebiscite remains contestable on the grounds the U.N.’s own prior decisions established. The Native Hawaiian community continues to carry the unresolved consequences of a process that, by the standards the United Nations applied to South Africa and accepted for Puerto Rico, did not meet the threshold of genuine self-determination.

Pearl Harbor and Havana Harbor. Two harbors. Two different outcomes of the same imperial century. And in this century, how are the aggressions agains Venezuela and Iran any different. Imperialism is historically determined, a material colonial construct inherited from the European imagination by the United States.

The sugar economy in those 1887 ledgers built the access, the dependency, and the debt that made these outcomes possible. The planters knew what Pearl River was worth. They said so plainly, in print, before anyone had to force the question.

Lease is up, time to go!

The same harbor that anchored the Pacific leg of the 1898 imperial expansion is now at the center of a land dispute that the statehood process never resolved. In the summer of 1964, the Hawaiʻi Department of Land and Natural Resources leased thousands of acres of public trust lands to the U.S. Department of Defense for a period of 65 years — most of those leases issued for $1 for the entire term, executed as a condition to prevent the United States from setting aside these lands under the 1959 Admissions Act, specifically sections 5(d) and 5(e). Crown and government lands of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, confiscated following the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, passed through territorial administration, through statehood, and into a 65-year lease arrangement that expires between 2028 and 2031. The lease at Pōhakuloa Training Area on Hawaiʻi Island and the leases on Oʻahu at Kahuku Training Area, Kawailoa–Poamoho, and Mākua Military Reservation all expire on August 16, 2029, held by the United States Army. These are not marginal parcels. They are training installations embedded in the public land trust — the same trust that the 1978 Constitutional Convention reaffirmed as the constitutional basis for Native Hawaiian claims. The Office of Hawaiian Affairs, as co-trustee of those lands, has spent the past year attempting to establish that any disposition of these leases requires formal participation by OHA, not merely advisory consultation. OHA is advancing potential legislative language in the FY2027 National Defense Authorization Act to ensure Native Hawaiian voices are central to future decisions.

Into that negotiation, in May 2026, the USS Nimitz carrier strike group entered the Caribbean on the same day the Department of Justice indicted former Cuban president Raúl Castro — a public show of force accompanying what Secretary of State Marco Rubio described as a failed state “90 miles from our shores.” Guided missile destroyers, surveillance drones, and the USS Kearsarge amphibious group carrying 2,500 Marines were positioned in the region while defense officials privately acknowledged that back-to-back deployments were straining hulls and crews already extended by the Iran blockade and the Venezuela operation. The administration, in other words, is projecting an imperial perimeter that requires exactly the kind of Pacific basing infrastructure currently under lease negotiation in Hawaiʻi — while simultaneously having no legal mechanism to compel renewal of leases on lands it does not own and cannot simply condemn without triggering a constitutional confrontation with the state’s own trust obligations to Native Hawaiians.

The 1887 Planters’ Monthly noted that the Pearl River coaling station arrangement could be terminated on twelve months’ notice. The 2029 lease expiration carries no such reassurance for the Pentagon. What the planters understood as a commercial bargain — market access exchanged for a strategic foothold — has become, 140 years later, a question of whether the same foothold can be maintained against the claims of the people whose land it actually is. The military needs Hawaiʻi. The lease structure says Hawaiʻi does not have to say yes.

Parts of this article was published in 2007 in the now defunct imipono.org

Primary source: “Hawaiian Planters’ Monthly,” Vol. VI (Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette Publishing Company, 1887). Published by the Planters’ Labor and Supply Company of the Hawaiian Islands.

The contrast between the Xi–Putin summit and the Xi–Trump summit was not just bad manners. Beijing staged both meetings with nearly identical state choreography, but where the distinction emerged was in institutional substance, strategic language, and the degree of convergence around long-term restructuring of the global order.

The summit between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin centered on systemic coordination against what both governments described as unilateral U.S. military and unipolar financial dominance. Russian and Chinese statements emphasized “multipolarity,” strategic partnership, sanctions resistance, energy coordination, and opposition to missile defense expansion. The joint declarations criticized U.S. foreign policy directly and linked military instability to declining Western institutional legitimacy, what I like to call our American Perestroika, largely predicated by what I see as an irreversible gravity of Assets under Management, the new AuMerica.

In 2013, the first year of Xi’s presidency, Washington was in the midst of a containment program against both China and Russia. The Obama-Clinton, then later Obama-Biden administrations launched the U.S. into it’s own comprehensive trade partnership— the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)— as an investment regime led program to resuscitate the neoliberal economy that ruptured in 2008. The BRICS economies had not yet formalized, and the US-sponsored Ukraine coup that initiated the war in Ukraine had not yet happened. What was being challenged, was the formation of three events, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and regional integrations like the RCEP and BRICS.

The Russia-China Strategic and Economic Partnership was discussed within this backdrop and Washington spent three administrations trying to disrupt this alliance. The moment the “comprehensive strategic partnership” was formally elevated highlights what we have come to see as joint coordination across the UN, G20, BRICS, and SCO, integrated energy cooperation including increased Russian crude oil supply to China, and mutual support on each other’s core sovereignty issues — Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang on the Chinese side, counter-terrorism and territorial integrity as evidence by the Nato-Russia proxy war in Ukraine on the Russian side.

The relevance to the current Putin-Xi meeting is that nothing in that 2013 framework has been reversed — it has only deepened and matured. What was described then as a partnership “moving forward from a new historical starting point” is now an institutional relationship with over a decade of joint mechanisms, energy contracts, military coordination, and UN veto alignment behind it. While Washington continues to treat each Putin-Xi summit as a provocation or an anomaly, as if the Sino-Soviet conflict is the natural enmity upon which their relationship is mandated, the Putin-Xi relationship shows the material continuation of a relationship that reset the Sino-Soviet tensions that began between Mao and Khrushchev and was exploited by Washington.

Russian state framing treated the summit as confirmation that Moscow remains integrated into an alternative Eurasian bloc despite sanctions and NATO pressure. Kremlin statements highlighted long-term industrial, technological, and financial coordination rather than short-term transactional diplomacy. Chinese coverage similarly framed the meeting as part of a broader transition toward a multipolar order in which BRICS institutions, regional development banks, energy corridors, and sovereign industrial policy gradually reduce dependence on Western-controlled financial infrastructure.

The Xi–Putin meeting also exposed conflicting interests inside the partnership. Russia sought accelerated movement on the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline and deeper energy guarantees. China withheld final approval, likely because of commitments that Xi made to Trump on the purchasing of US oil and gas. Beijing signaled support for strategic alignment without granting Moscow unlimited leverage over Chinese energy planning. That restraint demonstrated the difficult and calculated hierarchy inside the relationship. Russia increasingly requires Chinese markets, industrial imports, and financial channels, while China maintains flexibility between Eurasian integration and broader global trade management.

The Xi–Trump summit operated differently. Its central purpose was stabilization rather than strategic integration. Chinese and Western analyses described the meeting as an attempt to reduce escalation risks in trade, technology restrictions, supply chains, and military tensions around Taiwan and maritime logistics. The summit produced tactical de-escalation, but it did not resolve structural contradictions around tariffs, semiconductor controls, rare earth supply chains, or industrial competition.

Chinese handling of Donald Trump reflected a different strategic calculation from its handling of Putin. Beijing treated Trump as a necessary negotiator within a still-interdependent trade system. The Chinese side emphasized stability, predictability, and managed competition because China’s export system remains materially connected to U.S. consumption markets, dollar clearing systems, and advanced technology flows. At the same time, Chinese negotiators used the summit to demonstrate that Washington no longer possesses uncontested leverage. Rare earth controls, industrial supply chain dependencies, and tariff fatigue altered the negotiating terrain.

The Trump summit appears to be crisis management, particularly under the erosion of Washington’s declining legitimacy in the global space. The Putin summit was far more mature, operating with an institutional coordination between states attempting to build parallel systems.

We are watching a geopolitical transition in real time, and how Washington responds is for the history books.

The Xi–Trump meeting showed that the United States and China remain economically entangled despite strategic rivalry. Neither side can yet absorb full-scale decoupling without major industrial disruption. The meeting therefore focused on temporary stabilization mechanisms. Even Western policy institutions acknowledged that the summit largely restored conditions that existed before the latest escalation cycle rather than creating a new framework.

The Xi–Putin summit addressed a separate question: how to construct financial, logistical, and diplomatic systems outside Atlantic institutional control. Discussions around BRICS finance, sanctions resilience, currency settlement, transport corridors, and energy coordination all pointed toward gradual institutional bifurcation rather than immediate rupture.

Russian and Chinese state narratives increasingly frame Western sanctions, NATO expansion, and dollar dominance as symptoms of institutional exhaustion rather than signs of enduring hegemony. Beijing does not fully adopt Moscow’s confrontational posture, but it increasingly uses the language of civilizational plurality, sovereign development models, and multipolar governance to legitimize alternative institutional arrangements.

The broader structural issue is not whether China chooses Russia over the United States. Beijing is attempting to manage simultaneous dependence and divergence. China still requires access to global trade networks and Western consumption markets, but it is also constructing a new global cooperation through BRICS expansion, regional development finance, commodity coordination, and South-South infrastructure integration.

Even though we are mostly impatient to see the erosion of the petrodollar and the end of neoliberal primacy, the China-Russia partnership reveals the patience necessary to attain multipolarity without collapsing the global trade system, which Washington seems intent on doing.

The Trump-Xi summit in Beijing — the first US state visit to China since Trump’s own 2017 trip — arrives wrapped in the familiar language of bilateral reset: trade truces, technology governance, AI safety consultations. These are the visible agenda items. The structural question underneath them concerns oil, and who controls the terms on which it moves. CNBC

Since February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel launched air strikes against Iran and assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly 25 percent of the world’s seaborne oil trade normally passes — has been largely blocked. Iran’s response was immediate and calculated. Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces began charging yuan-denominated transit tolls for oil tankers seeking passage through the strait, turning the chokepoint into a live test of de-dollarization in the one arena where dollar primacy has been most durable: the energy market.

Iran joined BRICS in 2024 and has consistently pushed for non-dollar trade settlement. Russia, one of the world’s three largest oil producers, has been building dedollarization infrastructure since Western sanctions accelerated after 2022. Indian refiners are now settling Russian crude purchases in yuan and UAE dirhams, bypassing the US dollar in what marks the first time a top-five oil importer has structurally exited dollar settlement for crude. The Hormuz yuan toll is the most visible expression of a payment architecture that has been assembling for years across BRICS member states.

The petrodollar system was built on the Saudi agreement of the 1970s to price oil exclusively in dollars in exchange for US security guarantees. That arrangement still holds for the Gulf states, and approximately 80 percent of global oil transactions remained dollar-denominated as recently as 2023, per JP Morgan Chase estimates. Mainstream financial analysts frame the yuan-denominated Hormuz tolls as incremental. Natixis chief Asia-Pacific economist Alicia Garcia-Herrero has characterized the move as adding “incremental pressure” that “normalises alternatives in energy flows,” arguing that far-reaching dedollarization would require Gulf state participation that has not materialized. The framing is technically defensible and politically evasive in equal measure. The point of the Hormuz toll system is to demonstrate that non-dollar settlement of energy flows is operationally possible at the world’s most critical chokepoint. The demonstration itself is the event. Al Jazeera

Washington read this correctly, or at least partially. Trump publicly demanded that approximately seven countries heavily dependent on Middle East oil join a multinational coalition to escort vessels through the strait, framing it as those countries protecting “their own territory.” The allied response was instructive. Germany, Spain, Italy, Estonia, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and the European Union each declined. German defense minister Boris Pistorius asked publicly what a handful of European frigates could accomplish in the Strait of Hormuz that the powerful US Navy could not. The answer is nothing militarily. The more useful question is what the US Navy itself cannot do, which is reopen a strait without resolving the political conditions that closed it. Global Times + 2

China was named by both sides. Trump’s posts urged China, the UK, France, and Japan to deploy warships to keep the strait open, drawing a sarcastic response from Iran’s Foreign Minister, who observed that the US was “now begging others, even China, to help it make Hormuz safe.” Beijing’s response was consistent with its posture throughout the conflict. China positioned itself as a “sincere friend and strategic partner of Middle Eastern countries” committed to de-escalation, while identifying the fundamental cause of Hormuz tensions as the US-Israeli military strikes on Iran. That is a precise allocation of causality. It forecloses the premise of Trump’s request before engaging with its substance. Global Times

The Venezuela dimension adds a further layer the summit agenda does not acknowledge. China purchases approximately 76 percent of Venezuela’s crude output. The Trump administration has moved aggressively to interdict those flows through tanker seizures conducted under the 2002 Salas-Becker agreement, which allows US authorities to board Panama-flagged vessels with two hours’ notice. Between 2013 and 2025, China imported approximately 8.16 billion barrels of crude from Venezuela, Iran, and Russia combined, with sanctioned barrels accounting for roughly one-fifth of China’s total oil imports. Venezuelan crude exports to China averaged 642,000 barrels per day in 2025. Since the US blockade began in December, that flow has been reduced to approximately 166,000 barrels per day reaching Chinese ports. CNBC + 2

The US is demanding that China purchase American LNG in dollars while simultaneously intercepting the discounted sanctioned crude that Chinese independent refiners have relied on for over a decade. The Trump administration has announced that all oil transported in and out of Venezuela will flow through “authorized channels consistent with US law and national security,” positioning Washington directly in the marketing of Venezuelan oil. China has characterized the tanker seizures as “unilateral bullying” and a violation of international law. Both characterizations are accurate. Neither changes the operational reality on the water. Columbia University

The center of gravity in US-China relations has shifted away from tariffs toward something more structural: China’s control over critical minerals, rare earths, and the magnet supply chains that underpin modern military capability and advanced manufacturing. The yuan has reached a three-year high against the dollar, driven by China’s export surplus and market confidence in a stronger currency at a moment when the dollar is volatile. When Trump pushed tariffs past 140 percent in the spring of 2025 and China threatened to restrict rare earth flows, Trump reduced tariffs rather than escalate. The leverage asymmetry is visible and established. Council on Foreign Relations + 2

The containment record matters here. Since 2008, Washington has pursued containment of China’s geostrategic expansion, regional influence, technological advancement, and trade position across every administration. Obama launched the pivot to Asia. Trump launched the trade war. Biden imposed chip restrictions and industrial subsidies. Each pursued similar long-term objectives through different instruments. When Biden’s team entered the White House in 2021, the initial instruction at interagency meetings was that “all the work on China should continue as it had been.” Beijing’s analysts understand that Trump views China primarily in commercial and transactional terms. They understand equally that Trump will not be in office indefinitely, and that a more institutionalized, bipartisan China-skeptic consensus remains intact in Washington beneath the summit optics. Wgi + 2

China’s calculation at this summit is therefore not whether to trust Trump. It is whether any durable arrangement with Washington is available at all, regardless of who occupies the White House. The record since 2008 answers that question. The summit is more likely to produce tactical stabilization than a reset, with neither side ready for a grand bargain and neither willing to risk a breakdown that would further damage an already fragile global economy. Tactical stabilization, from Beijing’s position, is sufficient. The petro-yuan infrastructure advances during the pause. The BRICS settlement architecture continues to mature. The Hormuz toll system has already demonstrated its proof of concept. None of these require a favorable outcome in Beijing to remain in motion. Washington arrives needing something resolved. Beijing arrives needing only to avoid a rupture. That asymmetry defines the summit more precisely than any agenda item either side has published.

Also, the Democratic Party released a statement about Taiwan’s so-called “exclusion” from the WTO meeting, the world realigns under BRICS.

NDB and CRA: Moscow, May 13–15

Putin met Rousseff at the Kremlin on May 13, ahead of the 11th Annual Meeting of the NDB Board of Governors, held in Moscow on May 14–15 — the first time the annual meeting has convened on Russian soil. The meeting’s declared theme was “Development Financing in an Era of Technological Revolution,” with Finance Minister Anton Siluanov chairing the governors’ session. Rousseff conveyed greetings from President Lula and acknowledged close operational coordination with Siluanov, Deputy Chief of Staff Maxim Oreshkin, and newly appointed NDB Vice President Roman Serov. The agenda included decoupling BRICS trade from dollar settlement through national currency financing mechanisms — the operational question the NDB has been working toward since its 2022–2026 general strategy committed to raising local-currency financing to 30 percent of total commitments. The Moscow meeting also opened a discussion on NDB financing for nuclear energy projects, including instruments for national currency lending on nuclear infrastructure, with 27 countries having already signed a dedicated statement on nuclear financing at the Paris International Nuclear Energy Summit in March 2026. Pravda + 5

The CRA sits alongside the NDB as the BRICS financial safety net, structured as a $100 billion mutual liquidity arrangement among central banks — China contributing $41 billion, Brazil, Russia, and India $18 billion each, and South Africa $5 billion — activated in the event of balance-of-payments stress. In 2025, BRICS finance ministers announced that the CRA would begin developing digital tools for real-time liquidity monitoring and early-warning mechanisms for balance-of-payments stress. The timing of the Moscow meeting is not incidental. The Hormuz crisis has already demonstrated what sustained energy supply disruption does to import-dependent economies, several of which are NDB members. A credible CRA combined with national currency NDB lending represents the institutional layer beneath the petro-yuan and BRICS payment system developments — the infrastructure that makes dedollarization survivable at the sovereign level when dollar-denominated markets seize up. The Moscow meeting convened the day Trump arrived in Beijing. The simultaneity is the argument. BRICSWikipedia

Militarization and Regional Security
The recent BRICS foreign ministers meeting in New Delhi exposed deep fractures within the bloc over the Iran conflict, with Iran vehemently accusing the UAE of military action against it and urging BRICS to condemn US and Israeli aggression. This discord highlights the difficulty BRICS faces in presenting a unified geopolitical front amidst rising Middle East tensions, diminishing its strategic cohesiveness and potentially weakening its role as a Global South security counterweight. Meanwhile, in the South China Sea, heightened US military provocations, such as the launch of Tomahawk missiles, exacerbate tensions with China, reinforcing Beijing’s narrative of defending its sovereign claims and driving a security dilemma in the region. Japan’s deployment of anti-ship missiles on Philippine soil marks a notable escalation in regional militarization, reflecting growing security cooperation among US allies counterbalancing China’s assertiveness. These developments deepen interstate rivalries and risk entrenching militarized postures in two pivotal regions, benefiting defense industries and hardline political factions while harming prospects for diplomatic de-escalation^[3][9].

Trade, Finance, and Institutional Shifts
The approval of TMC USA’s deep-sea mining application by NOAA marks a major regulatory milestone advancing US commercial access to critical minerals in the Pacific, positioning American firms advantageously in the race for strategic resource extraction amidst rising global supply risks. Concurrently, ASEAN’s demonstrated financial market resilience to Middle East shocks underscores the region’s growing economic stability and integration, which supports its push for trade innovations like cross-border QR payment systems, further entrenching regional financial connectivity. Meanwhile, the WTO faces continued challenges with reform inertia and fragmented trade governance, as key plurilateral negotiations seek to bypass multilateral deadlock, reflecting a weakening of global trade norms and shifting leverage toward bilateral and regional accords such as the EU-Mercosur deal benefiting Mercosur’s export sectors with mixed reception. Additionally, the New Development Bank (NDB), under Dilma Rousseff’s presidency, exemplifies the BRICS initiative to create parallel development finance structures to reduce dependence on Western-dominated institutions, enhancing their collective economic sovereignty and influence on global finance policy^[1][2][6][7][10].

Global South and Development Realignment
The Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) continues to gain momentum as African leaders including Presidents Tinubu and Kagame advocate for deeper industrial integration, investment attraction, and harmonized standards, aiming to turn Africa’s vast market into a resilient trade and development hub. This momentum coincides with UN and World Bank assessments recognizing the gap in achieving Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, pushing emerging economies and development partners to recalibrate ambitions and capacity-building efforts. BRICS and affiliated institutions like the NDB play an increasingly pivotal role in supplementing global development finance, particularly as Global South blocs seek alternatives to Western-centric multilateralism. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is also reinforcing Chinese influence through infrastructure investment in the Global South, notably in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, further complicating international development alignments by embedding strategic dependencies under Chinese leadership^[4][5][8].

Ecological and Resource Governance
Deep-sea mining emerges as a contentious frontier, with TMC’s application approval indicating progress toward exploiting ocean floor mineral wealth critical for green technologies, yet triggering environmental concerns reflected in Greenpeace’s Arctic expeditions and scientific reviews assessing significant ecological risks. This technological and regulatory push reflects growing tensions between urgent resource needs for decarbonization and fragile marine ecosystem protections, spotlighting governance gaps in international seabed management. Meanwhile, the EU-Mercosur trade deal’s emphasis on agricultural exports, such as Brazilian beef, exposes conflicts over environmental standards and antimicrobial regulations, which provoke disputes and threaten sustainability goals by potentially exacerbating deforestation and biodiversity loss. These dynamics reveal how commodity-driven trade policies and emerging technologies intersect with environmental stewardship challenges, where economic actors and resource-rich developing countries stand to gain, while environmental advocates and vulnerable ecosystems face significant losses^[1][7].

Signals of Systemic Fragmentation
Heightened geopolitical fault lines manifest notably in the splintering of multilateral groupings and governance regimes. BRICS faces internal discord over Middle East conflicts, limiting its capacity for unified policy. The WTO remains hamstrung by institutional paralysis, as members diverge on dispute resolution and rules, leading to segmented plurilateral initiatives and eroding its role as a trade referee. The rise of China-led platforms such as the NDB and AIIB signals a parallel institutional architecture challenging established Western-led orders. At the same time, ASEAN and AfCFTA represent regional blocs balancing global pressures through economic resilience and integration. The duality of intensifying regionalism alongside the decline of universal multilateralism underscores a world increasingly governed by overlapping, competing frameworks, fostering uncertainty and strategic competition between major powers and regional coalitions^[2][4][6][10].

Sources

1. Full Coverage

2. Full Coverage

3. Full Coverage

4. Full Coverage

5. Full Coverage

OFAC Compliance Enforcement

The United States has long been pursuing containment through sanctions, finance, shipping enforcement, and compliance jurisdiction through the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in the Department of the Treasury. While it sounds benign, compliance enforcement is largely activated through industry demands, cooperation and capacity building, law, and enforcement. In my 2016 paper in American Quarterly, TPP at the End of the Line: A Briefing on Economic Cooperation and Capacity Building, I discuss how the rise of the BRICS economies and the Belt and Road Initiative advance the rules to multilateral trade system, and that it was the evolution of compliance regimes that launched the Cold War through the Economic Cooperation Act, aka, the Marshall Plan.

Since OFAC began in 1950, it was transformed through three crisis moments in 2001, 2008, 2020, and what I discuss in last month’s Black Paper, a fourth expansion, which we’re all tracking in realtime, global destabilization by the US and Israel. The first compliance expansion occurred in 2001 after 9/11 with the Patriot Act which expanded surveillance and financial monitoring. And it transformed again following the 2008 financial collapse where OFAC began to be used as a containment policy against China and the 2014 BRICS agenda dealing with transactions, shipping, logistics, energy, and access to markets. Later in 2020, in the post-COVID period, OFAC incorporated insurance, cloud infrastructure and data systems. The fourth expansion that is on the table is likely to take place with a series of catastrophic environmental crisis that will put ecological accounting front and center.

If you follow me and follow this trajectory, the West has already been situating itself to benefit from an ecological crisis, one that if left unchecked, will dominate Global environmental wealth. China, however, has just formed a counterweight against what I call the SDG-SNA-SEEA harmonization with its brand new World Data Organization (WDO). The Global South already pursuing a pathway that resists what could amount to the largest global theft in the history of the world— what the World Bank estimates as $100 trillion of natural capital. Also in Santa Marta, Colombia, the First International Conference on Fossil Fuels is concluding an agenda about public ownership of energy infrastructure, debt resolution facilities, and peace as a resolve to oil and gas industries.

Following the 2008 financial collapse, China and the BRICS economies proved resilient, largely because they did not embrace the neoliberal logic of debt privatization and financialization that led to Wall St.’s near collapse. Their status as emerging economies did not provide them the same kind of access to debt and financial governance rules that the OECD economies had, rules that were largely predatory to both developing countries and within their own populations. The BRICS economies, as outlined in their 2014 Fortaleza Declaration, has already enabled a counter-system through trade, energy, and infrastructure access and development finance. The conflict was no longer limited to tariffs or military weapons. It became a struggle over who gets to define lawful trade, and this is something that dramatically unfolded during regional trade competition between the TPP and the RCEP over APEC’s Free Trade Area in the Asia Pacific during the Obama era.

The EU’s 20th Russia sanctions package shows the shift. Brussels targeted Chinese entities accused of supporting Russia’s military-industrial base. China demanded that the entities be removed and warned that it would take measures to protect Chinese firms. This moves sanctions beyond Russia and into China-EU trade governance. It treats third-country supply chains as extensions of the battlefield.

The United States is doing the same through Iran. OFAC sanctioned Hengli Petrochemical’s Dalian refinery and about 40 shipping firms and vessels tied to Iranian oil flows. Treasury framed the action as a strike against Iran’s “shadow fleet.” and both Reuters and AP reported that the sanctions included wind-down rules and targeted Chinese-linked refining and shipping networks.

This is the material point. Sanctions are no longer aimed only at banks, officials, or frozen assets. They now target refineries, tankers, ports, insurers, due diligence systems, crypto channels, and logistics documentation. The EU’s Russia package also links a €90 billion Ukraine loan with new measures against Russian energy revenue, shadow-fleet vessels, LNG services, ports, and financial services. Debt finance, war finance, and energy compliance have been fused into one enforcement architecture.

The Iran-China oil trade is the current stress test. Washington wants to make Iranian oil commercially toxic. China’s refiners and traders have continued to absorb “sanctioned” barrels because discounted or strategically necessary energy supplies matter more than Western approval. Reuters reported that China remained the leading destination for Iranian oil in 2025, and that some independent refiners have limited exposure to the U.S. financial system. That weakens OFAC’s leverage unless the U.S. escalates toward banks, insurers, ports, and shipping registries.

This should be read as sanctions overreach. TASS reported China’s view that EU restrictions damage trust in Chinese investment, and Russian officials frame the sanctions campaign as evidence that Europe is losing economic autonomy. Even though Tass may be a Russian state-linked interpretation, this matters because it shows how Western sanction narratives are in decline, particularly when China called on Brussels to immediately remove the companies from the sanction list while justifying the development of alternative corridors, currencies, and security arrangements.

The same logic appears in climate finance. At the World Bank-IMF Spring Meetings, U.S. pressure threatened continuation of the World Bank’s climate strategy and its 45 percent climate-lending target. Down To Earth reported that low- and middle-income countries paid $38.5 billion more to external creditors in 2022–2023 than they received in new public external loan disbursements. This is the kind of compliance enforcement that should remind us that the $100 trillion Natural Capital valuation is tied to the other astronomical value— OECD debt. As expressed in the Black Paper, it is precisely the development space that will be targeted with new environmental compliance costs being harmonized within climate finance.

As I write this, The First Conference on Transitioning away from Fossil Fuels is concluding in Santa Marta, Colombia. Energy transition will soon become security policy. The Colombia fossil-fuel transition summit is framed around oil volatility, war, inflation, and dependency. About 50 countries gathered to discuss reducing fossil fuel reliance, including fossil-free zones in sensitive and Indigenous territories. This aligns with an ecological accounting argument: energy transition is not only emissions policy. It is a sovereignty struggle over exposure to oil chokepoints, sanctions, and price shocks.

Venezuela-Colombia integration is now accelerating. The kidnapping and imprisonment of President Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces in January has probably intensified this process, and the April 24 agreements on intelligence sharing, electricity, gas, border security, tourism, and trade reflect a broader need to stabilize the border and restore economic flows. This form of regional integration should be understood as structural blowback to sustained sanctions pressure. Venezuela and its neighbors can no longer treat energy, security, and trade as separate sectors because U.S. enforcement has already fused them into a single operational field.

Also ALBA—the Bolivaran Alliance— may have lost economic momentum with the decline in oil revenue, but that contraction is pushing integration into more targeted and functional arrangements. Bilateral agreements and regional forums are becoming more tightly coordinated around infrastructure, logistics, and security. What we are seeing in the Venezuela–Colombia agreements, and in broader regional convenings such as the Santa María conference, is a shift in purpose. Regional cooperation is a survival strategy under the imposed conditions of constrained finance and restricted market access.

Globally, Iran has been a the hinge. Orinoco Tribune published Pepe Escobar’s piece on how the war on Iran is disrupting BRI, INSTC, IMEC, and Eurasian corridors. Iran is not only an oil exporter. It is a corridor state linking the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, Russia, China, South Asia, and the eastern Mediterranean. Any attack on Iran threatens energy supply, maritime routing, and Eurasian integration all at once.

The likely blowback is clear. OFAC-style enforcement works when the U.S. controls the payment system, insurance, the reserve currency, the rating environment, and the legal venue. But when BRICS+ and other regional integrations weakens the sanction system, states can route trade through non-dollar settlement, alternative shipping networks, state-backed insurance, gold reserves, domestic capital pools, and military protection. Thie is where OFAC leads to an “Oh fuck” response. Each new sanction teaches targeted states how to build around and outside the old system.

The U.S. containment strategy may therefore accelerate the system it wants to prevent. China does not need to defeat the dollar overnight. It only needs to make enough trade possible outside the petro-dollar. Russia too, does not need to replace Western insurance entirely, it only needs to protect enough strategic flows to keep energy moving which it is doing with its military. Iran only needs enough oil buyers, shipping capacity, and corridor relevance to make western-backed compliance costly, thereby enhancing a gold-backed petro-yuan.

The deeper failure is juridical. OFAC has turned U.S. law into a global compliance hegemon. That regime depends on fear of exclusion from Western markets. If China, Russia, Iran, ASEAN, the AU, the EAEU, and Latin American integration projects build parallel markets with sufficient scale, exclusion loses force. Sanctions then stop functioning as discipline and start functioning as evidence that the Western system is unsafe for sovereign development.

OFUK

As director of the Office of Fucked Up Kompliance (OFUK), I would prepare for a new economy by shifting enforcement from asset seizure to system design. As I try to describe above, it’s easy to see OFAC as an agency where compliance and sanctions fail in practice: shipping routes that bypass insured lanes, refiners that operate outside Western finance, payment channels that settle in local currencies, and data systems that do not report into Western compliance frameworks. The OFUK office would respond by embedding foreign use-conditions into our own infrastructure rather than relying on prohibitions and enforcement. New contracts, insurance requirements, port access rules, translocal and indigenous-led technical standards would comply with how local regional energy, data, and goods would move if we were to engage in new regional integrated systems. The objective is to re-educate our behavior before negotiations and transactions occur. Monitoring would integrate trade documentation, vessel tracking, and financial disclosures into verification layers that flags multilateral use patterns. OFUK’s task is to enable a new learning curve where our partial participation is more attractive than domination.

Sources

Reuters, AP, U.S. Treasury/OFAC, Council of the European Union, European Commission, Xinhua/China Daily, Chinese Mission to the EU, TASS, teleSUR English, Down To Earth India, African Finance Corporation, Orinoco Tribune, The Guardian, and AP climate reporting.

Saiki, Arnie. “The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).” American Quarterly, edited by Chih-ming Wang and Yu-fang Cho, vol. 69, no. 3, Johns Hopkins University Press, Sept. 2017, pp. 501–512.

I’m reposting the Fortaleza Declaration in full because the declaration is harder to find on Google Search now. To get a sense of how important this 2014 moment was: It was the BRICS economies that largely remained solvent after what should have been the death of neoliberalism in 2008, and signaled the downturn of the OECD economic hegemony—the neocolonial consensus of the World Bank, IMF, and WTO. Unfortunately, it signaled the beginning of destabilization, regime change, coups, and a militarized containment policy that sought to perpetuate the colonial manifest that gave us World Wars one and two. Across most of the world, the United States and the largest Asset Management firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street have supported a cooperative effort to end BRICS multipolarity. Since the election of Obama, I have long said that after he inherited the 2008 Wall St. collapse, he had an opportunity to lead the U.S. down in a parachute, rather than a crash. Whatever repercussion that would have occurred domestically, the U.S. would have weathered through because it was in the interests of global trade for the multipolar economies to work together rather than in unipolar competition. Now we are on the brink—or in the midst— of global devastation because we never addressed the failure of the unipolar global system, or neoliberalism, or what the Trump administration is not even hiding: colonialism.

The Fortaleza Declaration

July 15, 2014

1. We, the leaders of the Federative Republic of Brazil, the Russian Federation, the Republic of India, the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of South Africa, met in Fortaleza, Brazil, on 15 July 2014 at the Sixth BRICS Summit. To inaugurate the second cycle of BRICS Summits, the theme chosen for our discussions was “Inclusive Growth: Sustainable Solutions”, in keeping with the inclusive macroeconomic and social policies carried out by our governments and the imperative to address challenges to humankind posed by the need to simultaneously achieve growth, inclusiveness, protection and preservation.

2. In the aftermath of the first cycle of five Summits, hosted by every BRICS member, our coordination is well established in various multilateral and plurilateral initiatives and intra-BRICS cooperation is expanding to encompass new areas. Our shared views and commitment to international law and to multilateralism, with the United Nations at its center and foundation, are widely recognized and constitute a major contribution to global peace, economic stability, social inclusion, equality, sustainable development and mutually beneficial cooperation with all countries.

3. We renew our openness to increasing engagement with other countries, particularly developing countries and emerging market economies, as well as with international and regional organizations, with a view to fostering cooperation and solidarity in our relations with all nations and peoples. To that effect, we will hold a joint session with the leaders of the South American nations, under the theme of the Sixth BRICS Summit, with a view to furthering cooperation between BRICS and South America. We reaffirm our support for the South American integration processes, and recognize in particular the importance of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) in promoting peace and democracy in the region, and in achieving sustainable development and poverty eradication. We believe that strengthened dialogue among BRICS and South American countries can play an active role in enhancing multilateralism and international cooperation, for the promotion of peace, security, economic and social progress and sustainable development in an interdependent and increasingly complex, globalizing world.

4. Since its inception the BRICS have been guided by the overarching objectives of peace, security, development and cooperation. In this new cycle, while remaining committed to those objectives, we pledge to deepen our partnership with a renewed vision, based on openness, inclusiveness and mutually beneficial cooperation. In this sense, we are ready to explore new areas towards a comprehensive cooperation and a closer economic partnership to facilitate market inter-linkages, financial integration, infrastructure connectivity as well as people-to-people contacts.

5. The Sixth Summit takes place at a crucial juncture, as the international community assesses how to address the challenges of strong economic recovery from the global financial crises, sustainable development, including climate change, while also formulating the post-2015 Development Agenda. At the same time, we are confronted with persistent political instability and conflict in various global hotspots and non-conventional emerging threats. On the other hand, international governance structures designed within a different power configuration show increasingly evident signs of losing legitimacy and effectiveness, as transitional and ad hoc arrangements become increasingly prevalent, often at the expense of multilateralism. We believe the BRICS are an important force for incremental change and reform of current institutions towards more representative and equitable governance, capable of generating more inclusive global growth and fostering a stable, peaceful and prosperous world.

6. During the first cycle of BRICS Summits, collectively our economies have consolidated their position as the main engines for sustaining the pace of the international economy as it recovers from the recent economic and financial global crisis. The BRICS continue to contribute significantly to global growth and to the reduction of poverty in our own and other countries. Our economic growth and social inclusion policies have helped to stabilize global economy, to foster the creation of jobs, to reduce poverty, and to combat inequality, thus contributing to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. In this new cycle, besides its contribution in fostering strong, sustainable and balanced growth, BRICS will continue to play a significant role in promoting social development and in contributing to define the international agenda in this area, building on its experience in addressing the challenges of poverty and inequality.

7. To better reflect the advancement of the social policies of the BRICS and the positive impacts of its economic growth, we instruct our National Institutes of Statistics and the Ministries of Health and Education to work on the development of joint methodologies for social indicators to be incorporated in the BRICS Joint Statistical Publication. We also encourage the BRICS Think Tanks Council to provide technical support in this task. We further request the BRICS National Institutes of Statistics to discuss the viability and feasibility of a platform for the development of such methodologies and to report thereon.

8. The world economy has strengthened, with signs of improvement in some advanced economies. Significant downside risks to this recovery remain, however. Unemployment and debt levels are worryingly high and growth remains weak in many advanced economies. Emerging market economies and developing countries (EMDCs) continue to contribute significantly to global growth and will do so in the years to come. Even as the global economy strengthens, monetary policy settings in some advanced economies may bring renewed stress and volatility to financial markets and changes in monetary stance need to be carefully calibrated and clearly communicated in order to minimize negative spillovers.

9. Strong macroeconomic frameworks, well regulated financial markets and robust levels of reserves have allowed EMDCs in general, and the BRICS in particular, to better deal with the risks and spillovers presented by the challenging economic conditions in the last few years. Nevertheless, further macroeconomic coordination amongst all major economies, in particular in the G20, remains a critical factor for strengthening the prospects for a vigorous and sustainable recovery worldwide. In this context, we reaffirm our strong commitment to continue working among ourselves and with the global community to foster financial stability, support sustainable, stronger and inclusive growth and promote quality jobs. The BRICS stand ready to contribute to the G20 goal of lifting our collective GDP by more than 2 percent above the trajectory implied by current policies over the coming 5 years.

10. We commend Russia for the successful work during its presidency of the G20 in 2013. The institution of the BRICS Summits largely coincided with the beginning of the global crisis, the first G20 Summits and the consolidation of that Group as the premier forum for economic coordination among its members. As a new round of BRICS Summits begins, we remain committed to deliver constructive responses to global economic and financial challenges and to serve as a strong voice for the promotion of sustainable development, inclusive growth, financial stability and of more representative international economic governance. We will continue to pursue our fruitful coordination and to promote our development goals within the international economic system and financial architecture.

11. BRICS, as well as other EMDCs, continue to face significant financing constraints to address infrastructure gaps and sustainable development needs. With this in mind, we are pleased to announce the signing of the Agreement establishing the New Development Bank (NDB), with the purpose of mobilizing resources for infrastructure and sustainable development projects in BRICS and other emerging and developing economies. We appreciate the work undertaken by our Finance Ministers. Based on sound banking principles, the NDB will strengthen the cooperation among our countries and will supplement the efforts of multilateral and regional financial institutions for global development, thus contributing to our collective commitments for achieving the goal of strong, sustainable and balanced growth.

12. The Bank shall have an initial authorized capital of US$ 100 billion. The initial subscribed capital shall be of US$ 50 billion, equally shared among founding members. The first chair of the Board of Governors shall be from Russia. The first chair of the Board of Directors shall be from Brazil. The first President of the Bank shall be from India. The headquarters of the Bank shall be located in Shanghai. The New Development Bank Africa Regional Center shall be established in South Africa concurrently with the headquarters. We direct our Finance Ministers to work out the modalities for its operationalization.

13. We are pleased to announce the signing of the Treaty for the establishment of the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) with an initial size of US$ 100 billion. This arrangement will have a positive precautionary effect, help countries forestall short-term liquidity pressures, promote further BRICS cooperation, strengthen the global financial safety net and complement existing international arrangements. We appreciate the work undertaken by our Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors. The Agreement is a framework for the provision of liquidity through currency swaps in response to actual or potential short-term balance of payments pressures.

14. We also welcome the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation among BRICS Export Credit and Guarantees Agencies that will improve the support environment for increasing trade opportunities among our nations.

15. We appreciate the progress our Development Banks have made in enhancing and strengthening the financial ties among BRICS countries. Given the importance of adopting innovation initiatives, we welcome the conclusion of the Cooperation Agreement on Innovation within the BRICS Interbank Cooperation Mechanism.

16. We recognize that there is potential for BRICS insurance and reinsurance markets to pool capacities. We direct our relevant authorities to explore avenues of cooperation in this regard.

17. We believe that sustainable development and economic growth will be facilitated by taxation of revenue generated in jurisdictions where economic activity takes place. We express our concern over the harmful impact of tax evasion, transnational fraud and aggressive tax planning on the world economy. We are aware of the challenges brought by aggressive tax avoidance and non-compliance practices. We, therefore, affirm our commitment to continue a cooperative approach on issues related to tax administrations and to enhance cooperation in the international forums targeting tax base erosion and information exchange for tax purposes. We direct our relevant authorities to explore ways of enhancing cooperation in this area. We also direct our relevant authorities to strengthen cooperation in the field of customs.

18. We remain disappointed and seriously concerned with the current non-implementation of the 2010 International Monetary Fund (IMF) reforms, which negatively impacts on the IMF’s legitimacy, credibility and effectiveness. The IMF reform process is based on high-level commitments, which already strengthened the Fund’s resources and must also lead to the modernization of its governance structure so as to better reflect the increasing weight of EMDCs in the world economy. The Fund must remain a quota-based institution. We call on the membership of the IMF to find ways to implement the 14th General Review of Quotas without further delay. We reiterate our call on the IMF to develop options to move ahead with its reform process, with a view to ensuring increased voice and representation of EMDCs, in case the 2010 reforms are not entered into force by the end of the year. We also call on the membership of the IMF to reach a final agreement on a new quota formula together with the 15th General Review of Quotas so as not to further jeopardize the postponed deadline of January 2015.

19. We welcome the goals set by the World Bank Group to help countries end extreme poverty and to promote shared prosperity. We recognize the potential of this new strategy in support of the fulfillment of these ambitious goals by the international community. This potential will only be realized, however, if the institution and its membership effectively move towards more democratic governance structures, strengthen the Bank’s financial capacity and explore innovative ways to enhance development financing and knowledge sharing while pursuing a strong client orientation that recognizes each country’s development needs. We look forward to initiating the work on the next shareholding review at the World Bank as soon as possible in order to meet the agreed deadline of October 2015. In this sense, we call for an international financial architecture that is more conducive to overcoming development challenges. We have been very active in improving the international financial architecture through our multilateral coordination and through our financial cooperation initiatives, which will, in a complementary manner, increase the diversity and availability of resources for promoting development and ensuring stability in the global economy.

20. We are committed to raise our economic cooperation to a qualitatively new level. To achieve this, we emphasize the importance of establishing a road map for intra-BRICS economic cooperation. In this regard, we welcome the proposals for a “BRICS Economic Cooperation Strategy” and a “Framework of BRICS Closer Economic Partnership”, which lay down steps to promote intra-BRICS economic, trade and investment cooperation. Based on the documents tabled and informed by the input of the BRICS Think Tanks Council (BTTC), we instruct our Sherpas to advance discussions with a view to submit their proposal for endorsement by the next BRICS Summit.

21. We believe all countries should enjoy due rights, equal opportunities and fair participation in global economic, financial and trade affairs, recognizing that countries have different capacities and are at different levels of development. We strive for an open world economy with efficient allocation of resources, free flow of goods, and fair and orderly competition to the benefit of all. In reaffirming our support for an open, inclusive, non-discriminatory, transparent and rule-based multilateral trading system, we will continue our efforts towards the successful conclusion of the Doha Round of the World Trade Organization (WTO), following the positive results of the Ninth Ministerial Conference (MC9), held in Bali, Indonesia, in December 2013. In this context, we reaffirm our commitment to establish by the end of this year a post-Bali work program for concluding the Doha Round, based on the progress already made and in keeping with the mandate established in the Doha Development Agenda. We affirm that this work program should prioritize the issues where legally binding outcomes could not be achieved at MC9, including Public Stock-Holding for Food Security Purposes. We look forward to the implementation of the Agreement on Trade Facilitation. We call upon international partners to provide support to the poorest, most vulnerable WTO members to enable them to implement this Agreement, which should support their development objectives. We strongly support the WTO dispute settlement system as a cornerstone of the security and predictability of the multilateral trading system and we will enhance our ongoing dialogue on substantive and practical matters relating to it, including in the ongoing negotiations on WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding reform. We recognize the importance of Regional Trade Agreements, which should complement the multilateral trading system, and of keeping them open, inclusive and transparent, as well as refraining from introducing exclusive and discriminatory clauses and standards.

22. We reaffirm the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s (UNCTAD) mandate as the focal point in the UN system dedicated to consider the interrelated issues of trade, investment, finance and technology from a development perspective. UNCTAD’s mandate and work are unique and necessary to deal with the challenges of development and growth in the increasingly interdependent global economy. In congratulating UNCTAD for the 50th anniversary of its foundation in 2014, which is also the anniversary of the establishment of the Group of 77, we further reaffirm the importance of strengthening UNCTAD’s capacity to deliver on its programs of consensus building, policy dialogue, research, technical cooperation and capacity building so that it is better equipped to deliver on its development mandate.

23. We acknowledge the important role that State Owned Companies (SOCs) play in the economy and encourage our SOCs to continue to explore ways of cooperation, exchange of information and best practices. We also recognize the fundamental role played by small and medium-sized enterprises in the economies of our countries as major creators of jobs and wealth. We will enhance cooperation and recognize the need for strengthening intra-BRICS dialogue with a view to promote international exchange and cooperation and to foster innovation, research and development.

24. We underline that 2015 marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations (UN) and the end of the Second World War. In this connection, we support the UN to initiate and organize commemorative events to mark and pay tribute to these two historical moments in human history, and reaffirm our commitment to safeguarding a just and fair international order based on the UN Charter, maintaining world peace and security, as well as promoting human progress and development.

25. We reiterate our strong commitment to the UN as the fundamental multilateral organization entrusted with helping the international community maintain international peace and security, protect and foster human rights and promote sustainable development. The UN enjoys universal membership and is at the very center of global governance and multilateralism. We recall the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document. We reaffirm the need for a comprehensive reform of the UN, including its Security Council, with a view to making it more representative, effective and efficient, so that it can adequately respond to global challenges. China and Russia reiterate the importance they attach to Brazil, India and South Africa’s status and role in international affairs and support their aspiration to play a greater role in the UN.

26. We recall that development and security are closely interlinked, mutually reinforcing and key to attaining sustainable peace. We reiterate our view that the establishment of sustainable peace requires a comprehensive, concerted and determined approach, based on mutual trust, mutual benefit, equity and cooperation, that addresses the root causes of conflicts, including their political, economic and social dimensions. In this context, we also stress the close interrelation between peacekeeping and peacebuilding. We also highlight the importance of bringing gender perspectives to conflict prevention and resolution, peacebuilding, peacekeeping, rehabilitation and reconstruction efforts.

27. We will continue our joint efforts in coordinating positions and acting on shared interests on global peace and security issues for the common well-being of humanity. We stress our commitment to the sustainable and peaceful settlement of disputes, according to the principles and purposes of the UN Charter. We condemn unilateral military interventions and economic sanctions in violation of international law and universally recognized norms of international relations. Bearing this in mind, we emphasize the unique importance of the indivisible nature of security, and that no State should strengthen its security at the expense of the security of others.

28. We agree to continue to treat all human rights, including the right to development, in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing and with the same emphasis. We will foster dialogue and cooperation on the basis of equality and mutual respect in the field of human rights, both within BRICS and in multilateral fora – including the United Nations Human Rights Council where all BRICS serve as members in 2014 – taking into account the necessity to promote, protect and fulfill human rights in a non-selective, non-politicized and constructive manner, and without double standards.

29. We commend the efforts made by the United Nations, the African Union (AU), Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries (CPLP), among others, in support for the realization of legislative and presidential elections in Guinea Bissau, paving the way for the return to constitutional democracy in the country. We recognize the importance of promoting long-term political stability in Guinea-Bissau, which necessarily encompasses measures to reduce food insecurity and to advance a comprehensive security sector reform, as proposed by the Guinea-Bissau Configuration of the UN Peacebuilding Commission. Similarly, we also welcome the efforts of the UN, AU and Southern African Development Community (SADC) in support of legislative and presidential elections in Madagascar, assisting in the return of constitutional democracy in the country.

30. We commend the efforts of the international community in addressing instability in Africa through engagement with, and coordination by, the AU and its Peace and Security Council. We express our deep concern at the deterioration of the security and the humanitarian situation in West Africa. We call upon all parties in these conflicts to cease hostilities, exercise restraint and engage in dialogue to ensure return to peace and stability. However, we also note the progress that has been made in areas of the region in addressing political and security challenges.

31. We also express our concern with the plight of the abducted women and children of Chibok and call for an end to the continued terrorist acts perpetrated by Boko Haram.

32. We support the efforts of the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) in its task to help the Government of Mali fully stabilize the country, facilitate national political dialogue, protect civilians, monitor the human rights situation, create conditions for the provision of humanitarian assistance and the return of displaced persons, and extend the State authority in the whole country. We emphasize the importance of an inclusive political process; the immediate implementation of a disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) process; and political, economic and social development in order for Mali to achieve sustainable peace and stability.

33. We express our concern about the ongoing political and humanitarian crises in South Sudan. We condemn the continuation of violence against civilians and call upon all parties to ensure a safe environment for the delivery of humanitarian assistance. We also condemn the continuation of confrontations despite the successive commitments to the cessation of hostilities and express our belief that a sustainable solution to the crisis is only possible through an inclusive political dialogue aimed at national reconciliation. We support, in this regard, the regional efforts to find a peaceful solution to the crisis, especially the mediation process led by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). We welcome the “Agreement to Resolve the Crisis in South Sudan”, signed on May 9, and expect the political leaders of South Sudan to remain committed to the negotiation process and to the completion of dialogue on the formation of a transitional government of national unity within 60 days, as announced by IGAD on June 10. We commend the efforts of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan to fulfill its mandate and express our deep concern about the armed attacks that were led against UN bases in the country.

34. We reiterate our grave concern with the situation in the Central African Republic (CAR). We strongly condemn the abuses and acts of violence against the civilian population, including sectarian violence, and urge all armed groups to cease hostilities immediately. We recognize the efforts of the Economic Community of Central African States and the AU to restore peace and stability in the country. We commend the establishment of the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the CAR (MINUSCA). We express our support for a successful transition from the African-led International Support Mission to the CAR (MISCA) to MINUSCA by 15 September 2014. We urge the transitional authorities in the CAR to adhere strictly to the N’Djamena Roadmap. We call upon all parties to allow safe and unhindered humanitarian access to those in need. We reaffirm our readiness to work with the international community to assist the CAR in accelerating the implementation of the political process of the country.

35. We support the efforts by the UN, in particular the UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO), deployed under UN Security Council resolution 2098, and the regional and sub-regional organizations to bring peace and stability to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and we call upon all involved to honor their obligations in order to achieve lasting peace and stability in the DRC.

36. We welcome the AU Malabo Summit decision to establish an interim African Capacity for Immediate Response to Crises (ACIRC) by October 2014 to respond quickly to crisis situations as they arise. We stress the importance of adequate support to ensure the timely operationalization of the ACIRC, pending the final establishment of the African Stand-by Force.

37. We express deep concern about the ongoing violence and the deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Syria and condemn the increasing violations of human rights by all parties. We reiterate our view that there is no military solution to the conflict, and highlight the need to avoid its further militarization. We call upon all parties to commit immediately to a complete cease-fire, to halt violence and to allow and facilitate immediate, safe, full and unimpeded access for humanitarian organizations and agencies, in compliance with the UN Security Council resolution 2139. We recognize practical steps undertaken by the Syrian parties in implementing its requirements, including the practice of local cease-fire agreements reached between the Syrian authorities and the opposition forces.

We reiterate our condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, wherever it occurs. We are gravely concerned at the continued threat of terrorism and extremism in Syria. We call on all Syrian parties to commit to putting an end to terrorist acts perpetrated by Al-Qaeda, its affiliates and other terrorist organizations.

We strongly condemn the use of chemical weapons in any circumstances. We welcome the decision of the Syrian Arab Republic to accede to the Chemical Weapons Convention. In accordance with related Organization for the Proscription of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) Executive Council decisions and UN Security Council resolution 2118, we reiterate the importance of the complete removal and elimination of the Syrian chemical weapons. We commend the progress in that regard and welcome the announcement that the removal of declared chemicals from the Syrian Arab Republic was completed. We call on all Syrian parties and interested external actors with relevant capabilities to work closely together and with the OPCW and the UN to arrange for the security of the monitoring and destruction mission in its final stage.

We support the mediation role played by the UN. We appreciate the contribution made by former Joint UN – Arab League Special Representative for Syria, Mr. Lakhdar Brahimi, and welcome the appointment of Mr. Staffan De Mistura as UN Special Envoy to Syria, and express our hope for his active efforts to promote an early resumption of comprehensive negotiations. We recall that national dialogue and reconciliation are key to the political solution for the Syrian crisis. We take note of the recent Syrian presidential elections. We stress that only an inclusive political process, led by the Syrians, as recommended in the Action Group on Syria Final Communiqué of 2012, will lead to peace, effective protection of civilians, the realization of the legitimate aspirations of the Syrian society for freedom and prosperity and respect for Syrian independence, territorial integrity and sovereignty. We emphasize that a national reconciliation process needs to be launched as early as possible, in the interest of the national unity of Syria. To that end, we urge all parties in Syria to demonstrate political will, enhance mutual understanding, exercise restraint and commit to seeking common ground in accommodating their differences.

38. We reaffirm our commitment to contribute to a comprehensive, just and lasting settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict on the basis of the universally recognized international legal framework, including the relevant UN resolutions, the Madrid Principles and the Arab Peace Initiative. We believe that the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a fundamental component for building a sustainable peace in the Middle East. We call upon Israel and Palestine to resume negotiations leading to a two-State solution with a contiguous and economically viable Palestinian State existing side by side in peace with Israel, within mutually agreed and internationally recognized borders based on the 4 June 1967 lines, with East Jerusalem as its capital. We oppose the continuous construction and expansion of settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories by the Israeli Government, which violates international law, gravely undermines peace efforts and threatens the viability of the two-State solution. We welcome recent efforts to achieve intra-Palestinian unity, including the formation of a national unity government and steps towards conducting general elections, which is key element to consolidate a democratic and sustainable Palestinian State, and call on the parties to fully commit to the obligations assumed by Palestine. We call on the UN Security Council to fully exercise its functions under the UN Charter with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We recall with satisfaction the decision of the UN General Assembly to proclaim 2014 the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, welcome the efforts of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in providing assistance and protection for Palestine refugees and encourage the international community to continue to support the activities of the agency.

39. We express our support for the convening, at the earliest possible date, of the Conference on the establishment of a Middle East zone free of nuclear weapons and all other weapons of mass destruction. We call upon all states of the region to attend the Conference and to engage constructively and in a pragmatic manner with a view to advancing that goal.

40. Noting the open-ended consultations on a draft International Code of Conduct on Outer Space Activities, and the active and constructive engagement of our countries in these consultations, we call for an inclusive and consensus-based multilateral negotiation to be conducted within the framework of the UN without specific deadlines in order to reach a balanced outcome that addresses the needs and reflects the concerns of all participants. Reaffirming our will that the exploration and use of outer space shall be for peaceful purposes, we stress that negotiations for the conclusion of an international agreement or agreements to prevent an arms race in outer space remain a priority task of the Conference on Disarmament, and welcome the introduction by China and Russia of the updated draft Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space, the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects.

41. While reiterating our view that there is no alternative to a negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear issue, we reaffirm our support to its resolution through political and diplomatic means and dialogue. In this context, we welcome the positive momentum generated by talks between Iran and the E3+3 and encourage the thorough implementation of the Geneva Joint Plan of Action of 24 November 2013, with a view to achieving a comprehensive and long-lasting solution to this issue. We also encourage Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to continue strengthening their cooperation and dialogue on the basis of the Joint Statement signed on 11 November 2013. We recognize Iran’s inalienable right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy in a manner consistent with its international obligations.

42. Recognizing that peace, security and development are closely interlinked, we reaffirm that Afghanistan needs time, development assistance and cooperation, preferential access to world markets and foreign investment to attain lasting peace and stability. We support the commitment of the international community to remain engaged in Afghanistan during the transformation decade (2015-2024), as enunciated at the Bonn International Conference in December 2011. We stress that the UN should play an increasingly important role in assisting Afghanistan’s national reconciliation, recovery and economic reconstruction. We also reaffirm our commitment to support Afghanistan’s emergence as a peaceful, stable and democratic state, free of terrorism and extremism, and underscore the need for more effective regional and international cooperation for the stabilization of Afghanistan, including by combating terrorism. We extend support to the efforts aimed at combating illicit traffic in opiates originating in Afghanistan within the framework of the Paris Pact. We expect a broad-based and inclusive peace process in Afghanistan which is Afghan-led and Afghan-owned. We welcome the second round of the presidential elections in Afghanistan which contribute to the democratic transfer of power in this country. We welcome China’s offer to host the Fourth Heart of Asia Ministerial Conference in August 2014.

43. We are deeply concerned by the situation in Iraq. We strongly support the Iraqi government in its effort to overcome the crisis, uphold national sovereignty and territorial integrity. We are concerned about spillover effects of the instability in Iraq resulting from increased terrorist activities in the region, and urge all parties to address the terrorist threat in a consistent manner. We urge all regional and global players to refrain from interference that will further deepen the crisis and to support the Iraqi government and the people of Iraq in their efforts to overcome the crisis, and build a stable, inclusive and united Iraq. We emphasize the importance of national reconciliation and unity in Iraq, taking into consideration the wars and conflicts the Iraqi people have suffered and in this context we commend the peaceful and orderly holding of the latest parliamentary elections.

44. We express our deep concern with the situation in Ukraine. We call for a comprehensive dialogue, the de-escalation of the conflict and restraint from all the actors involved, with a view to finding a peaceful political solution, in full compliance with the UN Charter and universally recognized human rights and fundamental freedoms.

45. We reaffirm our commitment to continue to tackle transnational organized crime, with full respect for human rights, in order to reduce the negative impact it has on individuals and societies. We encourage joint efforts aimed at preventing and combating transnational criminal activities in accordance with national legislations and international legal instruments, especially the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. In this regard, we welcome BRICS cooperation in multilateral fora, highlighting our engagement in the ECOSOC Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice.

46. Piracy and armed robbery at sea are complex phenomena that must be fought effectively in a comprehensive and integrated manner. We welcome the efforts made by the international community to counter maritime piracy and call upon all stakeholders – civilian and military, public and private – to remain engaged in the fight against this phenomenon. We also highlight the need for a transparent and objective review of the High Risk Areas, with a view to avoiding unnecessary negative effects on the economy and security of coastal states. We commit to strengthen our cooperation on this serious issue.

47. We are deeply concerned by the world drug problem, which continues to threaten public health, safety and well-being and to undermine social, economic and political stability and sustainable development. We are committed to countering the world drug problem, which remains a common and shared responsibility, through an integrated, multidisciplinary, mutually reinforcing and balanced approach to supply and demand reduction strategies, in line with the three UN drug conventions and other relevant norms and principles of international law. We welcome the substantive work done by Russia in preparing and hosting the International Ministers Meeting on 15 May 2014 to discuss the world drug problem. We take note of the proposal for the creation of an Anti-Drug Working Group presented at the Second Meeting of BRICS Heads of Drug Control Agencies.

48. We reiterate our strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations and stress that there can be no justification, whatsoever, for any acts of terrorism, whether based upon ideological, religious, political, racial, ethnic, or any other justification. We call upon all entities to refrain from financing, encouraging, providing training for or otherwise supporting terrorist activities. We believe that the UN has a central role in coordinating international action against terrorism, which must be conducted in accordance with international law, including the UN Charter, and with respect to human rights and fundamental freedoms. In this context, we reaffirm our commitment to the implementation of the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy. We express our concern at the increasing use, in a globalized society, by terrorists and their supporters, of information and communications technologies (ICTs), in particular the Internet and other media, and reiterate that such technologies can be powerful tools in countering the spread of terrorism, including by promoting tolerance and dialogue among peoples. We will continue to work together to conclude as soon as possible negotiations and to adopt in the UN General Assembly the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism. We also stress the need to promote cooperation among our countries in preventing terrorism, especially in the context of major events.

49. We believe that ICTs should provide instruments to foster sustainable economic progress and social inclusion, working together with the ICT industry, civil society and academia in order to realize the ICT-related potential opportunities and benefits for all. We agree that particular attention should be given to young people and to small and medium-sized enterprises, with a view to promoting international exchange and cooperation, as well as to fostering innovation, ICT research and development. We agree that the use and development of ICTs through international cooperation and universally accepted norms and principles of international law is of paramount importance, in order to ensure a peaceful, secure and open digital and Internet space. We strongly condemn acts of mass electronic surveillance and data collection of individuals all over the world, as well as violation of the sovereignty of States and of human rights, in particular the right to privacy. We take note of the Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet, held in São Paulo, on 23-24 April 2014. We thank Brazil for having organized it.

50. We will explore cooperation on combating cybercrimes and we also recommit to the negotiation of a universal legally binding instrument in that field. We consider that the UN has a central role in this matter. We agree it is necessary to preserve ICTs, particularly the Internet, as an instrument of peace and development and to prevent its use as a weapon. Moreover, we commit ourselves to working together in order to identify possibilities of developing joint activities to address common security concerns in the use of ICTs. We reiterate the common approach set forth in the eThekwini Declaration about the importance of security in the use of ICTs. We welcome the decision of the National Security Advisors to establish a group of experts of BRICS member States which will elaborate practical proposals concerning major fields of cooperation and coordinate our positions in international fora. Bearing in mind the significance of these issues, we take note of Russia’s proposal of a BRICS agreement on cooperation in this field to be jointly elaborated.

51. We reiterate our commitment to the implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity and its Protocols, with special attention to the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 and the Aichi Targets. We recognize the challenge posed by the agreed targets on conservation of biodiversity and reaffirm the need to implement the decisions on resource mobilization agreed to by all parties in Hyderabad in 2012, and set resource mobilization targets that are ambitious in order to allow for their fulfillment.

52. Acknowledging that climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing humankind, we call on all countries to build upon the decisions adopted in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) with a view to reaching a successful conclusion by 2015, of negotiations on the development of a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the Convention applicable to all Parties, in accordance with the principles and provisions of UNFCCC, in particular the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. In this regard, we reiterate our support to the Presidency of the 20th session of the Conference of the Parties and the 10th session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol, to be held in Lima, Peru, in December 2014. We also note the convening of the UN Climate Summit 2014 to be held this September.

53. While bearing in mind that fossil fuel remains one of the major sources of energy, we reiterate our belief that renewable and clean energy, research and development of new technologies and energy efficiency, can constitute an important driver to promote sustainable development, create new economic growth, reduce energy costs and increase the efficiency in the use of natural resources. Considering the dynamic link between renewable and clean energy and sustainable development, we reaffirm the importance of continuing international efforts aimed at promoting the deployment of renewable and clean energy and energy efficiency technologies, taking into account national policies, priorities and resources. We stand for strengthening international cooperation to promote renewable and clean energy and to universalize energy access, which is of great importance to improving the standard of living of our peoples.

54. We are committed to working towards an inclusive, transparent and participative intergovernmental process for building a universal and integrated development agenda with poverty eradication as the central and overarching objective. The agenda should integrate the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development in a balanced and comprehensive manner with concise, implementable and measurable goals, taking into account differing national realities and levels of development and respecting national policies and priorities. The Post-2015 Development Agenda must also be based on and fully respect all Rio principles on sustainable development, including the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. We welcome the outcome document of the UN General Assembly Special Event on the Millennium Development Goals, which decided to launch an intergovernmental process at the beginning of the 69th Session of the UN General Assembly that will lead to the adoption of the Post-2015 Development Agenda.

55. We reiterate our commitment to the UN General Assembly Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to working together to achieve a consensual and ambitious proposal on SDGs. We emphasize the importance of the work by the Intergovernmental Committee of Experts on Sustainable Development Financing and highlight the need for an effective sustainable development financing strategy to facilitate the mobilization of resources in achieving sustainable development objectives and supporting developing countries in the implementation efforts, with ODA as a major source of financing. We support the creation of a facilitation mechanism for the development, transfer and dissemination of clean and environmentally sound technologies and call for the establishment of a working group within the UN on this proposal, taking into account the Rio+20 outcome document and the Secretary General’s reports on the issue. In this regard, we reaffirm that the outcome of each of these processes can contribute to the formulation of Sustainable Development Goals.

56. We recognize the strategic importance of education for sustainable development and inclusive economic growth. We reaffirm our commitment to accelerating progress in attaining the Education for All goals and education-related Millennium Development Goals by 2015 and stress that the development agenda beyond 2015 should build on these goals to ensure equitable, inclusive and quality education and lifelong learning for all. We are willing to strengthen intra-BRICS cooperation in the area and welcome the meeting of Ministers of Education held in Paris, in November 2013. We intend to continue cooperation with relevant international organizations. We encourage the initiative to establish the BRICS Network University.

57. In March 2014 we agreed to collaborate through dialogue, cooperation, sharing of experiences and capacity building on population related matters of mutual concern to member states. We recognize the vital importance of the demographic dividend that many of us possess to advance our sustainable development as well as the need to integrate population factors into national development plans, and to promote a long-term balanced population and development. The demographic transition and post-transition challenges, including population ageing and mortality reduction are amongst the most important challenges facing the world today. We confirm our strong commitment to address social issues in general and in particular gender inequality, women’s rights and issues facing young people and we reaffirm our determination to ensure sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights for all.

58. We recognize that corruption negatively affects sustainable economic growth, poverty reduction and financial stability. We are committed to combat domestic and foreign bribery, and strengthen international cooperation, including law enforcement cooperation, in accordance with multilaterally established principles and norms, especially the UN Convention Against Corruption.

59. Considering the link between culture and sustainable development, as well as the role of cultural diplomacy as a promoter of understanding between peoples, we will encourage cooperation between BRICS countries in the cultural sector, including on the multilateral basis. Recognizing the contribution and the benefits of cultural exchanges and cooperation in enhancing our mutual understanding and friendship, we will actively promote greater awareness, understanding and appreciation of each other’s arts and culture. In this regard, we ask our relevant authorities responsible for culture to explore areas of practical cooperation, including to expedite negotiations on the draft agreement on cultural cooperation.

60. We are pleased with progress in implementing the eThekwini Action Plan, which further enhanced our cooperation and unleashed greater potential for our development. In this regard, we commend South Africa for the full implementation of the eThekwini Action Plan.

61. We are committed to promoting agricultural cooperation and to exchange information regarding strategies for ensuring access to food for the most vulnerable population, reduction of negative impact of climate change on food security and adaptation of agriculture to climate change. We recall with satisfaction the decision of UN General Assembly to declare 2014 the International Year of Family Farming.

62. We take note of the following meetings which were held in preparation for this Summit:

- Third BRICS Think Tanks Council (BTTC);

- Third BRICS Business Council;

- Sixth Academic Forum;

- Fifth Business Forum;

- Fourth Financial Forum.

63. We welcome the outcomes of the meeting of the BRICS Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors and endorse the Joint Communiqué of the Meeting of the BRICS Trade Ministers held in preparation for the Summit.

64. The 5^th edition of the BRICS Business Forum provided an opportunity for match-making and for in-depth discussion of highly relevant issues of the trade and investment agenda. We welcome the meeting of the BRICS Business Council and commend it for its Annual Report 2013/2014. We encourage the respective business communities to follow-up the initiatives proposed and to deepen dialogue and cooperation in the five areas dealt with by the Industry/Sector Working Groups with a view to intensifying trade and investment flows amongst BRICS countries as well as between BRICS and other partners around the world.

65. We reiterate our commitment made during the BRICS Leaders-Africa Retreat at the 5^th BRICS Summit to foster and develop BRICS-Africa cooperation in support of the socioeconomic development of Africa, particularly with regard to infrastructure development and industrialization. We welcome the inclusion of these issues in discussions during the BRICS Business Council Meeting, held in Johannesburg in August 2013.

66. We welcome the BTTC Study “Towards a Long-Term Strategy for BRICS: Recommendations by the BTTC”. We acknowledge the decision taken by the BTTC, taken at its Rio de Janeiro meeting in March 2014 to focus its work on the five pillars upon which the BRICS long-term strategy for cooperation will rest. The BTTC is encouraged to develop strategic pathways and action plans that will lead to the realization of this long-term strategy.

67. We welcome the holding of the first Meeting of the BRICS Ministers of Science, Technology and Innovation and the Cape Town Declaration, which is aimed at: (i) strengthening cooperation in science, technology and innovation; (ii) addressing common global and regional socio-economic challenges utilizing shared experiences and complementarities; (iii) co-generating new knowledge and innovative products, services and processes utilizing appropriate funding and investment instruments; and (iv) promoting, where appropriate, joint BRICS partnerships with other strategic actors in the developing world. We instruct the BRICS Ministers of Science and Technology to sign at their next meeting the Memorandum of Understanding on Science, Technology and Innovation, which provides a strategic framework for cooperation in this field.

68. We welcome the establishment of the BRICS Information Sharing and Exchange Platform, which seeks to facilitate trade and investment cooperation.

69. We will continue to improve competition policy and enforcement, undertake actions to address challenges that BRICS Competition Authorities face and further enable competitive environments in order to enhance contributions to economic growth in our economies. We note South Africa’s offer to host the 4^th Meeting of BRICS Competition Authorities in 2015.

70. We reiterate our commitment to fostering our partnership for common development. To this end, we adopt the Fortaleza Action Plan.

71. Russia, India, China and South Africa extend their warm appreciation to the Government and people of Brazil for hosting the Sixth BRICS Summit in Fortaleza.

72. Brazil, India, China and South Africa convey their appreciation to Russia for its offer to host the Seventh BRICS Summit in 2015 in the city of Ufa and extend their full support to that end.

Fortaleza Action Plan

1. Meeting of BRICS Ministers of Foreign Affairs / International Relations on the margins of UN General Assembly.

2. Meeting of BRICS National Security Advisors.

3. Mid-term meeting of BRICS Sherpas and Sous-Sherpas.

4. Meetings of BRICS Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors on the margins of G20 meetings, WB/IMF meetings, as well as stand-alone meetings, as required.

5. Meetings of BRICS Trade Ministers on the margin of multilateral events, or stand-alone meetings, as required.

6. Meeting of BRICS Ministers of Agriculture and Agrarian Development, preceded by the Meeting of BRICS Agricultural Cooperation Working Group.

7. Meeting of BRICS Health Ministers.

8. Meeting of BRICS Ministers of Science, Technology and Innovation.

9. Meeting of BRICS Ministers of Education.

10. Meeting of Ministers or Senior Officials responsible for social security, on the margins of a multilateral meeting.

11. BRICS Seminar of Officials and Experts on Population Matters.

12. Meeting of BRICS Cooperatives (held in Curitiba on 14-16 May 2014).

13. Meetings of financial and fiscal authorities on the margins of WB/IMF meetings as well as stand-alone meetings, as required.

14. Meetings of the BRICS Contact Group on Economic and Trade Issues (CGETI).

15. Meeting of the BRICS Friendship Cities and Local Governments Cooperation Forum.

16. Meeting of the BRICS Urbanization Forum.

17. Meeting of BRICS Competition Authorities in 2015 in South Africa.

18. Meeting of BRICS Heads of National Statistical Institutions.

19. Meeting of Anti-Drug Experts.

20. Meeting of BRICS Experts on Anti-corruption cooperation, on the margins of a multilateral meeting

21. Consultations amongst BRICS Permanent Missions and/or Embassies, as appropriate, in New York, Vienna, Rome, Paris, Washington, Nairobi and Geneva, where appropriate.

22. Consultative meeting of BRICS Senior Officials on the margins of relevant sustainable development, environment and climate related international fora, where appropriate.

23. Sports and Mega Sporting Events.

New areas of cooperation to be explored

- Mutual recognition of Higher Education Degrees and Diplomas;

- Labor and Employment, Social Security, Social Inclusion Public Policies;

- Foreign Policy Planning Dialogue;

- Insurance and reinsurance;

- Seminar of Experts on E-commerce.

*This is the first of a five-part series called Sequence of the Seashells, outlining decolonial data governance and translocal market infrastructure, which is all about describing how communities can reclaim authority over the compliance chains that determine the value of their own environmental and social data.

The sections are What is Data, The Crusoe Economy, The in-between space is a Caravanserai, Behold! The World Data Organization, and Translocal Intermediaries. Please share and subscribe!

What Is Data?

Data is and is not a resource. It is not sugar or oil, and the pipeline metaphor that has governed decades of technology policy has done more damage than it has produced insight. Oil is extracted, refined, and burned. Once it is gone, it is gone. Data does not behave this way. Value is accumulated through reciprocity. Data provides access, evidence, and relationships. And yet data is also a resource in the most consequential sense: it can be owned, enclosed, withheld, and weaponized. It can be made to serve accumulation rather than circulation, consolidation rather than equity. The same speck of information that empowers a community to make a land claim can, in the wrong hands, be used to dispossess it. Whether data functions as a commons or as a commodity is not a technical question. It is a question of governance — and governance requires intermediaries.

Long before the ledger, before the coin, before the debt tablet, value moved through reciprocity. The anthropological record is consistent on this: in gift economies, in potlatch systems, in the communal land management of Pacific Island communities, in the seasonal labor exchanges of peasant economies across every continent, value was not accumulated only by extraction, it was accumulated through circulation, obligation, and exchange. The quality and depth of the relationships through which things moved defined principled trust networks.

The anthropologist Marcel Mauss when discussing the hau in Maori exchange, describes the spirit of the gift. What he meant was that the object given carries the giver with it, and the obligation to return is not debt in the modern sense but the maintenance of a living relationship (Mauss 12). Value, on that account, is not a quantity. It is a measure of connection. We have not lost this. It survives in every community that still organizes around stewardship rather than ownership, around reciprocal obligation rather than contract. What a decolonial accounting program proposes should not be nostalgia for a pre-monetary past. It should simply be the recognition that these circuits of reciprocal value never disappeared, but were simply excluded from indigenous accounting ledgers. Restoring them does not require abolishing markets. It requires building the intermediary infrastructure through which reciprocal values can be measured, verified, and made legible to the institutions that currently pretend it does not exist.

Data is an immense speck

Dr. Seuss also understood this before the technologists did. In Horton Hears a Who!, the entire narrative turns on a speck of dust, a particle so small, so apparently inconsequential, that every other creature in the jungle dismisses it as nothing. Horton, the elephant, hears something in it. He hears a whole civilization: the Whos of Whoville, with their mayor and their children and their houses and their particular way of being alive. The speck is not nothing. The speck is everything to the Whos. The problem is not that the Whos lack existence. The problem is that the jungle’s accounting system has no category for them. They are too small to be visible, too distant to be heard, too easy to ignore when more powerful creatures have decided in advance what counts as real.

When we visualize data in all of it’s abstraction, it is difficult to think of it as something greater than a speck. Yet data is not only the abstracted, aggregated, platform-harvested data that fills the ledgers of surveillance capitalism but rather the granular, particular, qualitative signal generated by a community, a household, a mataqali, a fishing village, a displaced family living at the margin of a climate event. They are the sequence of seashells, and if we only see it as miniscule, it is easy to dismiss. In our economic global reality, however, the vehicle through which the 21st century’s relationship with technology is determined, data is precisely how we organize and manage economic systems. Whether it gets heard depends entirely on whether there is a Horton in the system — intermediaries with the structural capacity to listen, to verify, to amplify, and to hold the protocol that says: a person’s interaction is a value, no matter how small.

The standard argument for data markets runs like this: data is the new oil, and whoever controls the pipeline wins. That argument has served the consolidators well. It has not served the Global South. It has not served indigenous communities, peasant economies, displaced peoples, or the climate-vulnerable margins of every region. The pipeline metaphor is itself the problem and we are helplessly watching the unraveling of any genuine global security as it is being driven off a cliff by a handful of billionaire madmen seeking to control oil as if it contained an elixir of life.

Some Intermediary categories

The categories like Cooperative Warehousing and Storage Hubs, Regional Logistics Cooperatives, Digital Market Commons Platforms, Community Clearing and Accounting Systems, Circular Economy Fabrication Centers, Community Broadband and Cloud Infrastructure, Ecological Storage and Distribution Facilities, Health and Care Exchange Platforms, Community Insurance and Risk Pools, and Local Procurement and Fair-Trade Exchanges are not simply sectors. They are intermediary types. Each one is a node in a data market that, if properly constituted, can distribute value across communities rather than extract it upward.

This is the central argument: intermediaries are where value is produced, verified, and retained. Without them, data flows toward consolidation. With them, data becomes the basis for a new kind of infrastructure equity.

The Labor of Data and the Invisibility of Intermediary Work

Standard national accounting treats data as a byproduct of economic activity rather than as a product of labor in its own right. The System of National Accounts — the SNA, the framework that governs how governments measure economic output — records what is transacted. It counts the sale, the contract, the commodity that changes hands. What it does not count is what makes transaction possible in the first place: the verification work, the storage infrastructure, the consent protocols, the local knowledge that had to be translated into a form legible to the system before any of it could be used. This labor is real. It has costs. It has workers. It produces value. None of it appears in GDP.

The System of Environmental-Economic Accounting — SEEA — was developed precisely because GDP was recognized as inadequate for measuring ecological and social value. But SEEA inherits the same foundational assumption: value is what can be priced and transacted. Stewardship, reciprocity, and community governance of data and land do not have market prices in the conventional sense, so they remain at the margins of the framework, acknowledged in principle and undervalued in practice.

SDG-SNA-SEEA Harmonization

As preciously described in the Black Paper, the Sustainable Development Goals gesture toward this gap. The 2030 Agenda calls for data disaggregation, for leaving no one behind, for measuring what matters to communities rather than only what matters to markets. But the institutional apparatus through which the SDGs are measured — the harmonization of SDG indicators with the SNA and SEEA frameworks — routes that ambition back through the same accounting logic it was meant to challenge. The result is a system that can tell you the market value of a forest’s timber but not the governance value of the community that has stewarded it for generations.

Stewardship remains, as it has always been, off the books. And yet the intermediary infrastructure through which all of this data moves — the platforms, the clearing systems, the logistics networks, the cloud architecture, the financial instruments that bundle and price data assets — generates some of the largest concentrations of private wealth in human history. That infrastructure is not ungoverned. It is governed very precisely, by Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Brussels, and Geneva, under trade enforcement mechanisms centered in Washington. The communities whose labor, land, and ecological knowledge feed the system are off the books. The infrastructure that monetizes what they generate is not. That asymmetry is not an oversight. It is by design.

Intemerate accounting begins from the opposite premise. Value is not produced at the point of extraction. It is produced and sustained through the chain of stewardship, verification, and intermediation. A Cooperative Warehousing and Storage Hub is not simply a building. It is an accounting node. Every transaction that passes through it — every measurement of food stored, energy used, waste generated, labor contributed — is a data event. That data event has value. The question is who captures it, who verifies it, and who holds the protocol that determines its meaning and for whose benefit.

The intermediary holds the protocol. That is what gives intermediaries their structural importance, and that is why translocal data markets — markets organized around distributed, community-anchored intermediary networks — can produce equity outcomes that platform-based data markets cannot.

Qualitative Value and the Limits of Quantification

One of the persistent failures of natural capital accounting is its insistence that everything must be priced to be counted. Biodiversity offsets. Ecosystem services. Carbon credits. The logic is: if it has a price, the market will protect it. The evidence does not support this. What gets priced is what is already legible to the market. What is already legible to the market is what already belongs to the market’s frame of reference — which is to say, it belongs to the accumulation regime that produced the crisis in the first place.

Intemerate accounting rejects this substitution. Qualitative data — the kind generated by community journals, oral testimony, FPIC protocols, resilience scoring exercises, and participatory observation — is not a degraded form of quantitative data. It is a different register of measurement. It captures what the Variable Data Chart cannot: the texture of reciprocity, the social cost of displacement, the ecological knowledge embedded in a mataqali’s management of its land over generations.

The intermediary’s role here is not to translate qualitative data into a price. It is to hold qualitative data within a governance structure that protects its integrity while making it legible for capital access purposes. Community Clearing and Accounting Systems, Health and Care Exchange Platforms, and Community Insurance and Risk Pools all function in this register. They are not simply financial intermediaries. They are epistemological intermediaries. They mediate between the register of community knowledge and the register of institutional finance, without collapsing the first into the second. And quite simply, they should be benefit the most.

This is the distinction between measurable and non-measurable value that most accounting frameworks refuse to hold.

Protocol and Reciprocity as Accounting Infrastructure

The intermediary categories noted above are not politically neutral. They are constituted by protocols of reciprocity — rules about who contributes, who benefits, who holds the data, and under what conditions it can be used. Free, Prior, and Informed Consent is not only a legal obligation. It should be an accounting standard. It defines the terms under which community data enters the market. Without FPIC embedded in the intermediary’s operating protocol, the community data market becomes another extraction mechanism, dressed in cooperative language.

Regional Logistics Cooperatives and Translocal Procurement and Fair-Trade Exchanges are particularly important in this regard, because they operate at the translocal scale where the most important circulation decisions are made. Global supply chains are extractive because they are governed by protocols written at the top of the value chain. Translocal supply chains can be equitable if the protocols are written at the base — in the mataqali, the barrio, the fishing community, the urban informal settlement — and enforced through community clearing systems that make the terms of exchange visible and contestable.

New technologies make this enforceable in ways that were not available twenty years ago. In fact, the brand new World Data Organization, makes this more possible than it was in 2025. Distributed ledger systems, when governed by community protocols rather than by corporate intermediaries, can provide the immutable verification record that auditors need to certify compliance with FPIC and reciprocity standards. Community Broadband and Cloud Infrastructure is the prerequisite: without community-owned connectivity, the benefits of distributed ledger governance flow to the infrastructure owner, not to the community generating the data.

Small Economies, Large Stakes

Pacific Island Countries and Territories — including Hawaii as an occupied Pacific Island — are among the most vulnerable economies in the world to the current configuration of global data markets. Their ecological assets are substantial. Their data sovereignty is minimal. The Pacific Islands Data Hub concept addresses this directly: a regional data architecture governed by Pacific communities, using intemerate accounting standards to establish the value of ecological stewardship, social resilience, and cultural knowledge as assets in climate finance negotiations.

The same logic applies to indigenous communities in the Americas, displaced populations in conflict zones, peasant economies in the Global South, and poor communities everywhere that generate ecological and social value that the current accounting regime treats as externalities. These communities are not data-poor. They are data-rich and governance-poor. The translocal data market, built on intermediary infrastructure is the mechanism through which governance can be rebuilt from the base.

Circular Economy Fabrication Centers and Ecological Storage and Distribution Facilities belong in this analysis because they are where the material economy and the data economy intersect most concretely. A fabrication center that tracks material flows, repair cycles, and waste diversion is generating the granular ecological data that climate finance frameworks claim to need. The question is whether that data feeds into a community clearing system that retains the value locally, or into a platform-based market that extracts it.

Intemerate Accounts and the Transformation of Small Economies

In the original Sequence of the Seashell proposal, we identified a seven-layer compliance chain, each functioning as an intermediary for environmental data governance.

1. Hana ʻikepili — data collection and generation

2. Hoʻoponopono i ka ʻano — data cleaning and classification

3. Hiki ke hahai ʻia ke kumu — traceability to source

4. Hōʻoia ʻia e kekahi ʻaoʻao kūʻokoʻa — independent third-party verification

5. Palapala hōʻoia — certification and documentation

6. Kūpono no ke kālā — financial compliance and eligibility

7. Hoʻoponopono hoʻopaʻapaʻa — dispute resolution and remedy

Kiaʻi puka — the gatekeeper — is the overarching function that governs entry and exit across the whole chain. It serves two purposes. The first is to make visible how OECD compliance chains extract, own, and leverage data value through their own gatekeeping institutions — the standards bodies, the rating agencies, the audit firms, the multilateral lenders — which determine who gets access to capital and on whose terms. The second is to demonstrate that local communities can build their own gatekeeping function: their own access rules, their own compliance standards, their own protocols for determining what enters the chain and what does not. The gatekeeper is not a neutral administrative role. It is where power over data value is actually exercised. The question is whether that power remains under neocolonial governance or in the community.

go to next: 2. Who wants a Crusoe Economy

Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W.D. Halls, introduction by Mary Douglas, W.W. Norton, 1990.

Seuss, Dr. Horton Hears a Who! Random House, 1954.

What I seek to illustrate in these five posts that make up The Sequence of the Seashells* is in all of its pluralities, a reminder that data rules of trade and exchange are vibrant and that we all have the capacity to access the 21st century economy with rules and infrastructure that do not exclude, oppress, enclose, or dispossess us. Translocal data markets are possible, operating like a commons, an in-between space that is structured, accountable, and intermediated.

We should consider that the traditional caravanserai that dominated pre-capitalist trade was truly an in-between space: a hub where goods, information, and trust were exchanged. The caravanserai was so much more than a truck stop off the interstate, it was a place where merchants rested, animals were cared for, news circulated, and credit arrangements were made. The caravanserai existed to make movement safe and reciprocal, combining storage, logistics, and social governance in a single physical site.

Travel Sketches between Empires

Hafiz Abru’s account in his Persian embassy to China, preserved in the Zubdatu’t Tawarikh, gives us a rare ground-level view of this system in operation along the Central Asian routes of the early fifteenth century. Aside from the remarkable and exotic cargo, what the account makes visible is the intermediary infrastructure that made the journey possible at all: the caravanserai keepers, the translators, the local governors who guaranteed safe passage, the provisioning networks that sustained a diplomatic party across thousands of miles of difficult terrain. When the system worked, it did so because every node in the route had an obligation to the next. Reciprocity was a trust network relaying a logistical logic that is relational to one another.

Wilfrid Blunt’s account of the Golden Road to Samarkand and Edward Schafer’s study of the T’ang dynasty’s engagement with foreign goods and peoples in The Golden Peaches of Samarkand together illustrate what this circulation actually produced. The T’ang court’s appetite for Central Asian horses, Sogdian silver, Persian textiles, and the performers and animals that traveled the same routes as merchants attributes political economy as a maintenance of relationships. Schafer meticulously catalogs what arrived in Chang’an. Sure, the peaches, the ostriches, the glass, the music, all the goods of trade, but the real value were the networks that again, like in Hafiz Abru’s account, kept Eurasia in productive contact across languages, religions, and imperial systems that had every reason to be hostile to one another. The caravanserai was the infrastructure that made this possible. It was moral as well as economic. Its value came from maintaining continuity — ensuring that distant communities could trade without continually falling into predation. Even its architecture reflected this ethics: open courtyards for transparency, multiple gates for inclusivity, and rules of hospitality that bound travelers to the host community.

Ibn Khaldun and the Asabiyyah

Ibn Khaldun, writing in the fourteenth century, gives this a theoretical frame that neither the World Bank nor the IMF has yet absorbed. The concept is asabiyyah — a term that resists clean translation but carries the sense of group feeling, social solidarity, the binding force that makes collective action possible across kinship lines, across occupational differences, across the ordinary frictions between metropoles. In the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun develops asabiyyah not as a moral ideal but as a material force. It is what allows a group to defend itself, to sustain long-distance trade, to build institutions that outlast any individual member. Without it, dynasties would collapse and economies would cease to circulate. What the caravanserai provided was relational infrastructure — the protocol and reciprocity that allowed asabiyyah to function not only within a community but between them.

Muhsin Mahdi's 1957 study is important here because he reads Ibn Khaldun as a philosopher of history in the full sense — someone who identified the internal logic by which civilizations generate the conditions of their own demise. For Ibn Khaldun, the problem is not external conquest, even though conquest eventually follows. The problem is what happens to asabiyyah when a civilization reaches the sedentary, urban, palace-building stage of its development. As a systemic thinker, his evaluation of empire is as relevant now as it was seven hundred years ago. He identifies wealth accumulation, the deepening division of labor, and the ruling group's increasing removal from the reciprocal obligations that originally allowed it to consolidate power. He recognizes that rift when administration replaces solidarity; when mercenary armies replace citizen fighters; when tax collection ignores mutual and general welfare. Each of these conditions may appear individually rational, but collectively they hollow out the social fabric that made the whole structure viable. What remains is a governance empty of the relational content that originally gave it force.

In the opening chapter of one of my favorite novels, Cities of Salt, Abdelrahman Munif captures what Ibn Khaldun theorizes. Before the Americans arrive and before Wadi al-Uyoun is erased, the community’s moral economy is already under pressure from the merchants who pass through it. One of the saltmen addresses it directly: "How can you compare someone who works all year for his wage with another who makes more profit in a single moment." The saltman is not asking this hypothetically. It is a judgment uttered with contempt. What Munif shows in that first chapter is that the people of Wadi al-Uyoun are not naive about the merchant’s indignation. They see it clearly. They have a moral framework that measures a person by their relationship to labor, land, and the obligations of the community they belong to. There is no lack of moral clarity, but what they do lack is the institutional infrastructure to defend that clarity against the force that is coming for them. The caravanserai, at its best, was the traditional practice, the interaction that slowed exchange down enough for obligation to operate, that made the fast merchant answerable to the slow community. When it disappeared, when the pipeline replaced the courtyard, what Munif’s saltmen knew became indefensible, and nothing remained to enforce it.

Even the Vakatabu…

In 2023, an intervention was held in Fiji among the chiefs, a vakatabu—a recognition that a new development discourse was needed to slow down for renewal and rejuvenation, strengthening the resilience and agency of Pasifika communities.

Slowing down is not a cyclical argument in the fatalistic sense. Ibn Khaldun is not saying that all civilizations will collapse, however, what he identifies is a specific mechanism of decay is the attention to reciprocity — the replacement of obligation-based interactions with accumulation and extraction. The caravanserai, on this reading, is the expression of asabiyyah extended across distance. It makes strangers into temporary members of an obligation network. The merchant arriving from Samarkand and the merchant departing for Tabriz do not need to know each other personally. They need to trust the institution that holds them both accountable to the same rules of hospitality, fair dealing, and mutual protection. That trust is asabiyyah at the infrastructural level — not the exclusionary solidarity of one tribal group against another, but the distributed, procedural solidarity of a commons that works because everyone using it has a stake in its integrity.

The neocolonial postwar economic order

This is what the postwar international economic order dismantled. The Bretton Woods institutions replaced reciprocity and obligation-based transactions with the conditionality regime. The structural adjustment program replaced the caravanserai with the pipeline. Communities that had sustained long-distance exchange through networks of reciprocal obligation for centuries were told that development required submission to a technical compliance system designed elsewhere, administered by specialists, and accountable to creditors rather than to the communities it claimed to serve. Ibn Khaldun would have recognized the pattern without needing the vocabulary of neoliberalism to describe it. The asabiyyah of the Global South was deliberately attenuated — by debt, by enclosure, by the conversion of communal land into collateral, by the replacement of local governance with compliance frameworks obtusely written so that the governed would remain strangers to the rules that bound them.

Restoring translocal data markets is, among other things, a project of restoring asabiyyah at the infrastructural level. Not sentiment. Not nostalgia. The concrete work of rebuilding the intermediary nodes — the clearing systems, the storage cooperatives, the broadband commons, the community insurance pools — through which reciprocal obligation can be made materially effective across distance, across difference, and across the governance gaps that extraction has deliberately widened.

Marx and St. Thomas Aquinas

As to the future, Thomas Aquinas, in Summa Theologica, Question XCVII, addresses the conditions under which human law may legitimately change. His answer is carefully structured: law should not change for the sake of change, because the stability of law is itself a social good — people organize their lives around it, and disruption carries a cost even when the new law is better than the old. But law must change when it no longer serves the common good it was designed to protect. What Aquinas is describing, in the language of scholastic theology, is an accountability standard. The law is justified by its relationship to the community it governs and the obligations it upholds. When that relationship breaks down, or when the law serves accumulation rather than the common good, or when compliance regimes become instruments of exclusion rather than frameworks of participation, then the ground for change is right for rebellion, or in the case of compliance, restoration.

Like Aquinas, restoring laws for the common good, Marx also describes in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. When one considers that Marx is really discussing law’s claim to universality against bourgeois interests and greed, what may appear to be revolutionary is simultaneously the most conservative argument available (Marx. 58). In the postwar era, the question of revolution as systemic change has time and again been captured by the same interests it claimed to displace. What presents itself as transformation — the developmental state, the structural adjustment program, the green economy, the digital platform — reproduces wealth accumulation and economic disparity under new administrative language, leaving the population whose security was invoked as justification no closer to the common good that both Aquinas and Marx, from opposite ends of history, understood as the only legitimate ground for law.

While the postwar global supply chains have changed the way we produce, consume, distribute, and value exchange, 21st century data should be seen as the paradigm shift, the great equalizer that can both flatten north-south disparities and provide access for all those who have been largely excluded from economic participation: indigenous peoples; peasant farmers and fisherpeoples; migrant communities displaced by climate or war; the racialized and structurally excluded urban communities.

A language of relationships

If the world does not look like a caravanserai, we should consider that the technical language across all sectors of compliance excludes people — including native English speakers — from participating in what should be as simple as a handshake or a formal greeting on the mat, a kūkākūkā in Hawaiian, or more broadly a Pasifika talanoa. Exclusion is often engineered through language before it is enforced through law. This technical complexity is treated as professionalism or expertise, yet much of what governs economic life is, at its core, an elaboration of basic human agreements: to count honestly, to verify what is true, to honor obligation, and to steward shared responsibility. When these processes are buried beneath inaccessible terminology, communities are taught to believe that governance belongs to specialists and technologists rather than to themselves. Aquinas would recognize this immediately: a law that the community it governs cannot read has already begun to fail its purpose.

Decolonizing accounting therefore begins by translating institutions back into the language of relationships, where economic participation is understood not as submission to technical systems, but as the organized extension of trust, faith, morals, ethics, and virtues. The caravanserai did not require a compliance manual. It required a shared understanding of obligation. That understanding is what we should be restoring— not in stone courtyards along the Silk Road, but in the distributed, community-anchored infrastructure of a translocal data market that the 21st century both demands and makes possible.

go to next Behold! The World Data Organization

previous: The Crusoe Economy

References

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Burns Oates & Washbourne, Ltd. 1947. Question XCVII.

Blunt, Wilfrid. The Golden Road to Samarkand. Hamish Hamilton, 1973.

Hafiz Abru. A Persian Embassy to China: An Extract from Zubdatu’t Tawarikh of Hafiz Abru. Translated by K.M. Maitra, Paragon Book Gallery, 1970.

Ibn Khaldun. The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. Translated by Franz Rosenthal, Princeton University Press, 2015.

Mahdi, Muhsin. Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History. George Allen and Unwin, 1957.

Marx, Karl. Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Translated and edited by Joseph O'Malley, Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Munif, Abd al-Rahman. Cities of Salt. Translated by Peter Theroux, Vintage, 1989.

Schafer, Edward H. The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’ang Exotics. University of California Press, 1963.

*This is the third of a five-part series called Sequence of the Seashells, outlining decolonial data governance and translocal market infrastructure, which is all about describing how communities can reclaim authority over the compliance chains that determine the value of their own ecological and social data.

The sections are What is Data, The Crusoe Economy, The in-between space is a Caravanserai, Behold! The World Data Organization, and Translocal Intermediaries. Please share and subscribe!

The following is an excerpt from Manifesting the Liquid Continent, published in the 1st International Conference on Asia Pacific Ethnology and Anthropology, Kunming China.

Civilization as we have come to understand it, was built the moment we begin to understand the benefits of our division of labor and our understanding of exchange, markets, and supply chains. We gave it those us-and-them names, and also numbers like “many” and “none.” Now those numbers, define the Anthropocene, numbers like 8 billion, which some futurists predict may one day become none if this planet should soon become an uninhabitable wasteland. Totemic identifiers may soon become little more than placeholders establishing legitimacy of an imagined historicism suggesting that to be civilized means to have been found. Additionally, The seminal political historian and sociologist Karl Popper writes, “Robinson Crusoe and his isolated individual economy can never be a valuable model of an economy whose problems arise precisely from the interaction of individuals and groups.”[i] And yet, since we have never been as isolated as Daniel Dafoe’s shipwrecked and stranded character, then why should we strive for that insularity. There are some who reimagine the architecture of human space in the natural world, and will willingly leapfrog the millennia of our social evolution back to a solitary social contract dismissing the entire acquired knowledge of the Anthropocene to a pre-totemic place: a tree house on a deserted island.

Yet, the problems that Popper alludes to are “problems” because we are not fictive like Robinson Crusoe living in an island bubble away from cannibals. We live among others. We trade, work, govern, exchange, cooperate, and compete. Economic life is therefore one of the principal arenas in which those problems emerge. Whether islands in oceans, or mountain villages, or floating above the earth as in Jonathan Swift’s floating island of Laputa, we have evolved far beyond the historicist’s vision of an origin story. Ours is a history of supply chains. We divide our labor, we engage in exchange. Whether we walk or sail or fly whether we journey or aimlessly drift, the geography of islands, deserts, oceans, and mountains may, to some degree, have determined how natural partitions give boundaries to totems, but the movement of people towards markets of exchange reject the imposed partitions of states and islands and instead recognize oceans, mountains and deserts as merely the spectacle between markets, the interstitial space that would eventually define the breeding ground for military campaigns and conquest and the wastelands of nuclear testing.

It is in the classical political imagination of Euro-American culture that the asymmetrical relationship between main-lands and is-lands evolved, and it was Robinson Crusoe, who Peter Sloterdijk describes as the “puritanical simpleton who created a micro-commonwealth of British Christian clichés,” supplied a “formula for the relationship between self and world in the age of European world-taking.”[ii] The problem is that islands are also mainlands. Dafoe writes, “The savage was now a good Christian,” “we had here the Word of God to read and no farther off from his Spirit to instruct, than if we had been in England.”[iii]

The island of England was the mainland, precisely because of the puritanical self-identifiers that claim rights and property and determine the rules of exchange. Poor Robinson Crusoe left his middle class parentage to become a slave on a ship that was wrecked in a storm. Marooned on an island with savage cannibals, a commerce of which he had no taste for, Crusoe provided no service except for the guns he used to kill the savages and the conversion he applied to subjugate his native man-servant that he called Friday, whose name he never asked. Is it by coincidence, prognostication, or the persistent repetition of religious doctrine that the journals of Capt. Cook’s voyages into the Pacific should reproduce those very same narratives? Is that not the lesson learned from the apotheosis of Capt. Cook, that the self-fulfilling narratives of conquest, imperialism, and civilization are the myths of Christianity?[iv]

And yet these myths persist, invoking the same narrative tropes as if our future could only move forward by rubberstamping its approval of authority. It is the hypocrisy that is maddening. We may self identify as puritans, yet we trade as cannibals, as violent traders that cannibalize markets.

Our economy is predatory and fierce. In the history of the world, there is no greater example of a cannibalistic system than the waning days of neoliberalism when Wall Street’s Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns spectacularly imploded our financial system as investment markets consumed their own debt, hungered for credit default swaps, and feasted on derivatives and debt securities.

The economy of Robinson Crusoe killed the people not the cannibal. The system still remains as we have imposed the capitalist moniker atop every totem of each locale as if the logic of human development evolved to only reach this place, as if this matrix were the zenith of power. Economic historians may one day understand as Foucault has, that “this form of power is salvation-oriented (as opposed to political power). It is oblative (as opposed to the principle of sovereignty); it is individualizing (as opposed to legal power); it is coextensive and continuous with life; it is linked with a production of truth—the truth of the individual himself.” [v]

How can we approach western geography or the stratifications of trade and commerce seriously, when the basic assumptions continue to privilege a discourse that governs the flow of trade towards a center of power that is neither political, sovereign, nor legal, yet is linked with the production of truth, the manufacturing of consent, and punishes difference and deviancy with tactics of exclusion, obfuscation, and containment?

go to next: The in-between space is a Caravanserai
precious: What is Data

References

[i] Popper, Karl. The Poverty of Historicism. Routledge. 1997. pp. 8

[ii] * Sloterdijk, Peter. Spheres Volume III: Foams Plural Spherology. Semiotext(e). 2016. pp. 287-88.

[iii] Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Random House. 2001. p. 203.

[iv] Obeyesekere, Gananath. The Apotheosis of Cpatain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Princeton University Press. 1992. p.3.

[v] Foucault, Michel. Power. “The Subject and Power.” The New Press. 2000. p.333.

*This is the 2nd of a five-part series called Sequence of the Seashells, outlining decolonial data governance and translocal market infrastructure, which is all about describing how communities can reclaim authority over the compliance chains that determine the value of their own ecological and social data.

The sections are What is Data, The Crusoe Economy, The in-between space is a Caravanserai, Behold! The World Data Organization, and Translocal Intermediaries. Please share and subscribe!

When we think about restoration or environmental and community health data, intermediaries are the services that sit between the data and the markets. Finance systems and policy frameworks help to assign value to intermediaries. Every step in that chain carries costs: storage costs, security costs, verification costs, compliance costs, enforcement costs... The people who work those functions — the local staff at a data hub, the auditor who confirms a fishery baseline, the technician who maintains a community broadband node, the elder who validates a consent protocol — those are local paychecks. They walk and breathe as the material substance of a community data economy. The value of environmental and community health data is ultimately determined by who controls those intermediary functions and who captures the income they generate. When that control sits outside the community, the compliance chain extracts. When it sits inside the community, it enriches. This is the overall benefit when we discuss intermediaries as being integral to a nation’s economic health.

In my earlier Black Paper, I elaborate upon why compliance regimes should be challenged and I would argue that if not for— or in spite of —the miasma of the current geopolitics over oil shipments, extraction, and the petrodollar, the harmonization of the SDG-SNA-SEEA accounting frameworks are already advancing beneath our nation’s noses, to meet the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

The reason to approach this harmonization carefully are the numbers. One hundred trillion is an unnatural number. Consider that a Nature study estimated that there are about 3 trillion trees on earth; or that the human body contains about 37 trillion cells; or the brain has 86 billion neurons— sure there are phenomenon that are larger, like ants on earth, stars in the observable universe, grains of sand, or molecules of water— but the fact that government/public debt is about $100 trillion, and private debt is over $151 trillion, and the World Bank’s estimate of the value of Natural Capital also exceeds $100 trillion, those are the kinds of numbers that should give one pause, particularly when the global median consumption of 8 billion people is roughly $10 a day.

In this harmonization, Natural capital is valued at almost exactly equal to total global public debt, the lion’s share of which is owed by OECD countries. ACP nations — Africa, Caribbean, and Pacific — hold only about 4 percent of that debt while the OECD hold around 84% (led by the U.S. at $39 trillion). Now consider that the combined land and ocean territory of the ACP is larger than the entire OECD, and just imagine if the SDG-SNA-SEEA harmonization becomes the framework through which ACP environmental data is governed and valued, we will then be looking at a transfer of ecological wealth out of the regions that steward it, and into the accounting systems of the institutions that hold the debt. That is not simply a technical adjustment, we’d be looking at a global accounting theft that would have been as unbelievable as Palestine’s genocide being broadcast live in realtime for three years and counting. Under the shroud of Palestine, Sudan, Epstein, ICE, Venezuela, and Iran, it would be a shame for any ACP or South oriented government to even consider continuing to trust an environmental data management program coming from Washington, Wall St., Silicon Valley, Brussels, or Geneva, particularly when the opportunity to create our own intermediaries are now available. If this seems to be too abstract of a point, consider how much data resources would be extracted if the Global South adopts the IMF, World Bank, or OECD data compliance facilities.

What follows are just three intermediary categories that any restoration or community health data program would require, three programs that would ensure that our environmental data resources would remain within our communities, nations, and regions. As discussed in the previous posting, China’s brand new World Data Organization provides a counterweight against any possible OECD backdoor compliance theft. But once again, to be clear, I could be, like Bruno Schultz, speaking from a Sanitarium under the sign of an hourglass…

Data Custody and Verification

Before any environmental or community health dataset can enter a market, financing system, or policy framework, someone must hold it, authenticate it, and confirm that the consent conditions under which it was collected remain intact. In the current compliance architecture, this function is performed by externally accredited auditing firms, platform providers, and certification bodies whose standards are set in Geneva, Brussels, or Washington.

The cost of that accreditation is passed to communities as a condition of market participation. A community-governed data custody system — organized around local protocols of verification, with, for example, hōʻoia or verification as its operating principle — performs the same function at a fraction of the cost, keeps the income local, and ensures that FPIC (free, prior, and informed consent) is not a one-time procedural event but a continuously verifiable condition embedded in the custody chain itself.

China’s oldest merchant traditions understood this as well: the verification of weight, measure, and moral obligation (shu or reciprocity) was a community function before it was a state function, and the li of Confucian market governance placed reciprocity at the center of that verification, not as an ethical addition but as its operational foundation (Confucius 15:24). And 4000 years ago in India, in Book 4 of the Arthashastra, in “the removal of thorns” section, Kautilya constructed an entire administrative apparatus around the principles of exchange and the punishment of cheats, frauds, and predators, ensuring that the integrity of measurement remains a public good.

Ecological Storage and Distribution

Restoration data has physical correlates. A fishpond restoration program generates not only ecological monitoring data but harvests, seeds, materials, and biological stocks that must be stored, distributed, and accounted for across community networks. The infrastructure that performs this function — cold storage, seed banks, community warehouses, distribution logistics — is also a compliance infrastructure. It is where the chain of custody for ecological data becomes material and verifiable. When this infrastructure is externally owned or financed through debt instruments designed by multilateral development banks, the compliance terms attached to the financing reproduce the same dependency that the data extraction problem creates. Communities that have historically governed commons storage — loko i’a, the fishpond systems of Hawaiʻi, the communal crop, seed, and grain networks across Pasifika and elsewhere, the collective storage traditions that Polynesian voyaging culture required across open ocean trade routes — already hold the governance logic for this infrastructure. The voyaging record is relevant here not as metaphor but as material evidence: translocal exchange across a Pasifika liquid continent required distributed storage, distributed verification of cargo and obligation, and distributed enforcement of protocol and reciprocity across networks that operated without any of the centralized compliance infrastructure that the IMF or World Bank now presents as a precondition of development finance. The killing the cook metaphor in the subtitle is the allegorical lesson of Captain Cook.

Cook’s death at Kealakekua Bay in 1779 was not simply a violent encounter, it was the enforcement of protocol. The accounts suggest it followed a breach of reciprocity, a violation of the exchange obligations that governed the relationship between his crew and the community. The Hawaiians were not reacting to a stranger. They were enforcing the terms of a relationship that Cook’s side had broken. That is kiaʻi in its most material form, the guarding and stewarding of authority when the compliance chain is violated.

The poetic weight could be read as one of the most sophisticated translocal exchange network in human history, one that had operated across millions of square kilometers of open ocean for centuries without a central bank, a clearinghouse, or an IMF structural adjustment program, enforced its own compliance through exactly the distributed protocol and reciprocity infrastructure this article describes. And the man whose arrival marked the beginning of the systematic destruction of that entire governance system died because he violated its terms.

What colonialism wrought was not an absence of governance. It was a governance system that needed no Geneva, no Washington, and no Lloyds of London to function and that is precisely why it had to be destroyed.

Community Clearing and Accounting

Every exchange of data, ecological goods, restoration credits, of labor, requires a system that records what moved, between whom, under what terms, and what obligations remain outstanding. In Western financial architecture, this function belongs to banks, clearinghouses, and accounting firms whose accreditation, reporting standards, and dispute resolution mechanisms are governed externally. The cost of accessing those systems is a structural barrier that keeps community exchange subordinated to centralized financial infrastructure. A community clearing system governed through local accounting protocols — helu in the Hawaiian sense, the disciplined counting that keeps the obligation visible — does not require a bank charter or an IMF program to function. It requires trust infrastructure: shared standards for what counts, shared protocols for verifying that obligations have been met, and shared enforcement mechanisms that communities recognize as legitimate because they derive from their own governance traditions rather than from external accreditation bodies.

In China, in the 3rd-century BCE, Mencius recognized this clearing function as a reciprocity obligation of governance: the ruler who fails to ensure that exchange is balanced and that producers are protected from intermediary capture has failed the fundamental test of legitimate authority (bk III, pt I, ch III).

Everywhere, history reveals that accounting is both a compliance standard and a market standard. And it is one that communities across the Global South, the Pacific, as well as the occupied territories of the largest economies should apply on their own terms without being subjugated to the neocolonial accounting and enforcement regimes in Washington, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Brussels, or Geneva.

The point these three categories make together is simple. We have our own centers. The institutions that perform custody, storage, and clearing functions for community environmental and health data do not need to be built from scratch by external development agencies operating on debt terms. They need to be recognized, resourced, and connected — and they need the compliance frameworks that govern them to begin from community authority rather than from external certification requirements.

The World Data Organization has created the first institutional terrain in which community data governance can claim international recognition without passing through OECD-controlled accreditation systems. The question is whether we will take this opportunity before us. That means asserting our local data epistemologies now, before the standards are set, and build the compliance networks, verification systems, community auditors, and translocal data hubs, harmonizing to reassert our own governance traditions rather than waiting for others to hand them to us.

Institutions do not decolonize themselves. If we are not in the room with our own standards, our own frameworks, and our own demands, the WDO could very well reproduce the same accreditation monopolies under new branding. Updating our governance traditions, the territorial data, and the translocal networks doesn’t mean we go back to brutal enforcement mechanisms, but our work is to build the infrastructure that makes them legible on our own terms.

Simply put, the WDO will assist the global promotion of local data sovereignties while trade regimes and the neocolonial agencies will try to do everything they can to circumvent that from happening. To decolonize accounting means to extricate our data governance from colonial systems.

Previous: Behold! The World Data Organization

*This is the last of a five-part series called Sequence of the Seashells, outlining decolonial data governance and translocal market infrastructure, which is all about describing how communities can reclaim authority over the compliance chains that determine the value of their own ecological and social data.

The sections are What is Data, The Crusoe Economy, The in-between space is a Caravanserai, Behold! The World Data Organization, and Translocal Intermediaries. Please share and subscribe!

Sequence of the Seashells comes from a proposal written for a workshop in Hawaiʻi, and as part of any decolonial program, utilizes the naming of these events in the language of the locale, in this case,ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi.