The G-20 Summit convening in Johannesburg marks more than a shifting diplomatic geography; it represents a radical redrawing of the world’s political cartography. For over a century, global power has been mapped — literally and metaphorically — through an epistemology anchored in the United States and Western Europe. The cartographic imagination that once naturalized the idea of “America’s backyard” now falters. A polycentric world is emerging, driven not by a singular hegemon but by multiple overlapping sovereignties, histories, and trajectories. South Africa’s leadership of the G-20 symbolizes this transition: a repositioning of global coordinates in which the United States is no longer the gravitational center of world politics.
This cartographic unmaking and remaking must be understood within the longue durée of colonial dispossession. As Frantz Fanon argued, colonialism reorganized space as much as it reorganized bodies and subjectivities, producing hierarchies that were violently spatialized (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). The legacy of apartheid in South Africa is inseparable from this history: vast inequalities in land ownership, entrenched racialized geography, and territorially encoded injustice. The Expropriation Act, now signed into law as a constitutional mechanism to address historical dispossession, must be read not as a rupture of property rights but as an attempt to redraw a map whose borders were inscribed by colonial violence. Its provisions apply universally and permit no-compensation expropriation only in extremely narrow cases, contrary to alarmist narratives.
These distortions were amplified by the US President Donald Trump, who asserted that South Africa was engaged in “white genocide” and “land confiscation.” These claims have been debunked repeatedly by legal and independent fact-checking bodies, including court findings rejecting the “white genocide” narrative and multiple research organizations providing empirical rebuttals. The rhetorical power of such accusations, however, reveals an older imperial cartography resurfacing — one that frames African sovereignty as inevitably threatening, irrational, or punitive.
To understand the structural shift Johannesburg represents, Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis remains indispensable. Wallerstein’s articulation of the core, semiperiphery, and periphery helps explain the rising agency of states such as South Africa, which historically occupied the semiperiphery and now leverage institutional platforms to recalibrate global norms. The G-20 under South African leadership illustrates the semiperiphery’s capacity to challenge the normative dominance of the core. The world-system is not collapsing; it is being redistributed.
Yet material redistribution is only part of the story. Arjun Appadurai’s theory of global cultural flows provides a more dynamic analytic map. Appadurai’s ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes reveal how sovereignty today circulates across non-state terrains, from digital narratives to diasporic networks (University of Minnesota Press). The Trump–Ramaphosa dispute unfolded across these scapes, morphing from a bilateral disagreement into a global spectacle shaped by affect, misinformation, and digitally mediated imaginaries.
Alongside this cultural re-mapping, Amitav Acharya’s concept of a “multiplex world” captures the emergent architecture of global order: one defined by overlapping, non-hierarchical sites of legitimacy rather than a single hegemonic node. South Africa’s G-20 presidency exemplifies this multiplexity — a refusal to accept inherited hierarchies, an insistence on historical redress, and a strategic performance of Global South leadership.
But the post-American cartography is not only about states reconstructing global governance. Antonio Negri’s notion of the “multitude” — decentralized, networked, and collectively constitutive — reframes sovereignty beyond the state itself (Harvard University Press/JSTOR listing). Under this framework, land reform in South Africa is not merely a state-led initiative; it is a demand articulated by a multitude shaped by colonial memory, economic marginalization, and democratic mobilization. Negri’s work highlights how new forms of constituent power emerge from social movements, civil society, and transnational solidarities — precisely the forces pressuring global institutions to democratize.
This intellectual movement toward decentralizing power resonates with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call to “provincialize Europe” (University of Chicago Press) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s reflections on subaltern agency (Columbia University faculty page). Johannesburg exemplifies both: the Global South asserting sovereignty while amplifying historically marginalized voices whose perspectives have been systematically silenced in global governance. What this represents is a parallel gesture: the provincialization of America and the elevation of subaltern knowledge within transnational policy discourse. US strategic narratives no longer enjoy unchallenged authority. Claims about democracy, human rights, aid, and development are now evaluated against histories of interventionism, geopolitical asymmetry, and selective moralism.
Edward Said taught us that imperial power is sustained through narrative dominance — through the authority to produce knowledge about others (Columbia University page). In Johannesburg, that authority fractures. South Africa’s defense of its land reforms draws on constitutional law, historical evidence, and democratic legitimacy — challenging Orientalist tropes that cast African governance as inherently suspect.
Even the aspirational optimism of Parag Khanna’s “Asian and Global South century” gains new resonance here, re-situating the Global South not as a geopolitical object but as an architect of global norms. The cartography of the 21st century is no longer drawn exclusively from Washington, London, or Brussels; it is increasingly generated in Johannesburg, New Delhi, São Paulo, Jakarta, and beyond.
Yet this shift is fragile. Disinformation campaigns, elite cooptation, and the inertia of global institutions threaten to dilute the transformative potential of multipolarity. The “white genocide” hoax demonstrates how racialized mythologies can re-inscribe colonial cartographies, undermining redistribution and social justice. Similarly, the G-20 itself remains structurally biased toward wealthy states, and its embrace of Global South leadership is neither seamless nor guaranteed.
Still, Johannesburg marks a decisive moment. The United States has not disappeared from the map, but it no longer defines its contours. The Global South’s assertion of epistemic, moral, and institutional authority redraws the world — not as a backyard, but as a multiplex terrain of shared, contested, and negotiated sovereignties. The G-20 summit thus marks more than a geographic or symbolic shift; it embodies the emergence of a post-American world where semiperipheral states actively shape global agendas. By asserting legal, moral, and institutional authority, South Africa demonstrates that the Global South is no longer merely reactive—it is proactive, innovative, and indispensable in defining a more equitable, multipolar world order. The era of America’s uncontested backyard is over. Welcome to a post-American world.
A renewed global cartography of power requires a shift from extractive geopolitics to relational interdependence. Policymaking should foreground climate justice frameworks that center the vulnerabilities and aspirations of the Global South, rather than treating them as derivative variables in Northern planning models. Multilateral institutions must be reconstituted to reflect demographic, economic, and ecological realities — empowering emerging coalitions like BRICS+, the African Union, and ASEAN to shape global norm-making rather than merely respond to it. South–South knowledge circuits must be strengthened through collaborative research infrastructures, technology-sharing ecosystems, and sovereign digital architectures that protect data from neocolonial capture.
Economic reforms should prioritize de-dollarization pathways, diversified trade corridors, and post-neoliberal development strategies that refuse the austerity-driven orthodoxies of Bretton Woods institutions. Finally, transformative climate finance must shift from discretionary pledges to enforceable obligations grounded in historical responsibility, ensuring that mitigation and adaptation do not reproduce the very hierarchies they claim to remedy.
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