In the bustling markets of Kumasi, where I spent part of my childhood, you do not need to read diplomatic cables to know when northern empires are quarreling. You only need to ask a woman selling yams about the price of transport, or speak to a cassava farmer who had to cut his planting in half because a sack of imported fertilizer suddenly cost more than his monthly yield. For nearly three years, millions of families across Africa, Latin America, and South Asia have lived with the quiet violence of a war they did not choose, watching their savings evaporate as bread lines lengthened and diesel prices surged.
Now comes word from the United Arab Emirates that delegations from Kyiv, Washington, and Moscow have sat down across marble tables for their first trilateral conversations in months, emerging to describe the opening hours as constructive. It is tempting to breathe a sigh of relief. Any hour spent talking is better than an hour spent trading artillery rounds across frozen fields, and the people of Ukraine have endured a nightmare of destruction that demands an end. Yet reading the initial briefings from Abu Dhabi, one is struck by an old, familiar ache: the total absence of the peripheral world from the room where its fate is bartered.
The choice of venue is itself a sign of our fractured era. That these three capitals must meet on the shores of the Persian Gulf, hosted by an oil-rich monarchy that spent the conflict quietly balancing sanctions against sovereign wealth, tells us how much the old Western-dominated architecture has decayed. But a change in geography is not the same as a change in justice. The Gulf states have positioned themselves as agile brokers for the multipolar age, but their air-conditioned suites remain just as insulated from the harvest fields of the Sahel or the debt offices of Islamabad as the corridors of Geneva ever were.
When this war erupted, Western envoys took to the skies, descending upon African, Asian, and Latin American capitals with wagging fingers and prepared speeches. They demanded absolute moral clarity. They insisted that neutrality was complicity, that national budgets must be bent to accommodate an embargo on Russian energy, and that historical ties to Moscow be severed overnight. When southern leaders pointed out the glaring double standards regarding occupations elsewhere, or pleaded for relief as grain shipments halted, they were treated as inconvenient distractions.
What those northern diplomats called a fight for the international order was, for the Global South, an economic hurricane. The war disrupted global food supplies and ignited an inflationary wave that prompted central banks in Washington and Frankfurt to raise interest rates at historic speeds. That single policy choice exported financial ruin across the developing world. Countries that were already struggling to recover from the pandemic suddenly saw their currencies collapse against the dollar and their debt servicing costs triple. Schools closed in Ghana, hospitals ran out of medicine in Sri Lanka, and public sector wages froze in Kenya—all downstream casualties of an imperial conflict fought over European borders.
None of this will make it into the draft communiqués circulating through the hotels of the Emirates. The negotiators will haggle over territorial lines, security guarantees, the lifting of targeted sanctions, and the eventual flow of natural gas. They will speak of sovereignty in the narrow, legalistic terms beloved by northern capitals, entirely divorced from the material sovereignty of the smallholder who can no longer feed his children because global supply chains were conscripted into great-power warfare.
Even now, as talk turns tentatively toward peace, the international financial institutions are quietly preparing for the next phase: a massive, lucrative reconstruction effort backed by multilateral loans, while climate-stricken nations drowning in private debt are told there is no money left in the development pot. We are witnessing the familiar hierarchy of human suffering, where the rebuilding of Europe commands infinite capital, and the slow starvation of the tropics is treated as background noise.
Peace is necessary, and every soul in the Global South prays for the guns to fall silent in Ukraine. But a durable peace cannot merely be a ceasefire between three heavily armed states brokered by petrodollars. A just peace must reckon with the collateral wreckage left across the rest of the planet. Until the debts forced upon developing nations by this conflict are cancelled, until the predatory extraction of the global financial system is dismantled, and until the farmers of Kumasi can afford to feed their soil again, the true cost of this war will remain unpaid by the men who started it.