In the bustling market stalls of Makola in Accra, or across the terraced farming communities outside Nairobi, foreign policy is not measured by treaties or the precise geometry of buffer states. It is measured in the price of a bag of maize, the cost of a sack of synthetic fertilizer, and the dwindling value of local currency against a soaring American dollar. For two years, the vendors and smallholders who feed our cities have watched the prices of basic life lurch upward, driven by a conflict fought thousands of miles away across the black soil of Eastern Europe.
Now comes the news from Moscow that Vladimir Putin is raising his stakes, insisting that any discussion of peace must address the broader canvas of European security architecture. Inside the Kremlin, diplomats and state broadcasters celebrate the mere fact that the West is listening as a tactical triumph. The talk in the capitals of the global North once again shifts to the familiar language of great power politics: spheres of influence, military guarantees, and the redrawing of frontiers. But watching this spectacle from the Global South, one is struck by an enduring, bitter familiarity. The imperial powers are once again deciding how to carve up the world's stability among themselves, while treating the human collateral of their squabbles as an afterthought.
There is a profound moral dissonance in listening to European and Russian elites discuss security in such exclusive terms. To hear Moscow tell it, security is the birthright of large nations with nuclear arsenals, purchased at the expense of their smaller neighbors’ sovereignty. To hear Brussels and Washington tell it, international law must be defended with righteous indignation, even if that defense comes bundled with a selective amnesia regarding their own foreign interventions. Yet both sides share a common presumption: that the only security architecture that truly matters is the one built on European soil, designed by and for the industrialized world.
Meanwhile, the structural violence unleashed by this protracted war ripples outward, landing hardest on shoulders least able to bear it. When the supply of Ukrainian grain and Russian fertilizer is throttled by blockades and sanctions, it is not the elites in Moscow or London who skip meals; it is families in the Horn of Africa and the dry corridors of Central America. When Western central banks raised interest rates to combat the domestic inflation spurred by energy shocks, they triggered massive capital flight from developing economies. Countries already drowning in debt, negotiated on punishing terms with private creditors in New York and London, suddenly found their debt-servicing payments skyrocketing. In Ghana, in Sri Lanka, in Zambia, governments were forced to cut spending on clinics, schools, and climate resilience simply to keep the lights on and the creditors at bay.
This is the hidden ledger of modern warfare. It is an economic extraction engine that transfers the pain of geopolitical conflict onto the poor. We are continually lectured by Western envoys on our moral duty to take sides, to condemn aggression, and to uphold the rules-based international order. Yet whenever the Global South attempts to articulate its own urgent priorities—genuine debt cancellation, fair trade terms, or funding for climate disasters not of our making—we are met with polite sympathy and empty pockets. We are told the money simply does not exist, even as hundreds of billions are mobilized overnight for artillery, missiles, and defense contracts.
None of this excuses the brutal, unprovoked assault on Ukraine’s sovereignty. The people of Ukraine deserve self-determination, freedom from imperial domination, and the return of their stolen lands. But true self-determination cannot be an exclusive European franchise. When peace is discussed only as a realignment of European security, it inevitably leaves the underlying machinery of global inequality untouched. A peace negotiated solely between Moscow and the West will merely restore a status quo that was already deeply broken, leaving the rest of the world vulnerable to the next geopolitical shudder.
It is time to broaden the table. Peace cannot be defined merely as the absence of active combat along a European trench line, nor can it be treated as a private bargain between nuclear-armed adversaries. A just security framework must recognize that freedom from war is inseparable from freedom from hunger, debt servitude, and economic vulnerability. Until the communiqués issued from luxury summits acknowledge the vendor in Makola and the farmer in the Rift Valley as stakeholders in global peace, these high-stakes negotiations will remain what they have always been: a tragic exercise in imperial self-regard, where the few gamble with the lives of the many.