What is the value of human life? From a humanitarian perspective, all human beings possess inherent rights to life, dignity, and wellbeing, regardless of race, sex, or gender. These rights impose a moral duty to protect life and alleviate suffering. Yet, in positioning ourselves at the top of the food chain, humanity has increasingly framed life — human and non-human — as a resource to be exploited rather than protected.
This tension was brought sharply into focus for me this week. My mother, a humanitarian worker, explained that amid unprecedented global crises and widespread cuts to humanitarian funding, there has been a notable shift in how funding applications are framed. The value of human life is no longer justified primarily through the language of human rights, but through that of human capital. Funders must now be persuaded that investing in human life yields a measurable return. Survival, dignity, and wellbeing are increasingly assessed through economic productivity rather than moral obligation.
At the same time, the world faces overlapping crises: climate emergencies, collapsing ecosystems, threatened food systems, and deepening inequalities between dominant economies and historically colonised nations. These crises expose the failures of predatory capitalism, revealing it to be fundamentally unsustainable. The normalisation of violence, visible in genocide in Gaza, violations of sovereignty in Venezuela and Nigeria, and the ongoing war in Ukraine, demonstrates how elite concentrations of power have eroded democratic institutions and human rights in pursuit of resource extraction and geopolitical dominance. These events are not isolated; they are structurally connected.
Our collective wellbeing is shaped by what we consider “universal” values, yet research shows that decision-making power remains concentrated in the Global North. This imbalance allows economic value-based thinking to dominate global governance, even as it accelerates environmental destruction and social harm. The contradiction is clear: a system that claims to value life ultimately undermines the planet and all who inhabit it.
In this essay, I argue for an alternative framework grounded in Indigenous, feminist, and Global South knowledge systems: one that rejects the assumption that value must be tied to economic growth, and instead recanters relationality, care, and collective wellbeing.
The Curse of GDP
The promise of endless growth, upheld through capitalism, allows uneven power between the Global North and the Global South to persist. The Global North governs the world, while the Global South bears the consequences of that decision-making. Multilateral banks such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank determine the conditions of finance, loans, and debt through arbitrary, linear classifications of development. Countries are labelled High Income, Middle Income, or Least Developed, positioning the Global North as the benchmark while others are framed as “trailing behind.”
These classifications justify austerity measures that spiral nations into debt, facilitate land and resource grabs, and reinforce exploitative trade relationships. Crucially, this framework erases the historical realities of colonial extraction, enslavement, and environmental degradation that produced these economic inequalities in the first place.
Placing the Global North as the benchmark of advancement and progress also shapes how international aid is allocated, often accelerating the decline of countries that have already been historically persecuted. For example, my mum works in the humanitarian sector in Malawi. The UK, alongside other Global North countries, has cut its aid to Malawi by nearly 70% on the basis that Malawi has “failed to develop,” despite being a long-standing donor darling. Meanwhile, neighbouring countries such as Zambia have been prioritised for aid. As a result, despite Malawi’s economy being nearly 80% aid-dependent, its people are denied support because they are deemed not to generate sufficient return on investment.
The Global North is hardly a pillar of morality. If progress means cutting access to dignity, then this is what progress looks like. Yet the Global South has developed frameworks of morality and wellbeing that are context-specific, grounded in history, cultural practices, and social beliefs. Born out of social movements fighting for equity, countries such as Ecuador, Bhutan, and South Africa have developed moral frameworks that are now shaping national policy. Gross National Happiness (Bhutan), Buen Vivir (Ecuador), and Ubuntu (South Africa) all share decolonial values that centre dignity, relationality, and collective wellbeing, extending beyond human flourishing to the conservation and respect of the environment.
While the Global South experiments with alternative moral frameworks, the self-proclaimed pinnacle of the Global North — the United States — descends into authoritarianism, where the Trump era unleashed systemic violence through healthcare exclusion, food insecurity, and the cruelty embedded within immigration enforcement. The Global North claims the authority to define what is “universal” in how the world is governed, yet it increasingly lacks the moral high ground.
Moreover, the universally accepted framework of Sustainable Development Goals developed by the United Nations is inherently connected to GDP growth. Critics from the Global South have argued that these goals no longer reflect current planetary needs. The attempt to create a “universal” framework again dilutes the historical context of the debt owed by the Global North for extraction of the Global South’s resources. Just as economic frameworks impose Northern definitions of progress, so too does the Global North dominate the ways knowledge and liberation are defined — including feminism, philosophy, and moral thought.
In a Woman’s World, Which of Them Are Truly Liberated?
The so-called “universal” framework of feminism is dominated by knowledge produced in the Global North. This form of feminism is primarily influenced by white, middle-class perspectives and tends to be theory-focused and Eurocentric. In contrast, feminist knowledge in the Global South emphasises decolonisation, economic justice, and disarmament, often being more practical and context-specific. When Global South feminist knowledge is forced to fit Western academic paradigms, it becomes diluted and reframed, losing much of its original meaning and political intent.
A striking example of this can be seen in Purusha-Prakriti cosmology, a form of Hindu philosophy. In this framework, Purusha refers to pure, eternal consciousness, symbolising the sun, sky, and divine principles, while Prakriti refers to matter and the creation of the material world. Their interaction is understood as inseparable and inviolable. Yet, as Dube (2022) notes, Western interpretations have imposed binary readings, casting Purusha as masculine consciousness and Prakriti as the feminine creative principle. This misinterpretation legitimises male control over female sexuality and demonstrates how Global South philosophies can be distorted when reframed within heteropatriarchal, post-colonial, Eurocentric frameworks.
Palestinian-Egyptian-Australian author Abdel Fattah provides another example in her novel Ending Oppression. The protagonist, Amal Mohammed, embraces her hijab during a time of rising Islamophobia in Australia, using it as a form of self-expression and a declaration of her hybrid identity. The hijab becomes a symbol of multiple selves — rebellious, spiritual, romantic, and defiant — and reflects the ways in which liberation for Muslim women in both the Global North and South is interconnected. Abdel Fattah critiques the Western tendency to infantilise Muslim women, writing:
“I confess that I’m also tired of white women who think the answer is flashing a bit of breast so that those ‘poor,’ infantilised Muslim women can be ‘rescued’ by the ‘enlightened’ West — as if freedom was the sole preserve of secular feminists.”
She also critiques Geraldine Brooks’ Nine Parts of Desire, noting that Brooks’ failure to build meaningful relationships with the women she encountered resulted in a lack of recognition of the human rights violations experienced by Palestinian women and the structural barriers they face.
This demonstrates how the Global North continues to define and consume narratives of liberation, often obscuring the agency and lived realities of women in the Global South. Just as economic frameworks impose Northern definitions of “progress,” feminist knowledge from the Global South is filtered, misinterpreted, and commodified — a pattern that reproduces colonial legacies in epistemology as well as policy.
The Commodification of “Otherness”
The surface-level acceptance of “otherness” in mainstream culture gives the illusion of progress, while in reality reproducing colonial legacies. The commodification of “otherness” reflects the same patterns seen in Global North feminism and economic frameworks: culture and knowledge from the Global South are diluted, repackaged, and consumed for the benefit of dominant audiences. In post-colonial society, former colonial powers continue to ignore their historical role in creating inequality, both domestically and globally. Under the guise of “modernity” and “advancement,” they avoid confronting the persistent realities of oppression. For example, America and Britain claim to have achieved equality, yet police brutality against minorities continues, and the global rollback of DEI initiatives suggests that perceived “progress” often masks structural inequities.
As Angela Davis observes, oppression did not disappear; it merely transformed — just as Jim Crow laws evolved into mass incarceration. Similarly, bell hooks describes the commodification of culture as “eating the other,” highlighting how marginalised cultures are repurposed for the pleasure of the dominant population, erasing their historical and political context.
Rap music provides a clear illustration. Originally a form of storytelling and resistance against white supremacy, it has also been commercialised, often reinforcing misogyny and perpetuating harmful stereotypes about Black communities. While it remains an outlet for expression, hooks argues that its commodification positions Black bodies as both dangerous and desirable in the white imagination.
This process is connected to what Fisher calls cultural anhedonia: the inability to pursue or fully experience pleasure. Young white people, dissatisfied with US imperialism, economic marginalisation, and social alienation, can be seduced by “otherness” as a source of novelty or identity. Meanwhile, marginalised groups may also be drawn into commodification by the promise of recognition or acceptance. In this sense, African American culture today is not only a site of resistance but also a provocative lens through which whiteness imagines itself. Desire for proximity to Blackness — to appear “hip” or “cool” — uses the “other” as a backdrop to restore or reaffirm the perceived vitality of whiteness.
The commodification of “otherness” is not merely cultural appropriation or exploitation. It is an attempt to defamiliarise and distance from whiteness, only to return to it with greater intention. Yet doesn’t it seem that despite all the “perceived” progress made since the revolution of civil rights, we are returning to a period of white patriarchal dominance? This is not an accident. Communities of resistance are often replaced by communities of consumption. Historical context and the struggles of communities of colour are erased, while white patriarchal and misogynistic structures are preserved. Culture is eaten, consumed, and forgotten — think of yoga as a simplified example. Even when contemporary audiences do not intend to be racist, the framework of race as a construct of the white imagination — designed to sustain capitalism — cannot simply be ignored (Tsembe).
This commodification extends to love itself. In many Western frameworks, love is reduced to romance or personal fulfilment, often overlooking the relational and collective dimensions emphasised in Indigenous and Global South thought. As bell hooks reminds us, true love is rooted in shared dignity, care, and mutual responsibility — a practice of justice, not a consumable emotion.
Conclusion
The Global North continues to dominate the global economy, feminism, and culture, reproducing hierarchies that preserve capitalism and colonial legacies. Throughout this essay, I’ve shown how GDP-focused economic frameworks perpetuate historical exploitation and unequal aid distribution, how Global North feminist knowledge dilutes and reframes Global South perspectives, and how culture itself commodifies the “other,” preserving whiteness even under the guise of liberation. These interconnected patterns reveal that progress defined from the Global North often comes at the expense of dignity, justice, and wellbeing for historically marginalised communities.
This matters personally and professionally. I write from Malawi, though I was born in Jamaica and raised across Kenya, Cambodia, Myanmar, Singapore, and the UK. We at GirlDreamer may be based or raised in the Global North, but our roots, histories, and connections are firmly in the Global South. Our lived experiences reflect the diasporic realities of migration, colonial legacies, and community resilience, showing that liberation and wellbeing cannot be fully understood or achieved through Northern frameworks alone.
I call on readers to listen, amplify, and respect knowledge from the Global South rather than filtering it through Northern paradigms embedded in economics, feminist theory, or culture. True justice, wellbeing, and liberation emerge when the voices, practices, and insights of those historically marginalised are recognised, respected, and allowed to shape the future — not consumed, diluted, or commodified. At GirlDreamer, we put these principles into practice by creating spaces where women of colour can lead, define success and wellbeing on their own terms, and build communities grounded in care, relationality, and collective flourishing. By centering these approaches, we honour the past, challenge entrenched power, and reimagine what progress can truly mean.
