African countries need to understand that: A fundamental shift has occurred in the global order, and tomorrow’s existential reality for the continent can no longer be anchored on yesterday’s historical relationships with Western countries that have turned increasingly inward-facing. This means that the continent must now find its own way and fend for itself in a competitive world
WORLDVIEWS — and not a few egos — clashed strongly at the 2026 edition of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland as the world is remade in the image of United States President Donald Trump, and the assumptions – not always accurate, or even honest – that have underpinned the “rules-based international order” experience a tectonic shift. Our interest in this perspective piece is not so much the actual subjects of tension and dispute, in particular the future of Greenland and the Arctic region more broadly. It is more at a level below, the philosophical, and what it all means for Africa.
Worldviews – And Why They Matter
What exactly is a worldview, and why does it matter? Put simply, a worldview is an individual’s or a group’s (society, nation, country, race etc) interpretation and understanding of the environment in which he, she, or it exists, and the guidance that understanding provides to individual or group action as a pattern of thought and behaviour. In short, it informs how this understanding helps us navigate life and the world around us, near and far. Worldviews are foundationally important as a predictor of action (or inaction) and individual or group success. They shape the destiny of individuals and nations.
Philosophers identify seven components of a worldview:
- A model of the world: an understanding of the world and why it is the way it is.
2. An identity-historical component, the who am I or who are we question that asks the question: where have we come from?
3. Destination: where am I or are we going?
4. The theory of action – strategy. How do I or we navigate life and the world to get to the destination we have identified and agreed on?
5. The value system: what is the set of values that binds and guides my/our actions and our society?
6. The knowledge system: how do we learn and internalise what we believe to be true or false? Just to give an example, Western classical medicine, Chinese acupuncture, African traditional medicine, and Indian Ayurvedic medicine are all distinct knowledge systems. They come at the same goal – the human body and the care and healing of it – from different angles.
7. Building blocks: What are the building blocks of a worldview? Worldviews come from ideas or knowledge that already exists. We accept some and use them to construct our worldview, while we can reject some or be agnostic to those others.
To demonstrate how philosophical worldviews are such a powerful driver of success or failure among countries, let us briefly consider the worldview anchors of the West (with the United States as a prime example) and Asia (exemplified by China but also other rising Asian powers) that dominate our world today. The western worldview is one that sees individual liberty (freedom and human rights), institutions that check untrammeled political power of sovereigns, and scientific invention and innovation as the key drivers of national prosperity. The United States, in addition, was founded on a worldview of “exceptionalism”, one in which it is unique and powerfully endowed for greatness as the “shining city on a hill”, the “land of the free, home of the brave”.
The Asian worldview, on the other hand and as seen in the rise of China, is anchored on the Confucian principles of the elasticity and endlessness of time (hence the Chinese typically think and plan so long-term), stability as an end in itself, and therefore the interest of the community or society as much more important than the freedom of individuals. In other words, the Asian worldview emphasises the obligations of individuals above their “rights”.
What all this means is that worldviews are not one universal truth. They are, in fact, subjective understandings. What matters is the consistent application of the worldview, especially in national life. This will always yield transformative results because the goal and the path to achieving it are shared as a belief by all or most citizens. African countries, as a result of fundamental challenges of state formation arising from colonialism and arbitrary boundaries lumping peoples of disparate identities under artificial nations, as well as a contemporary dearth of visionary leadership that can overcome this foundational challenge, have tended to lack driving worldviews around which they can galvanise and organise to achieve development.
The Anarchical Society: An Understanding of World Order
In order to process accurately process what happened at #Davos2026, we must understand that the world order has been anchored on three contending pillars, in the rationalist-realist worldview of the English School theory of international relations. This approach to understanding world politics has been borne out time and again.
- The international SYSTEM: based on the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which ended the Thirty Years’ War between Christian Protestant and Catholic kingdoms in Central Europe and ushered in a new epoch in international order. Here, states were territorial, completely autonomous and sovereign, relating to each other through commerce, diplomacy, and war. Stability was anchored by a balance of power.
- Two centuries later, an international SOCIETY emerged in the late 1800s after the Universal Postal Union (the first multilateral international organization) was established and technology had begun to bridge physical distances between countries (the nascent rise of globalization). The short-lived League of Nations and, eventually, the United Nations after World War II, followed. Sovereign countries now started coming together to collaborate around mutually agreed values. But even in the “society”, there is always tension (called “anarchy” in international relations scholarship).
Even in the UN, for example, countries jostle to project and protect their national interests, and underlying domestic economic and military power created both formal and informal hierarchies in the society of states. An example is the veto power of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia and China – the Allied Powers that defeated the Axis Powers (Germany, Japan and Italy) during the Second World War. This is why proposed reforms to the permanent membership of the Security Council have not happened, and there is virtually zero prospect of expanding the numbers of veto power wielding members of the Council. It also is why President Trump in his speech at Davos on January 21, 2026, asserted that the audience at Davos would have been “speaking German or Japanese today” were it not for the United States deployment of overwhelming force that ended WW II.
What this means is that inherent in the “rules-based international order” is in reality, a system anchored significantly on power relations in which the powerful act, or claim to act, as guarantors of order in the international realm. This is particularly in relation to the use of force, which has important implications for the real nature of international law and its ability to bind powerful actors. Thus, the international order has, in reality, remained and remains an anarchical international society of states, the “rules-based international order” notwithstanding.
- The international COMMUNITY. This is an aspirational epoch that never fully emerged in reality, but was strenuously canvassed after the end of the Cold War and driven by the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the carnage of the Balkan wars that resulted in the disintegration of the Former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. This approach believes the world to be not just a society of independent, sovereign, collaborating and simultaneously contending states, but a community in which we ought to become our brother’s keepers, with a “Responsibility to Protect” citizens from genocide and other human rights violations committed under the cloak of sovereignty. In other words, sovereignty was no longer absolute.
Along with this doctrine came the fast and furious rise of globalisation driven mainly by “free” trade ( Trump’s deliberate unleashing of tariffs as a tool of statecraft has skewered this concept), technology, and culture. Along, also, came a sharp rise in immigration flows across countries, mainly towards advanced western countries from developing or underdeveloped countries in Africa and South Asia.
The challenge is that globalisation, while a real phenomenon, was always overrated, at least to the extent that its advocates assumed that it meant the end of substantive sovereignty. It has increasingly faced resistance with the rise of right-wing politics in several western countries over the past two decades. The philosophy of this rising force is that “our country is ours” and no external organization (such as the European Union or the United Nations) should dictate what happens inside a country with a legitimate government elected democratically by its citizens.
This was the driving force behind Brexit, the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union via a popular domestic referendum. Intertwined in this perspective, understandably, is a sharply increased hostility to immigration, in particular of the illegal variety, as citizens of Western countries feel increasingly overrun by foreigners who are making them a creeping minority in their own countries. In several cases, these population movements have brought with them religious tensions and, in extreme instances, served as a cover for terrorist cells.
It has also meant that developed countries have become far less concerned about what has erroneously been known as “international development” in poor countries. Development, by definition, is a bottom-up process and evolution in societies, and cannot be achieved with the outsider-driven approach embedded in the international aid industry of the past seven decades.
The two elections of President Trump, the most recent, in 2024, even more so than the first in 2016, have been the most consequential outcomes of the conceptual and domestic political resistance to extreme levels of globalisation and the advocacy for an international community. For the United States is without question the world’s most powerful country. This is also because globalisation has led to a transplanting of values and social norms across countries in ways that have fundamentally challenged prevailing worldviews in individual countries.
The tensions at Davos and in the run-up to it arose precisely because the Trump administration’s “America First” philosophy has knocked the previously existing contours of the Western alliance in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) out of kilter, and — at least in the perspective of European countries with which the United States has had historically close relationships — turned on America’s allies in the singular pursuit of the Great Power’s framing of its own national interest. All is no longer well inside “the family”.
What’s in It for Africa?
What does all of this mean for Africa, to which the Trump administration — and even other Western countries — have since served notice of the end of an entitlement-anchored relationship of dependency on foreign aid?
African countries need to understand that:
A fundamental shift has occurred in the global order, and tomorrow’s existential reality for the continent can no longer be anchored on yesterday’s historical relationships with Western countries that have turned increasingly inward-facing. This means that the continent must now find its own way and fend for itself in a competitive world.
The basis of competitiveness, influence and strength in the world is INTERNAL resilience and success in achieving the fundamental elements of sovereignty and state capacity. The main elements are four – the state’s ability to secure its territory and the lives and property of its citizens from external attack, the ability to administer taxes and mobilize revenues through a genuine social contract in which those taxes create an expectation of a minimum level of protection of the welfare of the citizens (e.g. universal social security), the ability to deliver effective social services such as healthcare, education and infrastructure, and an enabling environment for wealth creation by private citizens through entrepreneurship. Thus, the state spurs progress by creating security and welfare for citizens as a foundation for success and agency-driven interaction with the rest of the world. Paupers at home have no real standing in gatherings of the wealthy abroad. This calls for the formulation, citizen-education and the re-creation of nationhood on the basis of clear philosophical foundations as a driver of national ambition and progress, as has been the case in the West and Asia.
This requires a complete return to the drawing board in terms of national politics, democratic governance, and economic management. Critically, leadership selection in African countries must be reimagined. It is only the selection of the caliber of leaders with the capacity to drive the rise of the continent’s countries based on these fundamental understandings and values, that can guarantee Africa’s real, measurable progress. Attendance of international summits such as Davos, against backgrounds of teeming poverty of millions of citizens and insecurity at home that militate against productive enterprise, is a misplacement of priorities. While symbolism can matter in certain contexts, no deals reached in Davos can transform the reality of any African country. What is required for transformation is capable, competent, visionary and values-anchored leadership at home that transforms realities on the ground, serving as a sustainable foundation for external projection into the anarchical international society.
”Politics” – chasing votes and political power in domestic periodic rituals of elections through means fair and foul – will not save African countries and their leaders and make the continent respected in the world. Far more important are leadership and governance with measurable outcomes for citizens at home, and the factors that drive leadership selection.
Conclusion
President Donald Trump’s recent actions in world politics – tariffs, the intervention in Venezuela, and his muscular assertions of a U.S. national security interest in acquiring sovereignty over Greenland, and the tensions at the 2026 edition of the World Economic Forum in Davos – are far less a defenestration of the “rules-based international order” than an explanation of its undertones in reality, and perhaps an extreme demonstration of the nature of power in world politics that holds important lessons for African countries. Those lessons should be the starting point of a redefinition of the strategies of African countries as they seek their place under the sun. This task is far more fundamental – and difficult – than the current tendencies of the continent’s countries and their political leaders suggest they understand, much less a determination to embark on this journey. But in an evolving world, the continent has no alternative to grappling with this strategic agenda. Else, its future – with an estimate that its fast-rising population will make one quarter of the world’s workforce by 2050 and 40 per cent of the world’s population by 2100 – will be a difficult one. Substance must replace hype, and real leadership and strategy replace the political correctness of blind optimism.
References
Kingsley Chiedu Moghalu, Emerging Africa: How the Global Economy’s ‘Last Frontier’ Can Prosper and Matter (London: Penguin Books, 2014)
Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977)
Henry Kissinger, World Order (New York: Penguin Press, 2014).
* Kingsley Moghalu is the Founder and President of IGET Academy. A former senior official of the United Nations, he has served as Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, the Inaugural President and Vice-Chancellor of the African School of Governance, and as Professor of Practice in International Business and Public Policy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the Oxford Martin Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford.
- https://www.igetafrica.org/davos-the-new-world-order-and-africa/