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war & peace
The Global South’s AI Moment
If the Global South acts now, it can help build a future where algorithms bridge divides instead of deepening them—where they enable peace, not war.
Jul 14, 2025
The world stands on the brink of a transformation whose full scope remains elusive. Just as steam engines, electricity, and the internet each sparked previous industrial revolutions, artificial intelligence is now shaping what has been dubbed the Fourth Industrial Revolution. What sets this new era apart is the unprecedented speed and scale with which AI is being deployed—particularly in the realms of security and warfare, where technological advancement rarely keeps pace with ethics or regulation.
As the United States and its Western allies pour billions into autonomous drones, AI-driven command systems, and surveillance platforms, a critical question arises: Is this arms race making the world safer—or opening the door to geopolitical instability and even humanitarian catastrophe?
The reality is that the West’s focus on achieving military superiority—especially in the digital domain—has sidelined global conversations about the shared future of AI. The United Nations has warned in recent years that the absence of binding legal frameworks for lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) could lead to irreversible consequences. Yet the major powers have largely ignored these warnings, favoring strategic autonomy in developing digital deterrence over any multilateral constraints. The nuclear experience of the 20th century showed how a deterrence-first logic brought humanity to the edge of catastrophe; now, imagine algorithms that can decide to kill in milliseconds, unleashed without transparent global commitments.
So far, it is the nations of the Global South that have borne the heaviest cost of this regulatory vacuum. From Yemen to the Sahel, AI-powered drones have enabled attacks where the line between military and civilian targets has all but disappeared. Human rights organizations report a troubling rise in civilian casualties from drone strikes over the past decade, with no clear mechanisms for compensation or legal accountability. In other words, the Global South is not only absent from decision-making but has become the unintended testing ground for emerging military technologies—technologies often shielded from public scrutiny under the guise of national security.
Ultimately, the central question facing humanity is this: Do we want AI to replicate the militaristic logic of the 20th century—or do we want it to help us confront shared global challenges, from climate change to future pandemics?
But this status quo is not inevitable. The Global South—from Latin America and Africa to West and South Asia—is not merely a collection of potential victims. It holds critical assets that can reshape the rules of the game. First, these countries have youthful, educated populations capable of steering AI innovation toward civilian and development-oriented goals, such as smart agriculture, early disease detection, climate crisis management, and universal education. For instance, multilateral projects involving Indian specialists in the fight against malaria using artificial intelligence.
Second, the South possesses a collective historical memory of colonialism and technological subjugation, making it more attuned to the geopolitical dangers of AI monopolies and thus a natural advocate for a more just global order. Third, emerging coalitions—like BRICS+ and the African Union’s digital initiatives—demonstrate that South-South cooperation can facilitate investment and knowledge exchange independently of Western actors.
Still, international political history reminds us that missed opportunities can easily turn into looming threats. If the Global South remains passive during this critical moment, the risk grows that Western dominance over AI standards will solidify into a new form of technological hegemony. This would not merely deepen technical inequality—it would redraw the geopolitical map and exacerbate the global North-South divide. In a world where a handful of governments and corporations control data, write algorithms, and set regulatory norms, non-Western states may find themselves forced to spend their limited development budgets on software licenses and smart weapon imports just to preserve their sovereignty. This siphoning of resources away from health, education, and infrastructure—the cornerstones of sustainable development—would create a vicious cycle of insecurity and underdevelopment.
Breaking out of this trajectory requires proactive leadership by the Global South on three fronts. First, leading nations—such as India, Brazil, Indonesia, and South Africa—should establish a ”Friends of AI Regulation” group at the U.N. General Assembly and propose a draft convention banning fully autonomous weapons. The international success of the landmine treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention shows that even in the face of resistance from great powers, the formation of “soft norms” can pave the way toward binding treaties and increase the political cost of defection.
Second, these countries should create a joint innovation fund to support AI projects in healthcare, agriculture, and renewable energy—fields where benefits are tangible for citizens and where visible success can generate the social capital needed for broader international goals. Third, aligning with Western academics and civil society is vital. The combined pressure of researchers, human rights advocates, and Southern policymakers on Western legislatures and public opinion can help curb the influence of military-industrial lobbies and create political space for international cooperation.
In addition, the Global South must invest in developing its own ethical standards for data use and algorithmic governance to prevent the uncritical adoption of Western models that may worsen cultural risks and privacy violations. Brazil’s 2021 AI ethics framework illustrates that local values can be harmonized with global principles like transparency and algorithmic fairness. Adapting such initiatives at the regional level—through bodies like the African Union or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization—would be a major step toward establishing a multipolar regime in global digital governance.
Of course, this path is not without obstacles. Western powers possess vast economic, political, and media tools to slow such efforts. But history shows that transformative breakthroughs often emerge from resistance to dominant systems. Just as the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1960s expanded the Global South’s agency during the Cold War, today, it can spearhead AI regulation to reshape the power-technology equation in favor of a fairer world order.
Ultimately, the central question facing humanity is this: Do we want AI to replicate the militaristic logic of the 20th century—or do we want it to help us confront shared global challenges, from climate change to future pandemics? The answer depends on the political will and bold leadership of countries that hold the world’s majority population and the greatest potential for growth. If the Global South acts now, it can help build a future where algorithms bridge divides instead of deepening them—where they enable peace, not war.
The time for action is now. Silence means ceding the future to entrenched powers. Coordinated engagement, on the other hand, could move AI from a minefield of geopolitical interests to a shared highway of cooperation and human development. This is the mission the Global South must undertake—not just for itself, but for all of humanity.
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What Are the Chances for Peace in Ukraine Right Now?
What makes it so difficult to find a solution? Is Russia a threat to Europe? Five questions for Eurasia expert Anatol Lieven.
Jul 09, 2025
David Goeßmann: The talks a few weeks ago between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul came to nothing. What are the chances for peace?
Anatol Lieven: I see no prospect for an end to the war at present. Russia and Ukraine remain far apart on peace terms, and the Trump administration has not put forward a compromise proposal of its own. The Russian generals are reportedly telling Russian President Vladimir Putin that Ukraine will collapse by early next year, and Putin is willing to fight on, at least for a while. We will have to see what happens on the battlefield, and to the Russian economy.
David Goeßmann: What makes it so difficult to find a diplomatic solution for the Ukraine war?
Anatol Lieven: Ukraine will never legally recognize Russian sovereignty over the occupied territories, but cannot reconquer them. So a cease-fire will have to take place along the existing battle line, and the question of their legal status will have to be left for future negotiation—as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy proposed soon after the start of the war.
In my judgement, internal political factors make it impossible for the Ukrainian government to make a peace offer that Russia could accept—just as the French establishment could not make peace with the Communists in Vietnam long after the war there was clearly lost. The Europeans are far too divided to make a coherent joint proposal. So the initiative for peace will have to come from the U.S.
The only question is whether the U.S. can abandon it incrementally and peacefully, or if it goes down in blood and fire taking many other countries with it.
The European states will have to be consulted about the future of sanctions and the Russian assets in Europe that they have seized. But they are incapable of uniting behind a serious peace strategy.
David Goeßmann: In Europe and the U.S. it is feared that Russia will go beyond Ukraine and invade other European countries? Your take on that.
Anatol Lieven: Russian military capabilities and intentions vis a vis NATO have both been hugely exaggerated. Even hybrid moves (which are not "war") have so far been very small and in the nature of warnings not serious attacks. Russian nuclear bluster has been intended to deter NATO from intervening in Ukraine, not as the prelude to a Russian attack on NATO.
David Goeßmann: NATO has decided that each member state should spend 5% of its GDP on military and related infrastructure. How do you assess this unprecedented militarization?
Anatol Lieven: These figures are absurd. Five percent of E.U. GDP would be approximately $900 billion a year—as much as the U.S. and almost three times the military budgets of Russia and China put together. That is quite unnecessary, and impossible. This is an empty bribe to U.S. President Donald Trump to keep the U.S. committed to Europe, not a serious strategy.
David Goeßmann: The struggle for global primacy continues under Trump, see the bombing of Iran or the confrontation with China. Where are we heading?
Anatol Lieven: The desire for universal U.S. hegemony (also known as the "Wolfowitz Doctrine") is a megalomaniac project that cannot possibly be sustained for long. The only question is whether the U.S. can abandon it incrementally and peacefully, or if it goes down in blood and fire taking many other countries with it.
Among the nuclear-armed powers, we can hope that the fear of nuclear annihilation will stop them from going over the brink into war with each other. The example of India and Pakistan shows that Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) can actually work—for without it, India would have invaded Pakistan long ago. But the liberal dream of a global "Democratic Peace" is dead as a nail, killed by Israel and the U.S. itself just as much as by Russia.
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War Makes the World Sick... Literally
The body of a single child, wasting away from the lack of the basic fluid that runs in my sink or yours, best captures the way war casualties ripple across time and populations.
Jul 09, 2025
War kills in so many ways. These days, Americans are bombarded with images from Gaza and elsewhere of people or broken bodies being ferried on stretchers from the rubble of homes and hospitals, by rescue workers whose thin bodies and stricken faces suggest they are barely better off than those they’re helping. Social media and journalists make us eyewitnesses to emaciated children too weak to cry. And yet, compared with air raids that crush and bloody instantaneously, a slower disaster, more difficult to capture (especially given our made-for-TikTok attention spans), consists of the hours that many people in war zones spend wasting away from infectious diseases of one sort or another.
Let me count a few of the ways.
In Iraq in 2004, three-month-old Ali tries to cry but he’s too weak to make a sound, since his body has been ravaged by diarrhea. Between 2003 and 2007, half of Iraq’s 18,000 doctors left the country due to the deteriorating security situation (with few intending to return). Health facilities had also been bombed out and destroyed. By then, about two-thirds of the deaths of children under the age of five, like Ali, were due to respiratory infections and diarrhea compounded by malnutrition.
Consider what it would do if someone you loved perished because they were born in the wrong place at the wrong time in the storm of war that destroys infrastructure so central to our lives that normally we barely even notice its presence.
In Pakistan in 2017, one of a handful of countries that has yet to eliminate the polio virus, the father of a five-year-old boy is inconsolable when he learns that his son will never walk on his own again. Among displaced people in the Afghan-Pakistani border region where they lived, concerns about counterinsurgency air raids from U.S. and later Pakistani government and opposition forces, security threats toward vaccination teams in conflict-torn parts of that country, and suspicions among parents like that boy’s father that health workers had been sent by the U.S. government to sterilize Pakistani children, all prevented kids from getting the immunizations that they needed.
In Burkina Faso in 2019, three-year-old Abdoulaye dies after contracting malaria while in a shelter for people internally displaced by violence between government forces and Islamic militias. Malnourished and anemic, without direct access to a health clinic, he succumbs to a treatable illness.
In Fayetteville, North Carolina in 2020, as in other military towns across the U.S., rates of sexually transmitted infections like syphilis, herpes simplex, and HIV are among the highest in the country. Bases tend to drive up poverty among civilians by making the surrounding populations dependent on low-wage service work. And stressed-out, war-traumatized American soldiers are more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior that spreads disease among the broader population.
In Ukraine in 2023, a soldier treated for severe burns dies of sepsis, despite being given multiple antibiotics. Doctors found klebsiella, a multi-drug-resistant pathogen, in his body. Despite successful efforts by the Ukrainian government to curb antimicrobial resistance in its population prior to Russia’s 2022 invasion, mounting casualties, along with shortages of supplies and personnel, mean that Ukrainian health workers now try to do whatever they can to keep soldiers alive. In the long term, antibiotic-resistant infections traceable to Ukrainian patients are already beginning to appear in places as distant as Japan.
In May 2025 in the Gaza strip, four-month-old Jenan dies from chronic diarrhea after losing half her bodyweight. She needed hypoallergenic milk formula, but aerial bombardments and blockades of basic food and medical supplies have made that once common product scarce. As anthropologist Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins points out, prior to the start of the war between Israel and Hamas in October 2023, cases of diarrhea in young children there averaged about 2,000 per month. In April of the following year, however, such cases already numbered more than 100,000. Likewise, in the decade before the war, there were no large-scale epidemics in Gaza. In just the first seven months of that conflict, however, overcrowding in makeshift shelters, nutritional deficits, shortages of hygiene products—only 1 in every 3 Gazans has soap!—and contaminated water have led to new outbreaks of infectious diseases like measles, cholera, typhoid, and polio, exacerbated by widespread starvation.
At some level, it couldn’t be simpler. War destroys all too many of the modern amenities that make life possible. Preventable illness and death occur even in industrialized settings that are marked by inequality, lack of information, psychological trauma, or just the chaos of combat that hinders long-term thinking. In poor- and middle-income countries like Yemen, Syria, and Nigeria, infectious diseases were already among the top causes of death, even before the outbreak of significant conflicts. Their incidence, however, grew so much worse in wartime, especially among civilians who didn’t have the same access to doctors and medical hospitals as armed groups.
The body of a single child, wasting away from the lack of the basic fluid that runs in my sink or yours, best captures the way war casualties ripple across time and populations. For every soldier who dies in battle, exponentially more people suffer deaths from malnutrition, disease, or trauma-related violence even after battles end. Preventable infections play a large role in this story.
The War on Children
Children are particularly vulnerable to sickness and death in armed conflicts because of their immature immune systems, greater nutritional needs, tendency to succumb more easily to dehydration, and reliance on families who may not even be around to care for them. A study of more than 15,000 armed-conflict events in 35 African countries found that children aged 10 or younger were far more likely to die if they lived within 100 kilometers of a battle zone than they would have in earlier periods of peacetime. Increases in mortality ranged from 3% to about 27%, varying with how many people also died in nearby battles. Strikingly, many more babies under the age of one died annually in the eight years following a conflict’s end than while the battles were going on—infectious disease being a primary killer.
Take Yemen as an example of how war may affect young children and their families over time. Since the start of that country’s civil war in 2015, cholera, a waterborne illness doctors have known how to prevent since 1954, has ravaged the most vulnerable members of that country’s population, particularly children, due to a lack of appropriate sanitation or reasonable access to healthcare. As of December 2017, more than a million people had contracted the disease, nearly half of them children, and more than 2,000 had died of the illness. Compare that to the more than 10,000 Yemenis estimated to have died in direct combat by that time, and you get an idea of how significantly death by illness counts among the casualties of war.
Nearly a decade later, in fact, there are hundreds of thousands of new cases of that illness in Yemen each year and hundreds of annual deaths, making up more than a third of all cases globally. When Rami discovered that his daughters, aged 10 and 7, had cholera, he managed to scrape together the equivalent of about $15 to travel to a clinic so that the family could get lifesaving fluids and information to prevent further cases. Many families like his, however, can’t afford such treatment, forcing all too many of them to delay care or even experience the unthinkable: losing a child.
Consider what it would do if someone you loved perished because they were born in the wrong place at the wrong time in the storm of war that destroys infrastructure so central to our lives that normally we barely even notice its presence. I hope it’s an experience that neither you nor I ever have.
War and Displacement
Still, I think about such things every day, as I bet do many of my colleagues connected to the Costs of War Project. When we first launched that project in 2011, Professors Catherine Lutz, Neta Crawford, and I met with experts in armed conflict to discuss how we would cover the issue of war’s health impacts. Repeatedly, they reminded us of how hard it is to talk about war and health without understanding what it’s like for families to be forced to leave their homes in search of safety.
Unsurprisingly, refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) are uniquely vulnerable to disease and illness. Anyone who has gotten sick while traveling knows that the challenges of getting care are compounded by a lack of knowledge of the community you find yourself in. In the case of today’s more than 122 million war refugees or displaced people, stigma and harassment are frequent travel companions. According to one meta-analysis, more than one-fifth of refugee and IDP women have experienced some form of sexual violence while living in displacement settings. A study of more than 500 immigrants and refugees in Italy found that nearly half experienced physical violence, sexual abuse, harassment, or workplace discrimination.
How did we get to a time when our leaders seem loath to invest in healthcare and don’t even hide their disdain for poor people, a significant number of whom are military personnel and veterans?
The stories that extremist politicians tell about migrants—think of President Donald Trump’s tall tale of supposedly dog- and cat-eating Haitians in Springfield, Ohio—distract us from the social problems such politicians seem unwilling to deal with like loneliness and poverty. Displaced persons lack political clout and voting power in places that host them and, in actual war zones, fighters rarely respect shelters and camps designated for their survival.
For people who flee their homes, the basic boring stuff is lacking, too. Only 35% of refugees have clean drinking water where they live, while less than a fifth of them have access to toilets. Imagine how that would affect all of the higher-order things you value in your life, including gatherings with people you care about, if you couldn’t even find a decent place to wash your hands or brush your teeth!
Most of all, what stands out to me as both a social worker and a scholar of war is how people forced to leave their communities end up losing connections to health providers they trust. I can’t tell you how many individuals I’ve met in clinical and humanitarian settings who had declined to seek care for Covid-19, pneumonia, severe flu symptoms, and other illnesses because they lacked confidence that professionals in their host communities had their best interests at heart.
My Government’s Assault on Public Health
As Republicans in Congress passed a bill that would deprive millions of Americans of health insurance in the near term, as high-level officials spread disinformation about vaccines for once-eradicated illnesses like measles, and as public health workers and officials face threats of violence, all too many poor Americans are starting to experience the sorts of obstacles to healthcare common in war zones.
Meanwhile, with the Trump administration’s decisions earlier this year to fire at least 2,000 U.S. Agency for International Development workers and freeze foreign aid dollars used (in part) to treat and monitor infectious diseases elsewhere on this planet, the threat that a foreign pandemic might make it to this country has grown considerably.
To quote Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) at a recent town hall with constituents worried about losing healthcare, “We are all going to die.” While that is indeed so, it also matters how. A long life with access to basic services like immunizations and clean water is one of the differences between dying like a human being and dying like one of the wild animals I find in my rural area, infected by bacteria in the water or exhausted from heat exposure.
How, I wonder, did we Americans reach a place where many of us are silent or supportive of a strongman’s $45 million birthday military parade that closed roads to residents and commuters for days? How did we get to a time when our leaders seem loath to invest in healthcare and don’t even hide their disdain for poor people, a significant number of whom are military personnel and veterans?
I’m not sure I know what this country stands for anymore. I don’t know about you, but these days America sometimes feels to me like a treacherous foreign land.
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