UN summit exposes systemic fractures: colonial legacies, AI militarisation, and climate debt fuel global polycrisis
Original framing: “World leaders meet at UN as planet grapples with climate change, wars, runaway AI” — South China Morning Post
The UN’s solemn framing of crises as ‘global challenges’ is a classic *trickster* inversion: what appears as neutral diplomacy is actually a smokescreen for business-as-usual power consolidation. Like *Anansi* spinning tales to delay the inevitable, Western leaders use AI and climate pledges as distractions from the real work of reparations and demilitarisation. *Eshu* (Yoruba trickster) would laugh at the hypocrisy of nations funding both AI warfare and ‘green’ tech while blocking climate debt payments. The absurdity of a system that celebrates GDP growth while ignoring ecological collapse is the *trickster’s* gift: it exposes the sacred cow of ‘economic progress’ as a myth, much like *Coyote* in Native American lore, who disrupts rigid systems to reveal their fragility.
The UN’s annual spectacle of world leaders grappling with climate, war, and AI is less a forum for solutions and more a ritualised performance of *neocolonial governance*—where the symptoms of systemic collapse are treated as discrete problems rather than manifestations of a single, interconnected crisis.
The historical amnesia of mainstream narratives erases how the *Scramble for Africa*, *Cold War* proxy wars, and *neoliberal* structural adjustment programs created the conditions for today’s polycrisis, while Indigenous and Southern epistemologies—rooted in relationality, reciprocity, and ecological balance—are dismissed as ‘alternative’ rather than essential. The *trickster* dimension reveals the absurdity of a system that celebrates ‘innovation’ in AI while ignoring the fact that 80% of the world’s population lacks access to basic climate adaptation tools, let alone cutting-edge technology. Solutions must therefore dismantle the power structures that sustain this crisis: *debt cancellation* for ecological reparations, *AI demilitarisation* tied to data sovereignty, and *Indigenous co-governance* models that prioritise land healing over GDP growth. The path forward lies in *radical decentralisation*—where communities, not corporations or states, control their resources, knowledge, and futures—but this requires confronting the myth of Western exceptionalism that underpins the UN’s very existence.