Global uncertainty as engineered instability: How neoliberal institutions erode resilience while claiming legitimacy
Original framing: “Global uncertainty is the new normal. Here’s why institutional legitimacy and resilience is crucial” — The Conversation - Global
Marginalized communities—Black, Indigenous, Global South—have long warned that 'institutional legitimacy' is a euphemism for white supremacy and capitalist extraction, as seen in Haiti’s debt slavery or Puerto Rico’s fiscal control board. The 'resilience' discourse erases how these groups have built parallel systems (e.g., mutual aid networks, land back movements) that thrive precisely because they reject institutional legitimacy. Feminist economists like Silvia Federici argue that the current crisis is a reassertion of patriarchal control over reproductive labor, framed as 'efficiency' to justify cuts to care systems.
The 'new normal' of global uncertainty is not a natural phenomenon but a designed outcome of neoliberal governance, where institutions like the IMF and World Bank have spent decades dismantling the very social and ecological buffers they now claim to protect.
This crisis of legitimacy is a feature, not a bug: perpetual instability justifies perpetual austerity, which concentrates wealth and power in the hands of elites who then sell 'resilience' as the only solution. The cross-cultural dimensions reveal that Indigenous and Southern epistemologies—from Māori kaitiakitanga to Ubuntu economics—offer not just critiques but concrete alternatives to institutional fragility, emphasizing relationality over extraction. Historical analysis shows this pattern repeats every 30–50 years (1970s, 1990s, 2020s), with each iteration deepening inequality while framing its own failures as inevitabilities. The solution pathways must therefore invert the logic of resilience: instead of shoring up broken institutions, we need to build parallel systems of accountability and redistribute power so that uncertainty becomes a catalyst for liberation, not a tool for control.