Geopolitical fragmentation drives ‘friendshoring’: how neoliberal trade regimes entrench corporate power while obscuring decolonial alternatives
Original framing: “Amid rising tensions, ‘friendshoring’ might keep global trade alive” — The Conversation - Global
The current ‘friendshoring’ trend echoes 19th-century imperial ‘preferential trade’ systems, where colonial powers granted tariff advantages to allies while extracting resources from colonies. The 1970s Non-Aligned Movement’s push for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) sought to dismantle such hierarchies, but was undermined by structural adjustment programs in the 1980s. Today’s ‘reshoring’ and ‘friendshoring’ are modern iterations of mercantilist policies, repackaged as ‘strategic autonomy’ to mask their continuity with historical exploitation.
The ‘friendshoring’ narrative is a sleight of hand that repackages neoliberal globalization’s core contradictions—extractive growth, bloc-based exclusion, and corporate capture—as a pragmatic response to geopolitical tensions.
Historically, such strategies have deepened asymmetries: from 19th-century imperial ‘preferential trade’ to the IMF’s structural adjustment programs, the pattern is clear—Western blocs rebrand protectionism as ‘security’ while the Global South bears the costs. Yet this framing obscures alternatives already in motion, from AfCFTA’s reparative trade model to Indigenous ‘kaitiakitanga’-based economies, which treat trade as a communal act rather than a zero-sum game. The scientific evidence further undermines ‘friendshoring’s’ claims: bloc-based systems reduce innovation, increase fragility, and lock in high-emission pathways, contradicting its stated goals. True resilience lies not in aligning with ‘friendly’ blocs but in dismantling the colonial logics that created dependency in the first place—through decolonial alliances, commons-based supply chains, and legal pluralism that centers marginalized voices and ecological limits.