Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, delivered this year’s Nelson Mandela lecture to an electrified audience of 3,500 people in Johannesburg. Her words cut through the polite rituals of diplomacy and liberal self-congratulation that usually accompany such events. She spoke plainly about the violence that underwrites the liberal world order–the colonial wars, occupations, and racial hierarchies that persist beneath the language of human rights and the rule of law.
Albanese began by taking Mandela back from his liberal canonisation and affirmed his commitment to the ‘indivisibility of freedom’. Mandela, we must recall, refused to renounce his support for the Palestinian struggle or to deny the decisive role of Cuba at Cuito Cuanavale–a reminder that his humanism was inseparable from anti-imperial solidarity. For her, to honour Mandela–the real Mandela–was to recover that thread: the insistence that to be fully human is to recognise the humanity of all, without borders. She ended with two words that landed like a hammer blow: liberal tyrannies. That closing phrase did not appear in the version of her speech published by the Daily Maverick, the leading voice of South African liberalism
Albanese has been vilified and even sanctioned in Western capitals for saying what so many can see–that Israel’s war in Gaza is genocidal, and that the international system designed to prevent such crimes is paralysed when the perpetrator is an ally of empire. Her presence in South Africa, invited to honour Mandela, was itself an act of historical continuity. Like Mandela before her, she spoke not merely of law and rights but of power and hypocrisy, of the need to confront domination wherever it wears the mask of civilisation. Refusing euphemism, she described the situation in Gaza as apocalyptic–in the original Greek sense of revelation. ‘The genocide,’ she said, ‘has pierced the veil of Maya,’ exposing not an aberration but the structure of a world order.
Albanese noted that her European education had never taught her that the Holocaust was preceded by the German genocide of the Herero and Nama in Namibia–or that the dehumanisation practised by European fascism had its prototype in the colonies. The idea of a superior race, she warned, did not end with the Nazis; it ‘continues to fester in the world today.’ Gaza is not an exception to Western civilisation but part of its continuity–one revelation in a long, colonial apocalypse.
Herrenvolk Democracy
Liberalism presents itself as the moral conscience of the modern world: a creed of rights, reason and rule of law. But the order it built has always depended on exclusion and violence. From the birth of the Atlantic slave economy to the wars of occupation that accompanied the spread of ‘free trade’, liberalism’s promise of freedom was undergirded by the unfreedom of others. The same thinkers who wrote of natural rights defended the plantation and the colony; the same states that declared the equality of man drew their wealth from conquest, genocide, enclosure, and enslavement. As Domenico Losurdo showed, the three great liberal revolutions–in England, the United States, and France–each expanded rather than abolished slavery. Liberalism and racial slavery were born together, granting what he called Herrenvolk freedom: liberty for the master race built on the subjugation of others.
When the enslaved rose up in Haiti, defeating the armies of Spain, Britain, and France, they exposed the falsity of Europe’s universalism. That revolution, the greatest act of emancipation in modern history, was met with isolation and punishment–proof that liberal liberty was never meant for all. Across centuries, this contradiction was not an aberration but a structure. The democratic revolutions in Europe and America were inseparable from indigenous dispossession and racial slavery. The Industrial Revolution turned on cotton picked by enslaved hands. And when the enslaved or colonised demanded the liberty the metropole proclaimed, they were met with massacre–from the Caribbean uprisings of the eighteenth century to the Kenyan, Algerian and Vietnamese wars of the twentieth. From Tasmania to Namibia, settler colonies carried the genocidal logic of Europe well into the twentieth century.
Liberalism learned to manage its contradictions through distance. Violence was outsourced to the frontier, the colony, the periphery. At home, the rule of law; abroad, the law of rule. The Enlightenment’s faith in universal humanity coexisted with the assumption that certain peoples were not yet–or not fully–human. John Stuart Mill’s 1859 essay On Liberty remains a canonical text, still taught as an exemplary argument for freedom, yet Mill was explicit that ‘despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians.’ John Brown was executed in the same year that Mill published this essay. Racism has always been a choice.
From its origin, liberal freedom was never universal; it was always bounded by race and empire. That psychic architecture endures today, when the deaths of tens of thousands in Gaza are rationalised as collateral damage, and international law is weaponised by the West.
The great Black intellectuals of the twentieth century grasped this immediately. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1947 that there was ‘no Nazi atrocity… which the Christian civilisation of Europe had not long been practising against coloured folk Three years later, Aimé Césaire observed that fascism’s crime was to have applied in Europe what Europe had long inflicted on the colonies.
Every Human Life Counts as a Life
For South Africans, this is not an abstract critique. The country’s own history is a condensed version of the global story: a vocabulary of civilisation and property–a claim to be an African outpost of the West–built atop racial expropriation and domination. When apartheid was finally dismantled, it was replaced not by an alternative to liberal capitalism but by its integration into the global system. Political democracy arrived hand in hand with neoliberal orthodoxy, and the moral prestige of liberation was harnessed to the project of market rule.
That history explains the depth of feeling stirred by Albanese’s lecture. South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice is not only a legal manoeuvre. It did not only rekindle the possibility of international law being available to all rather than just another weapon of Western domination. It affirmed an axiomatic universalism–every human life counts as a life. No people can be beneath the law, and no state can be above it.
To accuse Israel of genocide is to directly challenge the post-Cold War order in which Western powers claim the monopoly of legitimate violence. The reaction from those powers–alternately dismissive and indignant–shows how little the liberal world tolerates judgment from below.
That tone had been echoed on the pages of The Daily Maverick itself, which published Greg Mills and Ray Hartley’s claim that South Africa’s case would make it a ‘pariah’. They wrote that it had ‘exposed’ the African National Congress government to be ‘no friend of liberal values’. They were right, of course, because liberal values have always meant freedom for some at the cost of devastation for others.
When Albanese invoked ‘liberal tyrannies’, she was not merely describing this hypocrisy; she was naming a system of domination that survives through moral alibi. Liberalism justifies its wars, coups and blockades as defences of freedom; it frames resistance as fanaticism; it punishes the weak in the name of justice and order.
From the Congo to Iraq, the liberal world perfected an empire of innocence–its violence always reluctant, always regrettable, always necessary. Through the Cold War, Western governments sponsored coups from Iran to Chile, from the Congo to Guatemala, backed apartheid, and waged wars in Korea, Vietnam and Algeria–all in the name of freedom.
As Frantz Fanon wrote in 1956, when open racism began to retreat from polite society, it re-emerged as ‘cultural racism’–a claim to universal civilisation that still placed the West at its centre. Assimilation became possible for a few, and domination remained the rule for most. Its violence is always reluctant, always regrettable, always necessary. When the United States invaded Vietnam, it claimed to be defending democracy; when it bombed Belgrade or Baghdad, it spoke of humanitarian intervention. The European Union funds detention camps across Africa while celebrating itself as the guardian of human rights. The U.S. sanctions around a third of all states in the name of freedom.
This moral self-deception has consequences not only abroad but at home. The same logic that divides the world into civilised and barbaric reproduces itself in domestic hierarchies: the migrant detained, the poor criminalised, the protester surveilled. The imperial boomerang brings the frontier inward.
To expose this is not to reject every liberal advance–the extension of suffrage, the curbing of arbitrary power, the defence of certain rights hard-won by struggle–but to see how those gains have been contained within a system that cannot offer them to all, that cannot, by its nature, deliver equality or peace. The liberal state has always depended on a class structure that concentrates wealth, and an imperial structure that externalises costs. Its promise of progress conceals a reality of extraction.
Europe, as Césaire wrote, is ‘indefensible’ not as a place but as a project–first imagined as a Christian civilisation defined against Islam, and later as the home of reason defined against savagery. In 1492, the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain and Columbus’s landing in the Caribbean marked the birth of that project’s world dominion–justified first in the language of religion, and later, under liberalism, in the language of science and race. The claim to civilisational superiority was constant.
Resisting Power
Yet the façade is cracking. The ‘rules-based order’ proclaimed after 1991 is now openly flouted by its architects; the authority of Western moralism wanes as the record of Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza stands exposed. There have been earlier moments when the apocalypse of empire was briefly recognised as revelation: when France’s wars in Indochina and Algeria shattered its republican illusions; when millions marched against the war in Vietnam; when London saw its largest ever protests on the eve of the devastation of Iraq–each moment a brief lifting of the veil, before it was drawn again.
Across the Global South, a new confidence is emerging–a sense that history’s moral centre of gravity may be shifting. South Africa’s case at The Hague is part of that shift. So too are the regional solidarities forming around it, from Latin America to Asia. These are early and uneven stirrings, not yet a coherent bloc, but they carry the echo of Bandung: the conviction that the peoples once ruled by liberal empires might speak again in their own name.
This is why Albanese’s words electrified her audience. To call out liberal tyrannies is to refuse the old deferential language in which the South must plead while the North judges. It is to insist that moral authority belongs not to the powerful but to those who resist their power.
Possibility of Renewal
If the liberal order is tyrannical, what comes after it? Albanese did not prescribe a new ideology. But implicit in her appeal was the demand for an ethics of equality untethered from empire–an order grounded not in pity or philanthropy but in solidarity. That will require rebuilding international law from below, reclaiming democracy from oligarchy, and confronting the economic despotism that liberalism has naturalised.
Such transformations are far from imminent. But when apocalypse is revelation, there is a possibility of renewal. What must end, she suggested, is the capacity of Western liberalism to veil its own violence–to restore the veil of Maya every time it is torn away. The powers that sustain liberal tyranny remain vast, their narratives deeply woven into the institutions and imaginations of the world. But cracks have appeared, and through them another horizon becomes visible.
The epoch that began in 1492–Europe’s planetary domination–is drawing to a close. Economic and political tectonics are shifting, and with them the balance of moral power. The end of Western hegemony will not by itself bring justice, but it may finally unbind the idea of freedom from the civilisation that claimed to own it.
Albanese’s closing words–liberal tyrannies–carry enormous power, ringing metallic power. To think beyond liberal tyrannies requires us, as Césaire urged, to ‘see clearly, to think clearly–that is, dangerously’.
Contributors
Richard Pithouse is a South African academic and writer working out of Johannesburg. He is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies, an International Research Scholar at the University of Connecticut, a Professor-at-Large at the University of the Western Cape, and a political coordinator with the Progressive International.