The Global South as the Last Unenclosed Ground
What the West calls underdevelopment is, in many cases, a description of what remains when enclosure is incomplete. The village in India that was technically isolated because it had no roads — no roads because it needed no roads, because it was self-sufficient — was not behind. It was outside the enclosure. The 70% local food production that British colonial policy systematically destroyed in India was not primitive. It was a functioning commons, a genuine alternative to market dependency, and therefore a threat to the project.
This is why the attack on the global south has always been multi-dimensional. Economic coercion through debt and trade terms. Military coercion through proxy wars, supported insurgencies, and direct intervention. Cultural coercion through the export of Western values — individualism, consumerism, the specific kind of female objectification that converts women from community members into market participants — via media, NGOs, and the subtle pressure of development funding conditionality. And the framing of all of this as liberation, modernization, and progress.
The GCC's involvement in Sudan — the UAE funding the RSF militia in pursuit of gold reserves and fertile agricultural land — is the 15th century enclosure running in the 21st century. The commons being enclosed is now a country's agricultural future and mineral wealth. The instrument is not a hedge but a militia. The philosophy of justification is not theology but geopolitics. The function is identical: convert shared resource into private property, sever the population from their means of subsistence, insert them into a dependency relationship with the enclosing power. That the UAE is itself a regional power that has absorbed the logic of the enclosing system rather than resisting it — that it has become the Cayman Islands of the Middle East, the tax haven and financial hub that the global north uses to move money outside the reach of any democratic accountability — is the final irony. The formerly enclosed become the enclosers, using the tools and the logic they were taught by the power that enclosed them.
The global south keeps holding itself together miraculously. Not because it is behind. Because the enclosure is incomplete. What remains — the home-based foundations, the spiritual practice, the communal relationship with land — is not tradition to be overcome. It is the ground the enclosure cannot reach.
The Thread
From the fencing of the English commons to the Cartesian philosophy that made it thinkable, from Tyre's alphabet to the European claim to have invented literacy, from Athenian democracy for property owners to the global export of democratic values by states that practiced slavery until the 19th century, from the salt tax in India to the structural adjustment in Africa, from Hayek's road to serfdom to the think tank ecosystem that made his theology into policy — the thread is the same.
There has always been a dimension of human life that cannot be enclosed. That resists being priced, transacted, owned, or made into ideology. The relationship with the land. The commons of cultural memory. The ongoing debt of care and reciprocity between generations. The sacred — by which is meant not necessarily the supernatural but the dimension of experience that exceeds calculation, that cannot be fully possessed by any institution, that remains always in excess of any attempt to make it final.
Every ideology since the 15th century has been either the enclosure of this dimension or the reaction to its enclosure. The isms — Romanticism, Marxism, Nationalism, Liberalism, Neoliberalism — are each a secular attempt to replace what the enclosure destroyed. Each attempt fails in the same way: by claiming completeness, by insisting that the final answer has been found, by becoming intolerant of the question that might reveal otherwise. The God that you can see without eyes and hear without ears is by definition not fully articulable. That inarticulability is a protection. The sacred that cannot be completely captured by any institution cannot be completely corrupted by any institution either. Its inexhaustibility is precisely what the enclosing project has found most threatening.
The global south's resilience — the fact that communities that have been extracted from, structurally adjusted, culturally coerced, militarily destabilized, and historically had their natural resources extracted for centuries are still holding themselves together, still maintaining practices of collective life, still preserving the relationship with land and community and the sacred that the enclosure was designed to destroy — is not a mystery. It is evidence that the ground cannot be finally enclosed. That the commons, once fenced, keeps finding gaps in the fence. That the relationship between people and land, between generations of obligation and reciprocity, between the human being and whatever exceeds their calculation — this relationship is older than capitalism, older than the nation-state, older than the written alphabet, older than the first debt recorded in Sumerian clay. And the six-century project to convert it into a transaction has not succeeded, though it has done enormous damage trying.
The damage is real. The enclosure is real. The suffering it has caused and is causing is real. But so is what it has been trying to enclose. And something that has survived six centuries of sustained attack — philosophical, theological, scientific, economic, military, cultural — is not fragile. It may be, in Taleb's sense, the most antifragile thing there is: something that gets stronger from the attack, because every attack reveals what cannot be taken.
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This essay is the fourth in a series that began with a conversation about truth and media and kept going until it arrived here — at the roots of the enclosure. It draws on Jason Hickel's Less Is More, David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Pirate Enlightenment, Josephine Quinn's How the World Made the West, Karen Armstrong's A History of God, and the argument — developed across this series — that the successive ideologies of the modern era are successive attempts to replace a sacred commons that was enclosed before any living person can remember it existing. The conversation continues. Brave New World is being read. Huxley, who saw all of this coming and called it by the name of pleasure rather than force, is waiting.
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