Violence in South Africa: Globalisation Tested by Territorial Belonging

Images that signify more than violence

Images circulating on social media show Black South Africans attacking African nationals from Ghana, Congo, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Somalia and elsewhere. Beyond acts that must be condemned morally and legally, these scenes have a disturbing symbolic reach: they may signal the exhaustion of one representation of the world and the emergence of another.

The liberal promise of a borderless world

For decades, liberal globalisation promoted the idea that people, like capital and goods, would circulate through a unified space governed by common economic rules. National, cultural and territorial attachments were expected to fade before a universal rationality. Individuals freed from inherited ties would inhabit an open, mobile and cosmopolitan world.

Recent events in South Africa, Europe and the United States undermine this vision. Human movement does not follow the same logic as economic flows. Structures of belonging do not disappear; they resist, reconfigure themselves and may become radicalised.

The migrant made into an enemy

In South Africa, a stark distinction has re-emerged between those perceived as belonging to the national territory and outsiders labelled indiscriminately as ‘Africans’. Amid unemployment, economic pressure and competition for resources, migrants crystallise diffuse fears and become the concrete face of an imprecise threat.

Because the violence occurs between Black Africans, the dividing line is not racial but political and territorial. It expresses an exclusive claim over a space that some have come to regard as their property.

A structural contradiction

Local political failures, migration policy and irresponsible public rhetoric matter, but they do not provide a complete explanation. Contemporary migration crises reveal a structural tension between a global economy organising the free circulation of wealth and opportunity, and societies that continue to organise themselves through territorial and symbolic belonging.

These attachments are not merely remnants destined to vanish. They are fundamental structures of human experience. By underestimating them, liberal globalisation produced a partial—and sometimes partisan—picture of the world.

The conditions of a genuinely common world

This violence is not an archaic return. It is profoundly contemporary: the brutal language of a world that proclaimed the end of borders without rethinking coexistence among people shaped by different countries, histories and cultures.

What is happening in South Africa therefore reaches beyond the country. It raises a central question about the limits of the global model and the political, social and moral conditions required to build a genuinely common world.