Reworlding of the World in Distress
The Epistemic Foundation of the G20 of the Future
Prof. Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni | 29 April 2026
Dennis J. Snower’s “Towards Reconstitution of the G20” is timely, provocative, and daring to invent the future. It is timely because it confronts a civilizational crisis, the breakdown of a world system, and the implosion of a global normative order. Yes, that order has been global, but it has never been universal. It has been Euro-North American centric and has remained so. Decolonization failed to deracialize, depatriarchize, and dehierarchize the modern world system. Snower’s piece is provocative in proposing that the G20 be refounded as a polycentric platform for structured cooperation capable of rescuing the world from systemic collapse. It is daring in insisting that “the deepest change required is conceptual” and that human flourishing should become the G20’s organizing purpose.
These points are well taken. Yet even as Snower names the need for a conceptual shift, his intervention remains predominantly technical and architectural. If the modern world is indeed facing a systemic breakdown, the required response cannot be institutional redesign alone. It must also be a reckoning with the knowledge and norms that shaped the present order. This commentary does not reject Snower’s propositions; it radicalizes his best one. A reconstituted G20 must begin from the epistemic question: whose knowledge counts, whose problems are named, and whose futures are secured when the G20 meets in the United Kingdom in 2027?
What is Actually Breaking Down
What is in crisis is what Carl Schmitt (2006) called the second nomos of the earth: the global order produced by the rise and expansion of Europe, a transcendental model of power constituted by lines of separation and hierarchies of rule. Anibal Quijano (2000) named this model the coloniality of power. Imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, and today’s computational platforms are its successive matrices. They do not belong to the past; they organize the present. They are reimposed through debt architectures, trade rules, climate negotiations, and the training data of AI systems.
Coloniality, which the G20 must practically consider, is not the memory of empire. It is the ongoing structure by which knowledge, value, and authority still flow along the channels first cut in the colonial period. It is why the OECD supplies the G20’s analytics, why banking standards are set in Basel, why conditionality still defines what counts as a “sustainable” fiscal path, and why research traditions from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific rarely enter the Finance Track except as “local context.” The G20 and the modern institutions around it are not free from these matrices. Domination, unilateralism, extractivism, and the arms race have fossilized into structural, epistemic, and institutional habits.
Snower’s five constitutional propositions — polycentric coordination, coalition-based cooperation, monitored delivery, nested multilevel governance, and flourishing-oriented problem-solving — are welcome. But they do not yet answer the harder question: how does an institution born inside these matrices rewire itself to pursue human flourishing rather than reproduce the hierarchies that have prevented it? That is not a technical question. It is a question of paradigm.
The Epistemic Turn: From Reform to Reworlding
The knowledge that plunged the world into this crisis cannot be the same knowledge used to lead it out. This is the central insight of the decolonial tradition, and it must become a principle of G20 redesigning of itself. I have called this wider project reworlding the world (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2024): the deliberate construction of a global order that is not merely more inclusive of the Global South, but constitutively plural. Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2018) speaks of the epistemologies of the Global South, that is, the knowledges, practices, and ways of being that survived the long night of colonial erasure and that now offer resources for thinking otherwise. Epistemic pluralism is not decoration. It is the precondition for any polycentric order worth the name.
I welcome Snower’s proposal of a G20 Implementation and Learning Mechanism. But learning must here include the harder and painstaking discipline of unlearning and relearning. Unlearning the assumption that legitimate analysis speaks with an OECD accent. Unlearning the reflex that treats the Global South as a site of problems to be solved rather than as a source of theories, institutions, and solutions. Relearning the G20 as a forum of many worlds rather than a council of one world generously widened.
Five Sharpening Moves for the UK Presidency
If the UK wishes to refound rather than merely host the G20 in 2027, five moves would make the reform genuinely transformative rather than cosmetic.
First, contest the neutrality of the G20’s analytical backbone. Snower’s Implementation and Learning Mechanism presumes OECD-style scorecards. A decolonial version would ask who designs the indicators, who audits the auditors, and what epistemic authority is granted to Southern research councils such as CODESRIA in Africa, CLACSO in Latin America, the Third World Network in Asia and to Indigenous knowledge systems. The UK presidency should invite these bodies into the Learning Mechanism as peers, not as consultees.
Second, add a reparative question to the flourishing framework. Snower asks four questions of every policy: Does it strengthen material security? Does it increase agency? Does it build social trust? Does it preserve ecological conditions? A fifth question is indispensable: Does the policy repair, or does it reproduce, the historical asymmetries manifesting in debt, in climate responsibility, in data extraction, in terms of trade that the current order inherits? A flourishing framework that does not ask the reparative question is flourishing for some at the continued cost of others.
Third, treat AI and data colonialism as a pillar, not a coda. Snower devotes significant space to AI governance and proposes a new A20 engagement group. This is a genuine opening, but it must be built to examine the political economy of computation: who owns the compute, who owns the training data, whose languages are model-supported, and whose labour including the content moderators and data labellers of the Global South underwrites the industry. Data colonialism is the order of the day; humans are being turned into things and things into humans; technolatry is the new theology. These are existential questions, not technical ones. Without a decolonial frame, “algorithmic accountability” will become another Northern-set standard exported under the language of safety.
Fourth, institutionalize dialogue between the G20 and BRICS+. The G20 and BRICS+ now share substantial membership but pull in different directions, and the distance between them is widening. The UK presidency has a rare opportunity: to open a formal G20–BRICS+ dialogue track, using the African Union — now a full G20 member — as a bridge-builder. No other body can broker this conversation. The OECD will not. The UN cannot. If the stated goal is to align global capacities with global challenges, then the world’s two principal multilateral formations cannot continue to operate as parallel theatres.
Fifth, break the script of the imperial conference. Europeans met in Westphalia in 1648, Vienna in 1815, Berlin in 1884–5, Versailles in 1919, and Potsdam in 1945 to world the world in accordance with their national interests and imperial designs. If the G20 in the United Kingdom in 2027 is to refound global governance rather than repeat this lineage, it must adopt a horizontal modus operandi that is conscious of the fact that the world is bigger than Europe and North America. This is the ethos of the insurgent and resurgent decolonization of the twenty-first century (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018). It is also the condition under which Snower’s three sources of legitimacy: voice in rule-making, differentiation in implementation, and visible delivery — can carry weight beyond the North Atlantic.
Conclusion: Beyond the Coloniality of Internationalism
The key take-away from Snower is the proposition of human flourishing as the pivot of a refounded G20. This is what the current civilization has failed to deliver. A new humanism is needed, one that places people’s welfare first, that opens the earth as a shared home for all, and that takes responsibility for repairing the planet itself as the enabler of all flourishing. But the G20 cannot carry this mandate under a capitalist political economy of extractivism, nor through institutions whose analytical reflexes were formed in the century of empire. The challenge is to move, as I have argued elsewhere, beyond the coloniality of internationalism (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2024).
The UK presidency in 2027 has a historic opportunity. Not simply to broker another communiqué, nor to preserve the G20 through a period of geopolitical stress, but to refound it on epistemic foundations adequate to a pluriversal world. That will require institutional courage: to treat Southern knowledges as peers, to ask reparative questions of every policy, to confront data colonialism directly, and to build bridges to BRICS+ through the African Union. It will require accepting that decolonizing minds is a precondition, not a postscript, for decolonizing institutions. If the G20 can do this, it may yet become what Snower hopes it will become: the premier forum for aligning global collective capacities with global collective challenges. If it cannot, 2027 will be remembered as one more conference in a long imperial lineage — and the world, which is already bigger than the room, will continue to build its future elsewhere.
References
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. 2018. Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization. New York and London: Routledge.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. 2024. Beyond the Coloniality of Internationalism: Reworlding the World from the Global South. Dakar: CODESRIA Books.
Quijano, A. 2000. “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America.” International Sociology 15(2): 215–232.
Santos, B. de S. 2018. The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Schmitt, C. 2006. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. London: Telos Press.
Snower, D. J. 2026. “Towards Reconstitution of the G20.” Unpublished Provocation Paper