A colleague recently sent me back an interesting note on a piece we were co-editing. ‘Why doesn’t Africa need to act first?’ they commented in reference to a sentence calling for the international community to take action on an issue of regional importance. Looking at the sentence again I realized that I had taken the ‘international community’ to mean African countries within the region, acting together to support an African country particularly damaged by a natural disaster. My co-editor, an American, thought that the international community basically meant the West.
It’s a well-worn trope. The unspoken rule, when discussing international politics, is that the international community comprises only rich and predominantly white countries – although lately a crack in the door has been left for Asian countries like Japan and China.
