As the rich get richer and the Global South gets poorer, expect more conflict

As my openDemocracy column that September reported, their attack “might have been more of a gesture intended to last just a few weeks. In the event, the paramilitaries found it easier than expected to hold onto much of the city, as the Filipino army – more used to rural counter-insurgency – proved incapable in urban warfare against determined rebels prepared to die for their cause.”

The United States sent in special forces and surveillance planes, but early predictions that liberating the city could be possible proved wrong and the army relied heavily on air attacks and artillery. But the early confidence that the Islamists would soon flee or be killed proved unfounded. As my openDemocracy column reported that September: “Only now, four months after the conflict started, are there signs that those rebels who have not been killed may be leaving Marawi.

“The costs are immense. In a city of 200,000 residents that has been transformed into a moonscape by almost daily bombardments by government forces, scores of civilians have been killed, many more wounded, and 400,000 people displaced.”

The latest attack on Cabo Delgado was smaller in scale and duration than Marawi but has come at a time when Isis’s increasing impact across substantial parts of Sub-Saharan Africa is causing widespread concern, not least in UN circles. Indeed, a UN assessment published in August last year pointed to an ISIS ‘war chest’ of $100m, and there are many indications that the movement, while far weaker in Iraq and Syria, sees the escalation of activity across Africa, from the Sahel and Mozambique to the Democratic Republic of Congo, as a cause for celebration.

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Taking an even wider view, Isis and similar extreme Islamist paramilitary movements have clearly not gone away and there is also ample evidence that their ability to recruit is enhanced by the widespread marginalisation of many millions of young people across the Global South whose circumstances leave them ripe pickings for violent, cultish movements.

Cabo Delgado, a neglected and economically marginalised province, is largely Muslim but Islam is a minority religion in the country. The area has become the focus for potential wealth from the new gas reserves and recent findings of some of the world’s richest deposits of rubies, but it is all too easy for Isis propagandists to insist that, with past experience in Mozambique, Nigeria and elsewhere, few of the benefits will ever trickle down to the wider population, and certainly not to the most marginalised.

Cabo Delgado’s gas wealth is a specific example but the overriding issue seen across much of the Global South, is the pernicious global trend of the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbating existing socio-economic differences. A year into the pandemic, Forbes has reported a worldwide surge in the number of billionaires, increasing in the last year by 660 to 2,755. Its annual rich list, released this week, shows the top billionaires’ wealth rose from $8trn to $13.1trn in the past year. As Forbes’s chief content officer, Randall Lane, put it, “the very, very rich got very, very richer”.

Over the same period, the number of people in extreme poverty rose by 150 million, the first increase in 20 years. As The Guardian put it: “The ranks of the super-wealthy swelled as the coronavirus threatened the lives of millions across the planet, while stock markets kept hitting new highs.”

This surge in wealth for the wealthiest is excellent news for any self-respecting propagandist supporting a paramilitary insurgency. That may presently apply mainly to Islamist movements – but there is no guarantee that it will be limited to them. The threat remains high of us entering an age of insurgencies rooted in revolts from the margins, and exacerbated by the effects of pandemics.

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