My late grandmother, Eunice Nyawira, was not a big fan of the idea of “Western values”. She couldn’t get her head around it. A peasant farmer in central Kenya born at the dawn of colonialism, she had seen her share of hardships, including food shortages that at times necessitated a resort to Western-provided food aid.
However, she fiercely resisted the notion that this form of charity was something different than the community practices she had witnessed in her youth, telling me of the granaries that would be set aside after every harvest for the poor and the disabled.
For my grandmother, the idea that one needed a foreign ideology to care for the vulnerable was absurd. In her experience, catering for the “less fortunate” was normal. It was not even “charity” in the Western humanitarian sense, where the aid often comes with conditions, publicity, and power dynamics. It was rather borne out of the obligation of being part of a community.
A Western humanitarianism that ignored the suffering and homeless on its own doorstep in favour of a saviourism abroad would horrify her, especially when that is accompanied with chest-beating and the infantilisation of the communities being assisted. The notion that the West had uniquely codified morality, that it had invented the values undergirding democracy, human rights, and humanitarianism – as opposed to merely developing specific formats for them – would strike her as deeply flawed, if not outright dishonest.
And she was right. Africans, Asians, or Latin Americans never lacked the values that were coded as “Western”. They just had different frameworks for expressing them, frameworks that did not require the spectacle of benevolence or the politics of dependency and domination. The West, in contrast, spent centuries wielding its supposed moral superiority as a tool of empire, justifying colonialism, economic coercion, and military intervention under the banner of spreading civilisation and human rights. As Roberto Belloni noted in his 2007 article, The Trouble With Humanitarianism, “once the West is morally elevated to the realm of right and reason, the use of military force in the name of protecting superior moral values is easier to endorse”.
The term “Western values” – like its counterpart “African values” – has in fact always been more wineskin than wine. Rather than a codification of particular values, it is a framework for legitimating and justifying actions by Western (or African) states. Is tolerance a “Western value” when, for example, it was colonialism that introduced homophobia to many African societies and then coded it as “African culture”?
The Western-led global order has always operated on selective morality, elevating human rights when convenient and discarding them when inconvenient.
Today, the response to Israel’s murderous campaign in Gaza has laid bare the hollowness of Western moral posturing. Governments that once lectured the world on human rights now justify mass killing and ethnic cleansing. Institutions that claimed to stand for international law now scramble to shield allies from accountability. The same Western nations that imposed sanctions on Russia for war crimes in Ukraine refuse even to call Israel’s actions in Gaza by their name: genocide.
The hypocrisy is staggering. The United States, the United Kingdom, and much of the European Union have not only blocked meaningful action at the United Nations but have actively enabled Israel’s onslaught, providing weapons, diplomatic cover, and economic support. At the same time, they have criminalised protests, censored journalists, and threatened humanitarian organisations for daring to call out their complicity. What, then, remains of the so-called Western commitment to free speech, democracy, and the rule of law?
This moment is not an aberration; it is an unveiling. The Western-led global order has always operated on selective morality, elevating human rights when convenient and discarding them when inconvenient. The Global South has long known this, having experienced firsthand the reality behind the rhetoric. From the coup-backed regimes in Latin America to the structural adjustment programmes that impoverished African nations, from the devastation of Iraq to the ongoing plundering of Congolese minerals, “Western values” have consistently proven to be less about principles and more about power.
So what comes next? Since the Western claim to moral authority is beyond salvage, perhaps, as my grandmother believed, the answer does not lie in seeking new ideological frameworks from powerful nations. Rather, it is in reclaiming what was never truly lost – an ethics of solidarity, responsibility, and justice grounded in our shared humanity and that acknowledges the lived experiences and values of those who have been subjected to empire, exploitation, and war.
The collapse of "Western values" as a framework for international engagement is thus not a crisis; it is an opportunity to create a new framework where ethics are not dictated by geopolitics and are not considered tools of control. Perhaps my grandmother was right all along. The world never needed "Western values" – only a return to the real values that many already had.
