Author: Bonny Ibhawoh, Professor of History and Global Human Rights, McMaster University

The problems of the world, including climate change, ongoing war, the COVID-19 pandemic and other emerging diseases, human rights abuses and gross inequality, are spilling well beyond national borders and the ability — or willingness — of individual countries to manage them. The industrialization of western Europe and North America, for example, which once helped enrich countries in those regions, also created toxic legacies from slavery, colonization, resource extraction and pollution, all of which have generated unfair and lasting consequences. They robbed other regions and Indigenous peoples of the opportunity to succeed or even to be safe from drought, flooding…