When Focus was founded 30 years ago in 1995, it was up against the confident assertion of global corporate elites that globalization promoted by neoliberal policies was the wave of the future. We confronted a multilateral system centered on three institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB), and the World Trade Organization (WTO), that worked together to eliminate regional, national, and social obstacles to the rule of global corporate capital. We were founded at the zenith of the US empire, when the collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States (US) as the one remaining superpower, filling it with the ambition to remake the world in its own image, determined to deploy its massive military might to make the world safe for the expansion of US capital and impose its political institutions throughout the Global South even if this meant overthrowing legitimate governments.

The global corporate and political elites promised economic development, an end to poverty, greater equality, and peace through the adoption of neoliberal economic policies and compliance with the military and political demands of Pax Americana.

Instead, the past several decades have demonstrated the utter failure of neoliberal economic ideology and corporate-led globalization in delivering well-being, building equality, protecting the environment, and ensuring economic and political security for the majority of the world’s peoples.

This unmasking of the impacts of globalization and empire was brought about by the resistance of people throughout the Global South. Through its research, advocacy, and activism, Focus was part of this resistance. While many other civil society formations succumbed to the siren song of ‘globalization with a human face,’ or cooperated with the WB in formulating ‘poverty reduction via structural adjustment,’ or compromised with the WTO by tempting the least developed countries with ‘tariff-free entry’ in northern markets of their commodity exports, or supported the deal between transnational corporations (TNCs) and the United Nations (UN) called the Global Compact, Focus consistently exposed these initiatives as Trojan horses designed to conceal corporate colonization and campaigned against them incessantly on the ground.

What were the realities that Focus’ research, writing, and popular education activities revealed?

The Myths and Realities of Neoliberal Globalisation

Focus showed that policies at the heart of the neoliberal economic model have enabled the perverse transfer of wealth from the South to the North (which was already set in motion during colonialism), from public to private sectors, and from poor and working classes to the wealthy and elites. This has deepened inequality, poverty, hunger and destitution across the world, and exacerbated environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, and the climate crisis.

Policymakers and public authorities talk about equality and peace, but the neoliberal-authoritarian nexus, persisting conditions of discrimination rooted in race, patriarchy, caste, ethnicity, and class, the perpetual wars that have gained ascendancy over the past several decades, and the continuing trajectory of environmental breakdown, are all ensuring that future generations will be at the servitude of a wealthy, privileged, racially and socially dominant minority.

The ambitions of many decolonized independent nations after World War II—of industrializing, correcting the terms of trade with former colonizers, redistributing global wealth, and achieving economic self-sufficiency by charting their own paths to development based on their particular conditions—were thwarted by countries of the North unwilling to relinquish their dominance over the global economy.

Structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) and austerity measures crafted by the WB and IMF snared many countries of the South into vicious debt traps and demanded drastic rollbacks of state interventions in the provision of essential goods and services, business and market regulation, and labor and environmental protection. Developing countries were compelled to open up their economies through trade and investment liberalization, leaving their small-scale producers, entrepreneurs, and workers at the mercy of unequal competition with imports from countries that possessed the means to subsidize and support their respective producers and exporters.

The early 1990s saw further expansion of the ambit of International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and the Washington Consensus to new ‘emerging economies.’ The establishment of the WTO and subsequent free trade agreements (FTAs), economic partnership agreements (EPAs), bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and tied aid served to further secure the trade and investment interests of TNCs largely from the North but increasingly from the South as well. The fragmentation and outsourcing of production, processing, and distribution of goods and services that characterize global trade and investment have resulted in long supply and value chains and accelerated the climate crisis, which in turn, have rendered all countries extremely vulnerable to economic shocks and disruptions from wars, conflicts, pandemics, extreme weather, and natural disasters.

The decimation of local industries, the loss of well-paying jobs domestically as a result of globalization and reduced public expenditure in public services and welfare entitlements, coupled with the increasing demand for cheap labor, have created huge waves of labor migration, both within and beyond national borders. Moreover, women workers find themselves increasingly finding work in the care-giving sectors, which are often un- or under-regulated, have little to no social protection, and are very prone to abuse. The undervaluation of women’s work—historically constructed within already existing patriarchal structures in the household and family, and with prevalent notions of ‘male breadwinners’—has often been used by countries especially in the Global South to attract more foreign investments in manufacturing, particularly in the garment, electronic, and agro-industrial sectors, where lower wages and increasing working hours seem to coincide with increasing women’s workforce participation rates. This systematic race to the bottom has resulted in the persistence of and often increase in gender wage disparities, job segregation, and adverse working conditions for women.

A parallel crisis of multilateralism—from the lack of genuine representation and leadership of countries of the Global South in critical multilateral decision-making spaces and growing corporate influence in these spaces that undermine states’ responsibilities and obligations to their peoples, to the diminishing legitimacy of human rights and governance institutions—has resulted in the failure to put public interest at the heart of global governance. Developed countries have pushed back against controls and regulatory mechanisms in the spaces that have afforded voice to the demands for justice, equity, and equality by the South. Instead, packaged and promoted by wealthy nations and IFIs as ‘good governance,’ neoliberal policies have focused on unfettered economic growth as the primary goal of state-led regulatory and legal measures at the cost of peoples’ well-being and equality, and healthy environments. Further, traditional modalities of development assistance have been rolled back and are now closely tied with economic and foreign policy imperatives of developed nations. In the place of state obligations to protect, uphold and advance public interest are the growing dominance of private corporations and agents of transnational capital in multilateral, regional and national policy spaces and development frameworks. This ‘multistakeholderism’ dovetails well with state authoritarianism, shrinking of civic spaces and criminalization of dissent, further subverting democratic and corporate accountability and the realization of peoples’ rights.

In the last few years, global geopolitical conflict has become a massive threat, with the USA defining China as a threat to its global hegemony and taking aggressive moves to ‘contain Beijing’ by increasing its military spending, increasing its naval deployments in the Asia-Pacific, and pushing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to participate in patrols in the South China Sea. USA has given free rein to Israel in the latter’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank. In Europe, the US push to extend NATO eastward has been one of the central causes of the war in Ukraine. The danger of the so-called New Cold War becoming a ‘hot war’ has definitely increased.

The Focus Method

In exposing these disturbing realities, Focus developed its characteristic method and style with three prongs: solid research guided by innovative analysis; popular education wherein its staff developed a mutual learning relationship with people’s movements; and participation in mass actions and nonviolent protests.

Focus organized seminal international and regional conferences such as the landmark conferences on global finance in Bangkok in 1998 and 2008, and helped found the historic World Social Forum (WSF) as a counterpoint to Davos in 2001. It supported the participation of representatives of people’s movements in assemblies of the WSF in Porto Alegre, Mumbai, Caracas, Nairobi, Belem and other sites. Focus was especially central in organizing the Asian Social Forum in Hyderabad and WSF in Mumbai in 2003 and 2004 respectively, which diversified the leadership of WSF processes globally.

Focus staff members were on the leading edge of the mass mobilizations that brought down the ministerial meetings of the WTO in Seattle in 1999 and Cancun in 2003, and militant actions in Hong Kong in 2005, destroying that agency’s ability to serve as an effective instrument of trade liberalization. They served as the people’s shock troops during the legendary Battle of Genoa in 2001.

Focus also played a leading role in the global movement against the American empire and wars, bringing a peace mission to Baghdad on the eve of the US invasion in 2003, playing a central role in the World Tribunal on Iraq in 2007, organizing another peace mission to Beirut in the midst of the invasion of Lebanon by Israel in 2006, and a series of anti-war Assemblies.

It organized the much-deserved smashing of a cherry pie in the face of IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus in Bangkok in 2000 and briefly held ‘hostage’ in full public view the head of the Asian Development Bank Tadao Chino in Honolulu in 2001.

The Contemporary Challenges to the Global South

While neoliberalism and corporate-led globalization have been intellectually discredited, they have left a disastrous legacy. SAPs, austerity programmes, the WTO, FTAs and tied development aid have curtailed the capacities and political will of developing countries to achieve economic sovereignty: they have sabotaged the livelihoods of small-scale producers, local entrepreneurs, working classes, as well as their collectives, unions and organizations; promoted widespread extractivism, devastating environments and ecosystems; undermined and prevented industrialization; and made health, education, shelter, social protection, and healthy and nutritious food out of reach for hundreds of millions of people.

Financial markets have expanded globally, with finance capital extending its reach into national and sub-national economies through banking, micro-finance and digital finance technology (fintech). Experience shows that these present real threats to the collective financial resources of governments, workers and ordinary citizens, such as pensions, social security contributions and social protection funds. A wide array of financial instruments ranging from pension, mutual and index funds to securities and derivatives have enabled corporations and individual investors to profit disproportionately from land, agricultural commodities, infrastructure, energy and critical minerals at huge costs to the real economy, biodiversity, stable jobs, access to food, and the climate.

The financialization of the climate crisis is continually expanding through a renewed push for and introduction of new schemes and market strategies such as carbon offsets and credits, nature-based solutions and other false solutions under green capitalism. The ecological modernization of capitalism, and the co-optation of key strategies/approaches such as ‘resilience’, ‘just transition’ and ‘sustainable development’ have led to the creation of new sacrifice zones, where people, workers and communities are left to suffer from environmental degradation, loss of employment and economic dispossession in the quest for unlimited growth and accumulation.

With the advent of the second Trump administration in the USA, we have the worst of all worlds: while some sectors of global capital are promoting the false promises of green capitalism, others are doubling down on fossil fuel extraction, emboldened by the capture of the leadership of the country responsible for the biggest volume of greenhouse gas emissions historically.

Today, we find ourselves in a world where privatization and financialization have permeated every aspect of our societies, economies and politics; where development is being used to enable corporate expansion; and public finance and the public sector are being misused to leverage corporate investment. The state’s role has been fundamentally reframed to create an enabling environment for the private corporate sector to pursue its objectives, which it does through legislative, legal and security apparatus. This has meant that the urban and rural poor have little or no access to essential public services and social protection. Whether water, sanitation, housing, education, food, health, banking, public transport or energy, all sectors crucial to peoples’ well-being and survival are increasingly prone to corporate takeover and accessible largely to those who can afford to pay the asking price. Poorly resourced and administratively cumbersome safety nets offer scant protection against exploitation and marginalization. This lack of access has become a new definition of poverty.

Peoples’ mobilizations and protests against the immiseration and human rights violations caused by the present economic-financial order frequently face violent reprisals by governments. At the same time, TNCs and elites continue to enjoy immunity from crimes and wrongdoing. Maintaining and expanding the economic-financial interests of upper classes and elites are framed in the language of ‘national interest,’ with fascist characteristics in some countries. Many authoritarian and fascist leaders and their supporters are also deeply misogynistic. On top of criminalization, arbitrary arrest, enforced disappearance, surveillance, and other forms of human rights violations, macho-fascist leaders have also encouraged and wielded gender-based violence as a particular form of repression directed against women and gender-diverse human rights activists.

In conflicts that intensified over the past decades, the peoples of the Global South have found themselves in the crosshairs of geopolitics. The peoples of Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and other communities in West Asia are desperately struggling for survival amidst Israel’s drive for regional hegemony that enjoys the full support of the USA. In the Asia Pacific region, US plans to make the Philippines its forward base for the containment of China is visiting the unwelcome impact of militarization on the daily lives of people and threatening them with the dangers of retaliation should war break out between the superpowers.

From Deglobalisation 1.0 to Deglobalisation 2.0

People’s movements have not waited for states, corporations, elites, and policy institutions to come up with viable solutions to the cascades of multiple, recurring crises that have become hallmarks of our times.

Working with people’s organizations, Focus has been in the vanguard of formulating alternatives to globalization and empire. Its signal contribution has been the strategy of Deglobalization, which proposes reversing globalization, re-embedding the market in society, and strengthening community through the spread of economic and social relationships based on common ownership. Deglobalization, which Focus proposed in 2000, was ahead of its time. As the noted Italian sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo pointed out recently, at the time of the Genoa protest in 2001, Focus’ proposal “would mean taking away power from transnational corporations and re-empowering local communities and citizens. It would prioritize equity and environmental sustainability over growth… At the time of the Genoa protests, any talk of a break from globalization appeared to many as an unrealistic if not outright dystopian prospect. However, twenty years later, this is precisely the course history is taking.” (i)

Today, Focus is taking note of trends on the ground to continue to be ahead of the curve in meeting people’s demands for progressive alternatives in a world fractured by capital and empire, but where people continue to yearn and hope for liberation.

At the local and immediate level, survival has been and remains an all-consuming priority. However, peoples, workers and communities have organized themselves in various ways and formations and continue to do so using generational knowledge and co-producing new knowledge and practices with peers to reclaim agency and autonomy for present and future generations. People have created cooperatives for collective production/provision of food, goods and services, labor sharing and barter initiatives, and territorial markets; they have revived traditional foods, regenerated biodiversity and strengthened local-regional food systems; they have organized schools to build skills and education in their communities and local areas; and they have created food, housing, social, health and economic commons.

Trade unions in many instances have reconfigured themselves to address the new challenges emerging from the climate crisis and persistent informalization of labor brought about by corporate-led privatization and the decline in public sector employment. With the absence of clear employer-employee relationships among informal sector workers—due to long chains of contractors and subcontractors, which make struggles for working conditions and organizing through trade unions far more challenging—workers are addressing the state for better social security protections alongside their wages and welfare entitlements. However, there is still little recognition of the multiple burdens and challenges that women workers face at home and in workplaces as wage earners and in work that produces and sustains life, all of which enable productive work and economic systems. It is therefore imperative that labor movements integrate publicly provided support and social protection for the particular needs of women workers in workplaces and for care and reproductive work, in their core, central demands.

Decades of resolute determination to demand human and collective rights have resulted to the adoption of landmark resolutions grounded in peoples’ lived experiences of discrimination and deprivation, and struggles for justice and reparations, including among others the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) in 2007 and the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) in 2018. Further innovative and emancipatory re-imaginings of rights and access to justice have also emerged as in the case of peoples’ movements struggling for the rights of nature and the universal human right to a healthy environment. Conceptualizations of agrarian and aquatic reform and defending and creating new commons are embedded in respect for nature and recognition of planetary limits of economic profit and human control.

Since its inception, Focus’ research and analyses have supported and advanced critical responses and progressive alternatives to neoliberalism, corporate-led globalization and militarism. In our work, we have continued to partner with social movements, build solidarities and networks, and bridge the policy-academe-praxis divide. Through these processes, with partners and allies, we have foregrounded and explored alternative paradigms that contribute to systemic transformations. Deglobalization, as a paradigm, has espoused the transformation of a global economy from one dominated by TNCs and capital to one that holds people, communities and nature at its center and in which, the international political and economic system builds national and local economies instead of degrading them. Food sovereignty challenges the corporatization of agriculture and food systems, and offers lasting solutions to food, economic and climate crises. Indigenous traditional knowledge systems held by communities and peoples’ have provided insights and learnings on how to build solidarity economies and holistic social-economic systems grounded in principles of social and ecological well-being, such as Buen Vivir and Ubuntu. In dialogue with these paradigms, a process from which it has learned and to which it contributed insights, Focus is moving from Deglobalization 1.0 to Deglobalization 2.0.

As Focus enters its fourth decade, even as we remain unwavering to our foundational principles, we have also been adapting creatively to a rapidly changing world. Over the past three decades, we have innovatively expanded our outreach and analysis methods, incorporating art, culture, and digital media into our strategies. This evolution reflects our commitment to strengthening public economies, the commons, peace and justice, and empowering communities through diverse, powerful storytelling media. Our partnerships with art collectives, such as Art4CDM in Myanmar, Asian Music for People’s Peace and Progress (AMP3) and People Tree in India, exemplify how we merge traditional activism with modern communication to document and amplify grassroots narratives. By utilizing songs, cartoons, photo exhibits, and social media, we not only enrich our engagement but also enhance our global impact, ensuring that our advocacy for economic, environmental and social justice resonates widely.

Furthermore, Focus recognizes and upholds intersectional feminism as integral to all our areas of work and struggle. We believe that all the forms of justice we are fighting for will not be fully realized until they are made a reality for all women, especially those from the most exploited and dispossessed sectors and peoples. To this end, we have strived to integrate an intersectional feminist lens in our analyses and critiques of various systemic crises based on the experiences and perspectives of women who bear the brunt of these crises. Focus has facilitated dialogues with women peasants, fisherfolk, Indigenous peoples, and workers to co-produce a comprehensive understanding of key issues while also ensuring that this knowledge is grounded in the realities and lived experiences of different communities. We have supported the participation of grassroots women in spaces for policy decision-making as well as broadening solidarity networks.

In our work to advance systemic alternatives, Focus has never believed in the absolutism of these alternatives; instead, we have worked with different sectors and communities, especially women, to assess the extent to which these alternatives could advance the various and inter-related aspects of justice, to improve the principles underpinning these alternatives, and to ensure that they recognize and respect the diverse contexts and realities faced by different members of societies and communities.

As geopolitical conflicts intensify, Focus remains committed to its foundational aim of promoting real security, one that is based on linking peoples’ initiatives for peace across national boundaries. In South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Asia-Pacific, areas where Focus has devoted much of its work, Focus’ insertion into a thick web of peoples’ organizations provides a firm basis for cooperation in regional movements for peace.

Moving Forward

As we celebrate our 30 years, Focus will continually advance initiatives and movements for building and reclaiming commons, campaigning for climate, environmental justice and real peoples’ security, and rebuilding public economies as peoples’ economies. To these ends, we will organize dialogues and generate collective analyses with our allies including social movements, trade unions, collectives, rights activists, justice networks, progressive intellectuals and legislators, civil society organizations, and the youth. We will initiate and/or participate in mass actions and engage in the time-honored Focus tradition of nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience.

Focus has always avoided the rhetoric of simple solutions. It is familiar with dealing with complexity and believes that its proposals must reflect a deep engagement with the many facets of social reality. Some of these aspects and specific questions we propose to engage on include:

  • Labor organizing is a critical issue given how neoliberalism has eroded organizing over the past decades. It is extremely difficult now for workers, especially informal workers, to organize and unionize. Developing new methods of struggle and organization are major challenges confronting labor movements in developing countries. Finding new ways to give visibility and voice to the issues of labor has become critical for all people’s movements and campaigns. Further, a very large number of the informal workforce are women with very little agency and support, and yet, there are many examples of women coming together to articulate and fight for their demands. How should we imagine and work towards a more inclusive and feminist future, recognizing marginality and patriarchy in the world of work and ensuring accountability of employers and the state?
  • The intersection of patriarchy, neoliberalism, and capitalism produce complex, potent and often concealed forms of exploitation and subjugation. The well-documented experiences of women from the most vulnerable and exploited classes and sectors have pointed to the negative impacts of privatization, financialization, financial crises, FTAs and debt on women and girls, indicating the importance of structural economic, institutional and political measures in building women’s empowerment, agency and citizenship. What then should be the elements and guiding principles of a democratic public economy to ensure that it is rooted in the intersectional realities of women and girls and can contribute to the advancement of gender justice?
  • Amidst the deepening of multiple crises across the world and the further weakening of the public sector, how can we collectively build and advance a revitalized, democratic peoples’ sector grounded on participatory democracy, justice, and peace to counter corporate power concentration and state-centric governance and cooperation? What can we learn from recent experiences of commoning, community-led governance, remunicipalization and nationalization?
  • Three decades of high-level UN climate conferences have repeatedly failed to deliver adequate action, vital resources, and real solutions to address the climate crisis. While it is imperative to continue to monitor, expose, and challenge the false solutions being forged by governments in collusion with corporations at the UN Conference of Parties (COP) space, we also need to build better synergies with people’s movements forging radical, autonomous and decentralized responses to the climate emergency. How do we amplify real solutions to the planetary emergency and popularize strategies and practices from the grassroots up—significantly leveling up their political traction as we redirect multilateralism towards the public good and preservation of Mother Earth?
  • It is imperative to reclaim the commons and rebuild public economies that would lead to the reining in of extractivist expansions and the redistribution of resources (natural, ecological, social, economic, knowledge, etc.) back to local control and management as commons. How can commons-oriented conceptualizations and commoning build the agency of people (the public) to build grassroots, embedded governance that is based on human rights and respect for nature?
  • How do the principles and practices of food sovereignty (encompassing agroecology, peoples’ rights, agrarian reform and defense of land, and territorial markets), extend to advancing and building commons and re-imagining public economies?
  • How can we use advances in the international human rights architecture such as UNDRIP, UNDROP, ILO, the Rio Conventions and CEDAW to embed human and collective rights in the center of governance at all levels?
  • What are the pathways and entry points to rethinking international/national financial and economic governance for countries of the South to be free of debt traps, and redirect financial resources towards ensuring essential services, social protection and social well-being for peoples? What new strategies should peoples’ movements forge to counter multistakeholderism in governance spaces? How do the emergence of fora such as BRICS signal the possibilities of new frameworks on trade and finance?
  • With the very real threat of conflicts breaking out in the Western Pacific and other regions in Asia, how can Focus engage in pushing governments to resolve differences through negotiations while at the same time contributing to strengthening cross-border links among peace organizations in South Asia, and the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan (the latter three countries host hundreds of US military installations that support Washington’s aggressive strategy of containing China)?
  • How can Focus contribute to strengthening the efforts of peoples’ movements for decolonization, and ending military and economic occupations?

Focus at the Trumpian Moment

With the assumption of power for a second time by Donald Trump, the world is at a crossroads. More than ever, action must be based on analysis of trends on the ground. In the USA, it is certain that the next four years will be bad for the climate, women, migrants, and minorities. In the US, Europe, Israel, and a number of countries in the Global South, like India and Brazil, we have witnessed the rise of fascist movements, some of which seized power.

For the Global South, this is a time of great uncertainty. There are strong indications that Trump is dumping the paradigm of liberal internationalism or expansive imperialism where the US elite was committed to fighting on all fronts in the world where they feel US interests are threatened. Trump appears to be retrenching to the Americas, focusing on reinvigorating the imperial heartland, North America, while strengthening the US grip on Latin America in an aggressive reiteration of the Monroe Doctrine.

What is emerging is an imperialism that is on the defensive, with the priority being setting up tariff walls against foreign imports, harsh measures to prevent the entry of non-white migrants and expel undocumented workers, destroy the global supply chains set up by US transnational capital and reshore or bring back their productive facilities to the US.

We see an era of geoeconomic competition emerging whereby free trade and the free movement of capital are being replaced by the close cooperation between national capital and the state to limit the penetration of the domestic market and prevent the acquisition of advanced technology, especially artificial intelligence (AI), by rival corporate-state actors. Unilateral economic actions rather than multilateral initiatives via the Bretton Woods institutions, and unilateral military strikes rather than joint assaults under NATO appear to be the preferred approach of the US under Trump.

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci had this memorable saying, “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” What he was trying to say was that you cannot have opportunity without crisis.

For Focus, the crisis of global capital and US hegemony offers both great risk and great opportunity. The geopolitical conflict between the US and China that is turning out to be a major feature of the coming period brings with it the danger of war, but it can also open up the path to a world where power could be more decentralized, where there could be greater freedom of political and economic maneuver for small, traditionally less-privileged actors from the Global South, playing off the superpowers against one another, where a truly multilateral order could be constructed through cooperation rather than be imposed through either unilateral or liberal hegemony.

As it has in its first thirty years, Focus will not evade the complexities of the era we are now entering but embrace the challenge of how to navigate its swirls and eddies to help bring the Global South closer to the promises of justice, equity, and peace.