This is the second of two articles. Part One traced how the “transition” framework emerged from a specific distribution of power and encoded its assumptions as universal logic. Part Two applies that diagnosis to China, Russia, and the Global South—and argues that the most dangerous geopolitical errors do not arise from ignorance, but from categories that outlived the worlds that produced them. The question is not whether we need better categories. It is whether we can still recognize when our own have become memories disguised as maps.
The Global South: The Mirage of Development Convergence
How the Category Was Formed & What It Made Invisible Then
For the Global South, the category of “transition” was deployed as a disciplinary institutional mechanism. Formed via the Washington Consensus, it translated the specific historical experience of Western industrialization into a universal, linear law of nature. Countries across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia were sorted onto a singular conveyor belt of progress. The metrics were strictly Western: deregulation, privatization, and institutional mimicry.
This architecture made invisible the structural violence of the post-colonial condition. It treated local communal property structures, indigenous economic networks, and state-led industrial experiments not as valid social choices, but as “market distortions” or “corruption” to be ironed out by IMF conditionality. It deliberately ignored the East Asian developmental state model—such as the sovereign economic trajectories of Singapore or Malaysia—treating them as brief anomalies on the road to neoliberal convergence rather than what they actually were: highly successful, non-Western institutional architectures.
What It Makes Invisible Now
In the current era, the survival of this unipolar category leaves Western analysts completely blind to the reality of developmental heterodoxy across the Global South.
When a Latin American or African nation fuses state-directed infrastructure investment with traditional social cohesion models, or selectively integrates with global financial markets while rejecting Western political lecturing, the unipolar mind can only diagnose it as “backsliding” or “governance failure”.
The transition lens systematically hides the profound intellectual shift occurring outside the West: the Global South is no longer seeking to “arrive” at the Western endpoint. Instead, these nations are practicing strategic non-alignment, treating Western financial systems, Chinese infrastructure (the Belt and Road), and local civilizational traditions as a toolkit to construct their own distinct modernities. The old framework cannot comprehend a world where a nation seeks economic modernization without the slightest intention of adopting Western cultural or political norms.
Let me expand on this with one more Global South example. When Ethiopia sought to modernize its economy by reviving its vital transport corridor to the Red Sea, the traditional Western recognition architecture responded through the IMF and the World Bank with its standard, post-1989 toolkit. The financing was offered, but it came tethered to strict governance conditionalities: the privatization of state assets, the deregulation of capital, and the restructuring of domestic institutions to mimic Western market templates. The unipolar mind could not conceive of infrastructure development outside of this institutional formatting.
Ethiopia, operating from its own deep self-understanding as an un-colonized civilizational state, bypassed this architecture entirely (for the sake of intellectual honesty, I must admit that Ethiopia was briefly occupied by Italy between 1936 and 1941, and its civilizational continuity is more complex than the term “un-colonized” suggests). By partnering with China to build the $4 billion, electrified Addis Ababa–Djibouti line, Addis Ababa engaged with a completely different model—one that decoupled capital intensive, state-led development from Western political lecturing.
The unipolar framework is structurally blind to what this project actually represents:
- It classifies it as an error or an anomaly: Because the railway was built via state-to-state financing and remains anchored to a dominant state-led economic model, Western evaluative habits can only diagnose it through categories like “debt-trap diplomacy,” “authoritarian overreach,” or “unsustainable governance”.
- It misses the alternative telos: The transition lens assumes that any infrastructure project must be astepping stonetoward liberal capitalism. It cannot see that for Ethiopia, the railway is a deliberate tool of sovereign state-directed development—a way to transform the country into a manufacturing hub while preserving its internal political authority and traditional social cohesion.
- It ignores the scale of the new recognition architecture: The railway is not merely a collection of steel tracks and locomotives; it is part of a newly exported recognition architecture (the Belt and Road). By adopting Chinese technical standards, digital signaling systems, and logistical frameworks, Ethiopia did not “fail to transition” to the West; it actively chose to plug itself into a multi-polar infrastructure network thatvalidatesits right to remain distinct.
This is precisely the type of “distinct modernity” that the transition framework cannot name. It is an equilibrium born of strategic non-alignment, where a nation uses Eastern capital and Western technology to fulfill a purely Ethiopian civilizational objective, leaving the unipolar evaluators stranded on the rusted tracks of the old French metre-gauge line, watching the electric bullet train scream past on the parallel standard-gauge.
Why China Cannot be Evaluated Through It Without Distortion
The transition framework requires a telos — a terminal state toward which development moves. China has a telos, but it is not the liberal democratic capitalism the transition framework assumes. It is what Xi Jinping has called “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” — a concept that is simultaneously civilizational, developmental, and sovereign. It does not point toward Western liberal democracy. It points toward a restored and reconstituted Chinese civilizational primacy, one that incorporates modern technology and economic capacity without accepting the political forms that Western development theory treats as their necessary accompaniment.
This means that every metric the transition framework uses to assess progress is measuring the wrong thing. Electoral competitiveness, judicial independence from party structures, civil society autonomy, press freedom — these are not lagging indicators of China’s development. They are features of a different model that China has consciously rejected, for reasons grounded in its own historical experience of what happened when such features were present under conditions of state weakness.
The transition framework also cannot process the scale variable. China is not a small open economy liberalising under external pressure. It is a continental civilizational state with sufficient mass to constitute its own gravitational field — to make other states adapt to its model rather than adapt to theirs. When China offers development financing without the governance conditionality attached to World Bank or IMF lending, it is not bypassing the transition framework through cynicism. It is offering an alternative framework in which development does not require a particular political form.
Finally — and this connects most directly to the recognition architecture concept — China is now actively exporting its own recognition architecture. The Belt and Road is not just infrastructure. The Digital Silk Road is not just cables. The China Standards 2035 initiative is not just technical standards. These are instruments through which China is attempting to make itself the supplier of the categories through which other states evaluate progress, security, connectivity, and development. The transition framework cannot see this, because the transition framework assumes that the categories of evaluation are fixed and Western. It cannot represent a world in which the categories themselves are being contested.
When Categories Outlive Their Worlds
A category does not become dangerous because it is false. Most powerful categories contain genuine insight. The transition framework captured something real about the post-Cold War moment: the extraordinary expansion of market institutions, the collapse of Soviet political economy, and the confidence of a world that believed it had glimpsed the endpoint of history. Its mistake was not analytical but temporal. Categories are born within specific historical environments. They emerge because they help societies make sense of the realities they encounter. The danger begins when a category continues to organize perception after the conditions that produced it have disappeared. At that point, it ceases to function as a map of reality and begins functioning as a memory of reality. This is the deeper challenge confronting contemporary institutions. The question is not whether the transition framework was useful in 1992. The question is whether a framework designed for the unipolar moment can adequately perceive a world characterized by civilizational plurality, competing developmental models, and the re-emergence of multiple centers of power. The category survives. The world that made it intelligible does not. The most consequential analytical failures rarely occur because the inherited categories continue to sort new realities into dead boxes. When this happens, the category itself becomes a source of blindness. The map remains familiar precisely because the terrain has changed. Every category is born in history. Wisdom begins when a civilization learns to recognize which of its categories are still describing the world and which are merely remembering it.
What Recognition Would Require
Recognizing the historical formation of a category does not mean replacing it with a supposedly neutral successor. It means changing the way categories are used. An analyst who understands that “transition” emerged within the specific conditions of the unipolar moment no longer treats it as a description of reality but as a hypothesis about reality—one perspective among others, carrying the assumptions of its own time and place. The practical consequence is not the abandonment of judgment but the institutionalization of reflexivity. Before asking whether China, Russia, or any other society is progressing through a transition, the analyst must first ask: transition toward what, according to whom, and under what historical assumptions? A policymaker operating under this discipline would evaluate not only the object of analysis but the recognition architecture through which the analysis is being conducted. An institution would require competing frameworks to coexist long enough to expose each other’s blind spots rather than allowing a single framework to define reality unchallenged. The goal is not to discover the final category that replaces “transition.” It is to cultivate evaluative habits capable of recognizing when a category has outlived the world that produced it, while remaining alert to the possibility that today’s replacement may one day suffer the same fate.
The challenge is not to find the correct category for a multipolar world. The challenge is to cultivate institutions capable of recognizing when their categories were formed, what they made visible, what they concealed, and when the world that sustained them has passed away.
