On 11 December 2025, I found myself serving on a panel at a dialogue co-convened by the United Nations and the Nelson Mandela Foundation to mark the 60th anniversary of the adoption of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD).

Tessa Dooms (Director of Programs at the Rivonia Circle) facilitated the panel discussion and interaction with a small but very engaged audience. Other members of the panel were Ambassador Nozipho January-Bardill (former member of the United Nations CERD), Human Rights Commissioner Tshepo Madlingozi and Amandla.mobi executive director Koketso Moeti.

Obvious layers of significance shaped the event: South Africa's experience of apartheid, and especially that pivotal moment of the Sharpeville massacre, was a founding influence on the global move towards ICERD in the 1960s; a group of survivors of the massacre was in attendance; when Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa, he signed the country up to ICERD; and ICERD is one of the most broadly supported UN international instruments. And, of course, the scourge of racism remains as challenging today in South Africa as it was at the dawn of the democratic era.

A key line of enquiry to emerge at the dialogue was on the utility of instruments such as ICERD, for they are honoured most often in their breach, and there is very little compelling evidence of their contributing meaningfully to changing human behaviours and combatting oppression. Obviously ICERD continues to carry enormous historic significance and symbolic value. As do so many of the other instruments (from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the 1973 Convention on Apartheid, from the 1949 Geneva Conventions to the 2015 Mandela Rules for the treatment of prisoners) produced in the 'global human rights' moment of the last seven decades.

However, sixty years of ICERD, and the world isn't getting better. Without offering an internal analysis of the Convention text, I would argue that it does have shortcomings. For one thing, it isn't geared to naming and resisting racism as an apparatus of power which excludes and in other ways oppresses Black people. For another, it explicitly excludes from its purview the systems which nation states put in place for defining citizenship and patrolling their boundaries - this, I would argue, is a space which, more and more, is becoming a primary locus for the manifestation of racism.

Even if ICERD were a perfect instrument, it would find itself, at the dawn of 2026, being confronted by what the world is experiencing now as the toxic nexus of a resurgent white supremacy, forms and manifestations of capitalism more rapacious than ever, and constellations of power fundamentally antithetical to concepts and practices of multilateralism. We see now, for instance, a United States president who openly defies international law and mocks those who invoke it or seek to defend it. Realistically, what does a treaty or a convention (or a ceasefire) mean in contexts like this? Very little. Despite this harsh reality, can ICERD and other instruments inspire us to do the very difficult transformative work humanity is being called to now? And what does that work even look like?

For me, after absorbing multiple dialogue inputs on 11 December, a number of critical lines of enquiry suggest themselves. Like exploring the possibility that combatting racism will always already involve combatting patriarchy and imperialism and capitalism and human superiority (over all other species). Like the imperative to undertake a courageous reckoning with capitalism in all its forms and manifestations, especially the ones that are deep inside all of us and which influence how we engage with the world without our even knowing it. Like confronting how democratic South Africa is replicating coloniality (from its extraction of wealth from the DRC and other countries on the continent to its obsessive use of the colonial commission of inquiry to delay, defer and deflect; from its use of colonial indirect rule in managing the former bantustans to its entrenchment of white privilege; and so on).

In many ways, it seems to me, the challenge for humanity lies in the realm of ideas. We cannot learn to do differently until we learn to think differently. And, arguably, we won't secure the breakthroughs that are needed unless we're willing to think the unthinkable. Like: if democracy is not working for the vast majority of human beings globally, do we need to think beyond democracy? If the nation state is becoming an obstacle to justice in the world, should we imagine other modes of human association and identification? If multilateral institutions and instruments are not working, is it time to begin thinking about other options? For too long now progressive formations and initiatives globally have been paralysed in the face of what has been a neoliberal hegemony. It is time to find a way out of the ideological vacuum created when Marxism, communism and socialism were abandoned with unseemly haste in the 1990s at the end of the Cold War.

In 1993 CERD issued General Recommendation No. 11 to the effect that the Convention is generally applicable to discrimination against immigrants or foreigners. However, a profound ambiguity remains around the structural and systemic forms of oppression which occur routinely as nation states regulate both citizenship and the movement of people across national borders.

[1] In 1993 CERD issued General Recommendation No. 11 to the effect that the Convention is generally applicable to discrimination against immigrants or foreigners. However, a profound ambiguity remains around the structural and systemic forms of oppression which occur routinely as nation states regulate both citizenship and the movement of people across national borders.