Xi Jinping’s call for international cooperation on AI signals that a new geopolitical contest is taking shape. For the Caribbean and wider Global South, access to AI is not enough. Meaningful participation requires ownership, institutional authority and influence over the rules without being confined to choosing between competing Chinese and American technological systems.

Some describe the WTO’s current struggles as institutional arthritis. This essay argues otherwise: institutions do not biologically age. The WTO is not simply failing to move but being redirected as state interests, economic power and geopolitical rivalries shift. Can the original bargain still hold, or are states already remaking global trade from within?

On neutrality and the invisible cultural standards that shape sport. This photograph is now familiar. When tennis star Naomi Osaka walked onto Centre Court at Wimbledon, it quickly made waves across the public conversation. Naomi Osaka at Wimbledon, London, 6 July 2026. Photograph: Mike Egerton/PA Images/Getty Images. What interested me, however, was not simply the photograph itself, but what it revealed. It brought me back to one of the hardest lessons of studying coloniali

The current tensions between Trinidad and Tobago and CARICOM are not simply signs of regional failure. They raise a deeper question: does the political and economic bargain forged in the 1970s still reflect the interests of Caribbean states today? This essay examines the national interests, inequalities and changing development strategies reshaping regional integration.

Development reports often present the Caribbean’s challenges as technical problems requiring more investment, exports, integration and resilience. But what disappears when history and power are removed from the diagnosis? This essay asks whether familiar policy prescriptions can transform economies shaped by extraction or whether they simply help us manage the same structures until the next report is published.

Development aid is often measured by the resources provided. This essay asks a different question: what happens when money is left on the table? Drawing on political economy and lived experience, it explores how institutional design, power and governance shape access to aid, arguing that development outcomes depend not only on funding, but on the capacity of systems to receive, navigate and transform opportunity.