By Aaron Abraha and Ghidewon Abay Asmerom

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Part II

The Myth of the “Open” West and the “Closed” Rest

One of the most powerful myths in contemporary international politics is the claim that the world can be neatly divided into “open” and “closed” societies using supposedly neutral Western metrics. According to this framework, much of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America is placed in shades of red—obstructed, repressed, or closed—while the states of the Western world are generally presented as open, liberal, transparent, and humane.

The problem is not that civic freedom, public participation, freedom of expression, or accountable government are unimportant. They are deeply important. The problem is that the measuring stick is often produced by the same historical civilization that enslaved Africans, colonized continents, exterminated indigenous populations, invented racial hierarchies, committed genocides, supported apartheid, waged illegal wars, and continues to lecture the world as though its own hands are clean.

This is not moral authority. It is historical amnesia institutionalized as methodology.

Who Defines “Open”?

The first question is simple: who gets to define what an “open” society is?

Organizations such as CIVICUS classify countries into categories such as open, narrowed, obstructed, repressed, and closed based on civic space, especially freedoms of association, peaceful assembly, and expression. CIVICUS itself says its ratings are based on multiple data streams and focus on these civic freedoms. 

On paper, this appears technical. In practice, the framework reflects a particular liberal, Western understanding of political life. It privileges certain visible forms of civic expression—NGOs, protests, opposition parties, private media, online activism, adversarial civil society—while often giving less weight to social cohesion, economic sovereignty, national security, anti-imperial resilience, public order, development priorities, and historical vulnerability to foreign interference.

This creates a built-in imbalance. A state that allows foreign-funded NGOs, hostile media ecosystems, and externally connected political activism may be rated more “open,” even if it wages wars abroad, arms dictatorships, supports occupation, imprisons migrants, or enables mass suffering through sanctions. Meanwhile, a state that restricts foreign political penetration in the name of sovereignty may be branded “closed,” even if its restrictions arise from a history of invasion, destabilization, sanctions, or externally sponsored regime-change efforts.

Thus, the label “open” often measures openness to Western-style political organization—not necessarily justice, dignity, sovereignty, or human well-being.

The Colonial Memory They Want Forgotten

The moral problem is deeper than methodology. The same Western civilization that now claims the authority to classify the world as open or closed built much of its power through systems that were the very opposite of openness.

Africa was enslaved and colonized in the name of civilization, commerce, and Christianity. Indigenous peoples in the Americas were dispossessed, exterminated, and confined under settler colonial rule. France committed atrocities in Algeria. Italy committed crimes in Libya and used chemical weapons in Ethiopia. Britain committed brutal violence in India and Kenya. Germany committed genocide in Namibia and mass atrocities in Tanganyika. European powers drew borders, destroyed societies, looted resources, and then later presented themselves as teachers of governance.

The contradiction is staggering. The descendants of empires that closed entire continents through conquest now claim the right to declare others “closed.”

This does not mean that abuses in non-Western countries should be ignored. It means Western judgment must be stripped of its false innocence. No civilization that produced slavery, colonialism, genocide, the Holocaust, apartheid support, and repeated wars of domination has the right to speak as though it stands outside history.

The Auditors of Freedom Have Blood on Their Hands

The claim that the West possesses the moral authority to divide the world into “open” and “closed” societies collapses when measured against its own historical record. The same civilization that now produces human-rights rankings and civic-space maps also built much of its wealth and global power through conquest, slavery, colonialism, genocide, dispossession, forced labor, famine, and racial domination.

In the Americas, European colonization produced one of the greatest demographic catastrophes in human history. Scholars estimate that roughly 55 to 56 million Indigenous people died in the first century after European arrival, reducing the pre-Columbian population by about 90 percent. This catastrophe, often called the “Great Dying,” was caused by a combination of introduced Eurasian diseases, warfare, slavery, forced displacement, and colonial violence. Researchers have argued that the collapse of Indigenous populations was so vast that abandoned farmland reforested on a continental scale, absorbing enough carbon dioxide to contribute to global cooling during the early modern period. In other words, European conquest killed on such a scale that it left a measurable mark on the Earth’s climate.

The violence did not end with the first century of colonization. In North America, Indigenous communities continued to face extermination campaigns, forced removals, broken treaties, massacres, disease, land theft, and cultural destruction. The Trail of Tears alone killed thousands of Cherokee people. Bounties were placed on Indigenous lives. Communities were uprooted, confined, and subjected to policies designed to destroy their political, cultural, and spiritual existence. By 1900, the Native population in what became the United States had been reduced to a tiny fraction of its pre-contact size.

The same pattern appeared across the colonized world. In India, British colonial rule produced repeated famines, economic extraction, destruction of local industries, and policies that scholars have linked to tens of millions of excess deaths. The Bengal Famine of 1943 killed up to three million people, while the rushed Partition of India in 1947 produced mass displacement and between hundreds of thousands and two million deaths.

In Africa, European rule was no less brutal. German colonial forces carried out the genocide of the Herero and Nama in Namibia between 1904 and 1908, killing tens of thousands and destroying up to 80 percent of the Herero population and half of the Nama. In German East Africa, the suppression of the Maji Maji Rebellion caused an estimated 75,000 to 300,000 deaths, largely through famine and disease resulting from scorched-earth tactics. In the Congo Free State, King Leopold II’s rubber regime, forced labor, terror, famine, and disease led to a catastrophic population decline estimated by historians at anywhere from one million to ten million people.

French colonialism in Algeria caused massive loss of life during both the nineteenth-century conquest and the twentieth-century war of independence. Italian colonial rule in Libya involved mass killings, death marches, concentration camps, and population devastation, especially in Cyrenaica. Even after World War II, British and Indian forces participated in the attempt to restore Dutch colonial authority in Indonesia, where tens of thousands died during the early decolonization struggle.

This is the historical record of the powers that now claim the authority to grade the world. They enslaved Africans, exterminated Indigenous peoples, colonized continents, committed genocide, engineered famines, supported apartheid, waged imperial wars, and then returned as auditors of civilization. Their maps now color much of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East in red—“closed,” “repressed,” or “obstructed”—while presenting themselves as “open,” liberal, humane, and morally qualified to judge others.

But a civilization that closed entire continents through conquest has no right to lecture the world about openness without first confronting its own history. A country cannot colonize, sanction, occupy, invade, exploit, and destabilize others, then claim moral innocence because its own citizens can protest in the capital. That is not openness. It is empire with civil liberties at home.

The central issue is not whether freedom, civic participation, or human rights matter. They do. The issue is the hypocrisy of a Western grading system that measures the internal behavior of weaker states while ignoring the external violence of powerful ones. A truly honest standard would ask not only whether a state permits protest, but whether it respects the sovereignty, dignity, and lives of other peoples. By that measure, many self-described “open” societies would appear far less open than they claim.

The Selective Blindness of the Metrics

The “open versus closed” framework often suffers from selective blindness. It focuses intensely on internal civil liberties in weaker states, but it rarely gives equal weight to the external violence committed or enabled by powerful states.

A Western country can be rated “open” while selling weapons to regimes that crush dissent. It can be called democratic while supporting occupations, sanctions, coups, or military interventions. It can prevent protest at home while helping destroy civic life abroad. It can claim free media while allowing corporate concentration, intelligence manipulation, censorship-by-platform, and manufactured consent in matters of war.

The result is a deeply distorted moral map. Countries are judged by how they treat domestic dissent, but not with equal seriousness by how they treat foreign lives.

This is why the framework often produces absurd outcomes: the states most responsible for global violence can appear “open,” while states struggling under the consequences of colonial borders, sanctions, security threats, and foreign pressure are branded “closed.” The empire is measured by its internal procedure. The victim is measured by its defensive posture.

Openness for Whom?

A second question must be asked: open for whom?

A state may be “open” for corporations, foreign media, NGOs, intelligence networks, opposition activists, and external influence operations. But is it open for the poor? For migrants? For colonized peoples? For racial minorities? For indigenous communities? For those opposing war? For those challenging the economic order?

Many Western states that present themselves as open have used surveillance, policing, detention, deportation, emergency laws, censorship pressure, and financial coercion against marginalized groups and dissenters. Recent lawsuits and human rights reporting, for example, continue to raise serious concerns about detention conditions, migrant rights, protest policing, and state violence in Western democracies. 

The point is not that Western countries have no freedoms. They do. The point is that “open” is often applied selectively. Societies can be open at the center and closed at the margins. They can be open to the rich, closed to the poor, they are open for whites, closed to people of color, they are open for men, closed for women. They can be open for citizens and brutal toward migrants. They can be open domestically and violent internationally. They can be open for approved speech and punitive toward speech that challenges strategic interests.

An honest metric would ask not only whether citizens can criticize their government, but whether the state participates in systems that deny millions of people elsewhere their basic rights.

The NGO-Industrial Lens and “Closed” as a Political Weapon

Many of these classifications also depend heavily on NGO reporting ecosystems. NGOs can do valuable work, but they are not neutral instruments floating above politics. They operate within funding structures, ideological environments, media incentives, donor priorities, and geopolitical pressures.

When Western governments fund democracy promotion, civil society programming, media development, and human rights advocacy abroad, the boundary between rights monitoring and political influence becomes blurred. A country that resists this ecosystem may be labeled hostile to civic space. But from its own perspective, it may be resisting foreign penetration through civil society channels.

This is especially important for postcolonial states. Many African countries know from history that conquest rarely arrives announcing itself as conquest. It arrives as civilization, evangelization, humanitarian concern, reform, democracy promotion, security cooperation, or human rights conditionality.

That historical memory cannot simply be dismissed as paranoia.

The label “closed” is not just descriptive. It can become a political weapon.

Once a country is branded closed, it becomes easier to isolate it diplomatically, sanction it economically, demonize its leadership, justify foreign pressure, fund opposition networks, and prepare public opinion for intervention. The rating becomes part of a larger machinery of delegitimization.

This is why postcolonial states are right to scrutinize these labels. They are not merely academic categories. They can shape aid, investment, diplomacy, sanctions, media narratives, and even military policy.

The danger is that Western-defined openness becomes a loyalty test: open to Western influence, open to Western NGOs, open to Western media, open to Western capital, open to Western strategic priorities. Those who resist are branded closed.

One of the greatest weaknesses of the open-closed framework is that it lacks a serious category for sovereign societies—states that may restrict certain forms of foreign penetration not because they oppose civic life, but because they have experienced colonialism, war, destabilization, sanctions, or external manipulation.

A sovereign society may insist that political organizations be nationally rooted, that foreign-funded activism be regulated, that media ecosystems not become tools of external warfare, and that national security be taken seriously. These choices can be abused, and they should be scrutinized. But they cannot automatically be equated with total closure.

The Western framework often refuses to distinguish between repression and sovereignty. That refusal is not analytical. It is ideological.

A More Honest Standard

A genuinely fair global civic-space framework would have to measure more than domestic protest rules and media laws. It would need to include at least five additional questions. Does the state respect the sovereignty of other nations, or does it destabilize them through war, sanctions, coups, occupation, proxy forces, and covert operations? Does the state protect human dignity of its own citizens and beyond its own citizens, social justice, including migrants, refugees, colonized peoples, and populations affected by its foreign policy? Does the state’s media system allow real debate on war, empire, corporate power, and foreign policy, or only debate within acceptable ideological boundaries? Does the state’s civil society ecosystem reflect national self-organization, or is it structurally dependent on foreign funding and geopolitical agendas? Does the state’s historical conduct match its moral language? By these standards, many self-described “open” states would no longer appear so open.

The  Western civic-space ratings are incomplete, historically unaccountable, and politically loaded.

They measure the world from the standpoint of societies that claim universal moral authority while refusing to carry the full weight of their own histories. They condemn restrictions in the Global South while minimizing the violence, coercion, surveillance, racism, militarism, and external domination practiced by the Global North. They classify states as open or closed without asking whether the so-called open states have helped close the political futures of others through colonialism, intervention, sanctions, occupation, and war.

A country cannot bomb, colonize, sanction, occupy, exploit, and destabilize others, then claim moral innocence because its own citizens can hold a protest in the capital.

That is not openness. That is an empire with civil liberties at home.

Conclusion: The Red Map Is Not Neutral

The red map of the world is not neutral. It is a political artifact produced through a Western gaze that often mistakes conformity for freedom and resistance for closure. It tells us something about civic space, but it does not tell the whole truth. It measures certain liberties while ignoring historical crimes, external violence, and the unequal global order that shaped the very states it judges.

The world does not need lectures from powers that enslaved Africa, colonized Asia, exterminated indigenous peoples, committed genocide, supported apartheid, and now present themselves as guardians of human rights.

It needs a more honest standard—one that measures freedom together with sovereignty, dignity, historical justice, and freedom from foreign domination.

Until then, the claim that the West is “open” while most of the world is “closed” should be read not as objective truth, but as the latest chapter in a much older story: the empire naming itself civilization and naming everyone else the problem.

They are not measuring freedom; they are measuring conformity to a Western liberal template while exempting Western power from the consequences of its own global conduct.