Gaza & the World Ep. 3: Vijay Prashad on Gaza, China, and the Limits of Global Action

In this episode of our "Gaza & the World" series, Helena Cobban talked with Vijay Prashad about the intersection of the genocide in Gaza and the shifting global balance of power. 

Vijay Prashad is a visionary global justice activist, the executive director of the Tri Continental Institute for Social Research, the editor of Left Word Books, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and a senior non-resident fellow at the Chong Yang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China. He was speaking with Cobban from Beijing.

In this episode, Prashad argued that while the world's economic center of gravity had shifted away from the United States, the US maintained overwhelming dominance through its military and information power.  He discussed the role of China in providing an alternative economic pole, which allowed Global South nations to speak more freely against Western policies, arguing that the genocide in Gaza had exposed the moral bankruptcy of the West to the global majority and evoked historical memories of colonialism. [

He contended that any discussion of post-conflict governance in Gaza was meaningless without the release of all Palestinian political leaders, whose imprisonment by Israel had crippled Palestinian political life. He concluded on a sobering note, saying that a direct confrontation with the US military was not currently feasible for rising powers and that meaningful change required a political transformation within the United States to dismantle its military-first approach to global affairs.