Francis Fukuyama, an American Political Scientist and Philosopher, asks whether history has reached its endpoint—whether the major contradictions of human life have been resolved within liberal democracy. Famously, his answer is yes. Fascism and communism have been defeated. What remains, in his view, is a world moving unevenly but inevitably toward a single political and economic form. Everything else is merely an event along the way.
Fukuyama even tells us not to concern ourselves with “strange thoughts” in countries like Burkina Faso. Once the West has declared the central questions answered, the rest of humanity is reduced to ethnonoise. The hard work, supposedly, has already been done. Civilization has arrived. What remains is only adoption, imitation or delay.
But it does matter what happens in Burkina Faso. It matters that states across Africa are pursuing development strategies shaped by local priorities rather than inherited Western models. It matters that political imagination is not confined to the North Atlantic nor exhausted by liberal democracy. The African Union replacing the Organization of African Unity; South Africa joining BRICS, the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa alliance; and Burkina Faso helping form the Alliance des États du Sahel show that so-called “strange thoughts” have not disappeared at all. They have found fertile ground in which to grow.
Fukuyama’s argument also rests on the belief that liberal democracy has resolved its internal contradictions and does not merely produce inequality as an emergent function. Yet the Panama Papers, Pandora Papers, LuxLeaks and the enduring permissiveness around elite financial misconduct, including weak regulation and enforcement around congressional stock trading and the broader protection of elite networks, suggest otherwise. Liberal democracy does not simply fail to prevent inequality. It repeatedly reproduces and protects it.
Its claim to stability has also come under strain. The attempted assertion of emergency power in South Korea under Yoon Suk Yeol, alongside repeated military interventions in parts of Southeast Asia and the Global South, shows that democratic institutions are not as settled as Fukuyama suggests. The United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union through Brexit was a direct rejection of a liberal order it helped construct. At the same time, the continued existence of the British monarchy alongside parliamentary democracy demonstrates that political forms do not resolve into a single coherent model.
Russia continues to assert itself through military force in its war with Ukraine. This is not a relic of a defeated ideology fading into irrelevance but an active challenge to the liberal international order. China has risen as a global power while maintaining a political system fundamentally distinct from liberal democracy, exporting firms like Huawei and Build Your Dreams alongside its governance model. Its doctrine of non-military interference has not weakened; Chinese communism is not disappearing. Meanwhile, despite its similar isolationism, Iran continues to project regional power in part through its own distinct political system.
Even the moral coherence Fukuyama assumes is unsettled. A recent vote at the United Nations addressing the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade revealed sharp disagreement among states that are supposed to share a common framework of values. But a close reading of the 13th Amendment, which actually allows slavery for incarcerated individuals, may have already foreshadowed some of these tensions. The codification of slavery, in any form including its present, prevents the Nation from dealing with the legacy of the Transatlantic trade.
Economic convergence tells a similar story. The expansion of BRICS reflects an effort by major states to build institutions and financial relationships that operate alongside Western systems. Discussions of alternative currencies and settlement mechanisms suggest that even the monetary foundations of the current order are not fixed. At the same time, the rise of cryptocurrencies introduces new forms of exchange that do not depend on traditional state structures at all. These are not replacements, at least not yet. They are experiments. They signal that the space of possibility remains open.
Fukuyama assumes that history requires large, unified ideological systems to continue. Without fascism or communism as rivals, he sees no engine for further transformation. That assumption is flawed. History does not depend on a single axis of conflict. It depends on contestation itself. Contest has not disappeared. It has multiplied across economic, cultural, political and technological domains.
Fukuyama feared the emergence of a passive “last man,” content within a stable system that no longer demands struggle. He should have finished “God Emperor of Dune.” People are not passive. They are engaged, reactive and often overwhelmed by the pace of change. Protest movements, political volatility and the constant renegotiation of norms indicate not satisfaction but pressure.
This is the best time to be alive—not because it is calm, but because it is unsettled. Nothing meaningful happens in a closed system. The ability to shape one’s world requires uncertainty and freedom: the freedom to move, the freedom to refuse and the freedom to imagine something different. It requires that outcomes are not predetermined. We are living inside that condition now, a period of possibility that is as unstable as it is generative. There are no final forms to reach, no endpoint waiting to resolve history for us.
This is not the end of history. It is the beginning of a more open one.