Beyond Global Justice: Toward a Life-Coherent Architecture of Universal Provisioning

The 2026 Global Justice Report offers one of the most ambitious quantified programmes yet developed for reconciling global equality, material sufficiency and planetary habitability. It integrates income convergence, wealth compression, shorter working time, expanded public services, rapid decarbonization, global taxation, shared ownership and international monetary reform. This paper accepts that achievement while arguing that distributive equality and aggregate ecological compatibility remain necessary but insufficient conditions of justice.

A life-coherent extension is developed around four principles. Universal life necessities establish the conditions that every person must be able to access securely, shifting the objective from income convergence toward effective life-capacity convergence. Non-sacrifice rejects the systematic deprivation of less powerful populations, future generations or ecosystems for aggregate economic, geopolitical or environmental benefit. Regenerative provisioning reconceives the economy as the organized reproduction of bodily, social, institutional and ecological life rather than as an autonomous system for generating monetary value. The enlargement of living capacities defines prosperity through health, knowledge, care, relationship, participation, creative contribution, temporal autonomy, ecological integrity and adaptive agency.

These principles are translated into an institutional architecture comprising a universal civil-commons floor, ecological and power ceilings, life-capacity dividends, non-sacrifice review, regenerative public finance, shared stewardship of productive assets, multidimensional accounting and nested democratic governance. The Global Justice Report’s Global Justice Fund, World Sovereign Fund and proposed monetary institutions are reconstructed as organs of a life-coherent commonwealth. The paper concludes that global justice cannot be completed by distributing income, wealth and environmental burdens more equitably within an unchanged economic grammar. Justice requires institutions recursively answerable to their living consequences: securing universal necessities, preventing displaced harm, repairing damaged relations and enlarging present and future possibilities without treating any people or place as disposable.

The Sweetness That Consumed the World: Sugar, Plantation Modernity, and the Long Metabolic Afterlife of Empire

Sugar is commonly understood as a food ingredient, source of pleasure, or public-health concern. This book reconstructs it instead as a medium through which Atlantic modernity reorganized land, labour, race, finance, empire, consumption, and bodily life. It argues that the Caribbean plantation was not merely a farm but an agro-industrial, financial, disciplinary, racial, ecological, and political institution designed to direct living worlds toward distant accumulation. Following sugar from the rise of plantation slavery through industrial mass consumption, emancipation, wage labour, nationalized production, and the contemporary food environment, the study identifies a recurring institutional pattern: benefits move toward legally and financially recognized claims, while human, ecological, household, and public costs remain displaced elsewhere. This pattern is conceptualized as the displaced balance sheet. Saint Kitts and Nevis provides the book’s central territorial case. Its unusually long relationship with sugar reveals how the plantation repeatedly changed form — from Indigenous dispossession and racial slavery to post-emancipation land concentration, centralized industry, organized labour, public subsidy, and final closure in 2005. The 1935 Buckley’s uprising demonstrates how sugar workers transformed the cane field into a site of political agency and helped establish the foundations of modern labour politics and democratic citizenship. The book further develops the concepts of emancipation without deplantation, counter-plantation, and the metabolic afterlife. It argues that the end of slavery did not automatically redistribute land or productive power, that colonized peoples continually created life-making worlds beyond plantation purposes, and that contemporary food-import dependence and chronic-disease burdens must be understood through multicausal interactions among history, trade, commercial formulation, public policy, biology, and individual agency. The concluding sections propose reparative accounting and deplantation as frameworks for reconstructing land, labour, finance, nourishment, health, memory, and pleasure around the protection, restoration, and enlargement of life. The aim is not to condemn sweetness as a substance, but to end sacrifice as its concealed institutional condition.

THE SOVEREIGNTY OF CREDIT: The Making and Unmaking of the Financial Constitution

The Sovereignty of Credit examines finance not merely as a system of intermediation but as constitutional power over future possibility. Beneath the visible political constitution lies a credit constitution: the laws, institutions, markets, valuation practices, payment systems and standards through which claims upon future income, production, taxation and ecological capacity are created, ranked, circulated, protected and enforced. Credit converts anticipated future capacity into present purchasing power, but it also assigns part of the future to repayment and control. The paper reconstructs how this power emerged through merchant credit, public debt, fiscal-military states, colonial finance, slavery, chartered companies, industrial corporations and insurance; how it was reorganized through total war, Bretton Woods, dollar hierarchy, capital liberalization and financialization; and how it now operates through banks, central banks, sovereign debt, ratings, institutional investors, private equity, private credit, payment infrastructures, sanctions, digital money and artificial intelligence.

The central diagnosis is the Great Financial Inversion: claims become more institutionally visible and better protected than the human, productive, public and ecological capacities upon which their value depends. The Caribbean and small-island condition reveals this inversion with unusual clarity. Monetary stability coexists with restricted policy space, foreign-exchange dependence, correspondent-banking vulnerability, climate exposure and refinancing pressure. The paper therefore develops a constructive alternative: credit as delegated public power; a life-grounded hierarchy of claims; a democratic credit constitution; plural banking; mission-oriented investment; sovereign debt justice; central banking for life stability; and digital public money as civil commons. Rejecting both conspiracy mythology and institutional innocence, it argues that finance is legitimate only insofar as it protects, restores or enlarges the life-capacities from which all real value arises.

Episode 94: Critique | Practical Life-Coherent Eastern Caribbean Finance

How can the vision of Life-Coherent Finance be translated into everyday institutional practice? This critique identifies three opportunities to strengthen the proposed Eastern Caribbean financial architecture: simplify its conceptual frameworks into usable decision tools, confront the political economy of banking reform, and demonstrate the system through a practical end-to-end regional case study. Read More

Episode 93: Debate | Can the Eastern Caribbean Dollar Anchor Growth?

The Eastern Caribbean dollar has maintained its fixed exchange rate for fifty years, but can monetary stability become the foundation for productive growth? This debate examines whether a Life-Coherent Financial System can convert the region’s abundant liquidity into resilient development — or whether administrative complexity, weak data, public debt, climate exposure, and the realities of small island economies will overwhelm the proposed architecture. Read More

Episode 92: Deep Dive | The Eastern Caribbean Dollar Stability Paradox

Fifty years after the Eastern Caribbean dollar was anchored to the US dollar, the currency remains one of the world’s most durable monetary success stories. But does monetary stability alone create genuine prosperity? This Deep Dive explores the paradox at the heart of the ECCU’s economic model and examines Dr. Bichara Sahely’s proposal for a Life-Coherent Financial System capable of transforming financial stability into long-term human and ecological flourishing. Read More

THE ANCHOR HOLDS — BUT WHAT DOES IT HOLD? Fifty Years of Eastern Caribbean Monetary Stability and the Unfinished Transition to a Life-Coherent Financial System

The Eastern Caribbean currency arrangement is one of the region’s most durable collective institutions. Since 7 July 1976, the EC dollar has remained fixed at EC$2.70 to US$1, supported by pooled foreign reserves, common monetary authority, legal commitment and sustained political cooperation. This monetary anchor has protected convertibility, payment continuity and confidence across eight highly vulnerable small jurisdictions. Yet monetary stability has not by itself generated the productive diversification, distributive inclusion, ecological resilience, regional ownership or institutional capability required for long-term viability. This paper argues that the next fifty years should not be organized around abandonment of the peg, but around completion of the architecture attached to it. Drawing on the ECCB’s founding mandate, regional economic integration, development-finance practice, human-development theory, comprehensive-wealth accounting, environmental-economic accounting, sustainable-finance taxonomies and governance safeguards, the paper develops a life-coherent framework for finance. It proposes a seven-part test covering life-necessity, capacity, distribution, external viability, resilience, regeneration and democratic accountability. It then outlines a layered architecture comprising regional project preparation, wholesale development finance, strengthened guarantees, purpose-governed credit, voluntary mobilization of regional savings, a life-coherent investment taxonomy, an Anchor-and-Purpose Dashboard and protections against political, private, bureaucratic and epistemic capture. A sequenced transition moves from foundations in 2026–2027, through demonstration in 2028–2030 and integration in 2031–2035, toward longer-term institutional maturity. The central thesis is that the anchor should be preserved while the vessel is repaired: monetary confidence must become a platform for productive, resilient, just and ecologically viable regional life.

Episode 91: Critique | Proving Institutional Liability for Colonial Extraction

How can the case for reparations be made even stronger? This constructive critique examines The Sacrificed Are Told to Thank the Altar, identifying opportunities to reinforce the historical, legal and economic foundations of institutional liability while sharpening the causal links between colonial extraction and life-capacity restoration. Read More

Episode 90: Debate | Institutional Liability for Inherited Colonial Wealth

If personal guilt is not inherited, can institutional responsibility still endure across generations? This debate examines one of the central questions raised by The Sacrificed Are Told to Thank the Altar: whether continuing institutions may inherit the wealth and prestige of colonialism while denying the liabilities that accompanied them. Read More

Episode 89: Deep Dive | Former Colonies Owe Nothing for Infrastructure

What happens when empire presents extraction as investment and the descendants of the oppressed are told they owe a debt to the machinery that exploited them? This Deep Dive explores Dr. Bichara Sahely’s concept of colonial debt reversal, reframing reparations as institutional responsibility and the restoration of life-capacities rather than inherited guilt or charity. Read More

Author: LIFE