The recent article, “Guyana slips in rule of law ranking” (28 October 2025, Kaieteur News), reports that Guyana now stands 80th out of 143 countries in the World Justice Project’s (WJP) Rule of Law Index, citing small declines in judicial independence and civic space. The editorial interprets this as a sign of democratic erosion and shrinking media freedom.
Such a conclusion, while understandable, is premature. It reflects a deeper issue: how international agencies acquire and exercise the power and authority to define the meaning of freedom and rule of law in societies of the Global South.
Organisations such as the WJP and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) occupy a privileged place in the moral economy of international governance. They speak in the language of universality, transparency, and accountability, yet their metrics are often shaped by historical experiences and political traditions specific to Western liberal democracies.
In translating complex local realities into global scoreboards, they wield a subtle form of power: the authority to define legitimacy and failure.
Dr Randy Persaud and other regional thinkers have long argued that such measures, though valuable, tend to marginalize local voices and undervalue indigenous forms of civic engagement. The question is not whether there should be standards, but whose structure of attitude and reference underlies them; in whose authority do they speak?
Imperial systems of knowledge did not depend merely on formal criteria; they rested on an entire structure of attitude and reference – a cultural lens through which other societies were perceived, described, and ranked.
This is crucial. To speak of a “structure of attitude and reference” is not to reject standards or discipline but to examine the historical imagination that frames them. Western agencies do not simply measure; they interpret and evaluate, drawing upon inherited assumptions about order, freedom, and civility.
When those assumptions are treated as universal, they transform complex realities into comparative hierarchies.
The result is not a contest between high and low standards, but between different vantage points on what human freedom looks like in practice.
But representation is never neutral; it arranges realities into hierarchies of value, deciding who speaks and who is spoken for.
Today’s indices reproduce this logic: they classify, quantify, and name, performing what might be called classificatory violence, where local nuance is sacrificed to external coherence.
Under this authority, Guyana’s story becomes a set of digits and ranks – 73rd in the RSF Press Freedom Index, 80th in the WJP Rule of Law Index – each converted into a global headline, stripped of the contestation and vitality that define our media space and culture.
In reality, Guyana’s public sphere is anything but silent. Kaieteur News, Stabroek News, Demerara Waves, and numerous digital platforms host continuous, sometimes ferocious debate. Government agencies such as the Department of Public Information and independent journalists alike participate in a noisy, plural, and self-questioning ecosystem. Across social media, citizens scrutinize authority and test the limits of expression daily. These are not signs of decay but of a living, argumentative democracy. When external scoreboards present minor shifts in data as evidence of national decline, they turn social complexity into moral calculus.
The effect is not illumination but simplification: a narrative of failure in search of an audience. But as Michel Foucault would remind us, the language of expertise is never outside the structures of power that sustain it.
The solution is not to reject external evaluation but to transform its basis. Global benchmarks should engage with the societies they classify and describe, grounding their claims in dialogue with local scholars, journalists, and civic actors instead of an inherited imperial authority. Diplomatic partners and international NGOs have an important role to play here – not as auditors of progress but as collaborators in understanding.
Freedom cannot be reduced to a number; it must be interpreted within context and culture. A genuinely universal conversation about press and governance will emerge only when the structures of attitude and reference which sustain them are made visible, debated, and revised so that what we call “standard” becomes the outcome of shared inquiry, not inherited authority.