When two elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled.

The ancient African proverb—when two elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled—captures the fundamental pathology of asymmetric power. Across human history, whenever titanic entities engage in contestation, the arena of their struggle is rarely confined to themselves. Instead, the costs of their friction are systematically externalised onto those who are smallest, weakest, and entirely devoid of agency in the dispute. Whether among empires, multinational corporations, ecological actors, or domestic units, the structural logic remains unchanged: the powerful pursue ambition or resolve animosity, while the peripheral bear the existential ruin.

The Historical Theatre of Proxy Warfare

The geopolitical arena provides the most vivid manifestation of this asymmetry. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union, restrained by the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, avoided direct military engagement. Instead, they transformed the post-colonial developing world into their ideological battleground. In Vietnam, the Korean Peninsula, and Afghanistan, sovereign territories were reduced to proxy arenas. Millions of civilians who had no stake in the ideological schism between capitalism and communism lost their lives, livelihoods, and futures.

Afghanistan serves as a tragic testament to this dynamic. The superpower rivalry of the late twentieth century dismantled its nascent state institutions, unleashed radicalisation, and left behind an unexploded landscape of ordnance and civil strife that continues to haunt the Afghan population decades after the original contenders withdrew. The elephants fought elsewhere, but the Afghan soil remains scarred.

Contemporary Rivalries and the Shocks of Deglobalisation

In the contemporary era, the battle lines have evolved from ideological frontiers to trade routes, technology standards, and supply chains, yet the collateral damage remains equally severe. The escalating friction between the United States and China—characterised by tariff wars, weaponised export controls, and technological decoupling—threatens the stability of global commerce. Developing economies across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa, which rely on integrated global trade and dual partnerships, find themselves caught in a crossfire of coercive economic statecraft. Secondary sanctions and fractured supply networks compel smaller nations to make zero-sum alignments, undermining their developmental trajectories.

This vulnerability was laid bare by the conflict in Ukraine in the 2020s. While rooted in European security architecture and great-power contestation, the immediate fallout reverberated across the Global South. Blockades in the Black Sea and disruptions to fertilizer and hydrocarbon supply chains triggered catastrophic food and energy inflation. Import-dependent nations in the Horn of Africa, as well as South Asian economies already grappling with macroeconomic stress, faced acute food insecurity, balance-of-payments crises, and social unrest. The conflict was conceived in the capitals of powerful states, but its human toll was paid at kitchen tables across the developing world.

Corporate Asymmetries in the Marketplace

The metaphor extends seamlessly into the economic sphere, where market dominance mirrors geopolitical hegemony. In the modern marketplace, aggressive price wars and predatory practices between corporate behemoths frequently decimate the surrounding ecosystem. When dominant e-commerce platforms, telecommunications giants, or retail conglomerates engage in deep-discounting battles to capture market share, the primary victims are Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), neighbourhood retail vendors, and unorganised suppliers who lack the capital buffers to survive prolonged margin compression.

Similarly, in the platform economy, the algorithmic tug-of-war between venture-backed aggregator monopolies squeezes gig workers and delivery partners. Lacking collective bargaining power and social security nets, these individuals bear the brunt of reduced incentives and arbitrary platform fees. Regulatory institutions, such as the Competition Commission of India (CCI), are increasingly forced to step in to curb anti-competitive mergers and abuse of dominant position, acknowledging that unregulated corporate combat invariably erodes the economic agency of the smallest participants.

The Ecological Divide and Asymmetric Costs

Perhaps the starkest structural manifestation of this proverb is the global climate crisis. The planetary atmospheric commons has been degraded predominantly by the historic and continuing emissions of industrialized and major economic powers. Yet, the existential burden of climate catastrophe falls disproportionately on those who contributed the least to global carbon budgets.

Small Island Developing States (SIDS) like Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Maldives face territorial extinction due to rising sea levels, while Least Developed Countries (LDCs) suffer from intensifying droughts, catastrophic floods, and desertification. Despite contributing a negligible fraction of historic greenhouse gas emissions, these vulnerable populations endure severe displacement and resource scarcity. The institutional recognition of this disparity—enshrined in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change through the principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities (CBDR-RC), and the hard-fought operationalisation of the Loss and Damage Fund—reflects an urgent moral demand that the perpetrators of ecological strain compensate the trampled periphery.

Collateral at the Microcosmic Scale

The dynamic is not confined to macroscopic global structures; it operates with equal potency within the micro-spaces of human society. In severe domestic conflicts, particularly protracted marital breakdowns and bitter custody battles, children are frequently reduced to emotional collateral. Absorbed in adversarial posturing, parents often fail to perceive that the emotional and psychological trauma is absorbed entirely by the child, who possesses neither the maturity to comprehend the conflict nor the autonomy to escape it. In the social fabric, whenever institutional giants clash—be it factional political parties polarizing the electorate or entrenched caste hierarchies disputing local authority—it is consistently the daily-wage worker, the marginalised community, and the ordinary citizen whose peace and security are forfeited.

Agency of the Grass: From Vulnerability to Strategic Resilience

However, to view the "grass" merely as passive, helpless fodder is to surrender to fatalism. The central question for the vulnerable is how to cultivate resilience, assert agency, and alter the structural power balance.

India’s own foreign policy evolution offers a compelling template. Emerging into independence during the peak of the Cold War, India refused to be co-opted into superpower military blocs, pioneering the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). In the contemporary multi-polar era, India has adapted this philosophy into the doctrine of Strategic Autonomy and multi-alignment. By engaging with diverse power centres on issue-based convergences—retaining ties with traditional partners while forging strategic coalitions such as the Quad—India demonstrates how an emerging power can avoid becoming an instrument in the rivalries of others. Furthermore, by championing the Voice of the Global South Summit and successfully integrating the African Union into the G20 during its 2023 Presidency, India has worked to institutionalise the collective bargaining power of developing nations.

Beyond individual statecraft, the protection of the vulnerable demands robust multilateral frameworks. Small and middle nations survive not by the benevolence of the strong, but through a rules-based international order. Strengthening the dispute settlement mechanisms of the World Trade Organization, establishing binding international treaties on technology transfer, and institutionalising global safety nets for debt relief are indispensable. In domestic markets, strict antitrust enforcement, robust labour legislation for gig workers, and strong support structures for MSMEs provide regulatory armour to prevent market concentration from crushing smaller enterprises.

Conclusion

Power, when unmediated by ethics and institutional accountability, tends inexorably toward self-absorption, blinding the powerful to the collateral devastation they inflict. The enduring relevance of the proverb lies in its warning against the uncritical acceptance of hierarchy. If the global order, the marketplace, and society at large are to achieve genuine stability, the interests of the powerful cannot be pursued at the expense of the vulnerable.

True resilience lies in empowering the grass—through collective solidarity, legal safeguards, and strategic autonomy—so that the ground upon which the powerful tread ceases to be an expendable battleground, and becomes instead a fortified foundation that commands respect and restrains conflict.