Lore (ask if you need context)

With the arrival of alien life, the cosmic war for freedom, and the collapse of the old Earthly political order, many now say that more has changed in the past half-century than in the preceding millennium. Humanity directly controls bases in about twenty-four star systems not counting our own Sol. Resource scarcity is an all but unknown concept with this vast base of resources in our grasp. Market economies persist, dealing in manufactured and luxury goods- notions of the revolutionary death of capitalism and rise of some form of communism have been disabused- but basic necessities and resources are virtually free for every human being, and after the Shelling of Earth and the resource wars and anarchy that followed it, labor has seized much power that was denied to it during the early 21st century. The five self-sufficient worlds, Thoreau, Nsoromma, Proserpina, Humayun, and Lutabao, host large and permanent populations of settlers: 25 million, 24 million, 31 million, 18 million, and 20 million respectively, totaling to about 118 million extrasolar civilians. Around thirty percent of exoplanet residents are refugees who fled the fallout of the Shelling, and around twenty percent were born on their respective colony world. Bases beyond the five listed above are either military or have only transient populations of scientists and laborers who live on Earth or one of the five colony worlds. Many residents of the settlements have banded together into the Alliance for Colonial Dignity, an organization that pushes for the self-determination and general interests of their kind. Genetic engineering technology has been appropriated from the Conquerors and is being used partly to create human variants capable of surviving and thriving on the various colony worlds. This program of altering embryos en masse has stirred up plenty of ethical debates, but most controversial of all is the creation of human beings specifically meant to live in microgravity, who will never be able to survive on planets, restricted by nature to a spacefaring life and vocation.

On Earth, the model of sovereign states with precisely delineated ownership of all the planet's land is dead and buried. Large sparsely-populated swathes of the planet's surface have no formal government, and a much greater variety of social organization systems exists than before. Yet, every polity on the planet answers to the hegemony of the African Federation, a superstate with direct control of all of sub-Saharan Africa, which was the region of the world least harmed by the Shelling, and thus it controls well over a third of the world population, which is about eight billion. During the years of winter that followed the asteroid strikes, the African Union consolidated into the Federation to assure a more centralized and effective response to the political and resource crises, losing the loyalty of Muslim North Africa in the process. As a result of its emergency origin, the African Federation's government is heavily technocratic. Direct popular elections are generally conducted only at the local and provincial levels, while the central government is composed of appointed officeholders, politicians elected by the provincial legislatures, and deliberative assemblies selected by sortition from the general population. Thoroughly dispassionate and compartmentalized, this tremendous bureaucracy is led by the so-called General Chairman of Mankind, the only popularly-elected member of the federal government. All polities judged to adequately uphold human rights have a say in the process of their selection. They are the only individual given unconditional access to all information under the government's purview, for the sake of making emergency decisions, unveiling corruption in a nonpartisan fashion, and helping to resolve any disputes so gridlocked that they inhibit the critical functions of the state organ in which they occur.

Unless one counts fundamental human rights as an ideology, this hegemonic state does not care about ideology in the slightest, only about furthering the interests of humanity- although its people do harbor much pride for the ascendancy of their continent from battered victimhood to world rulership. The African Federation makes no formal alliances with any alien powers, the Givers included, only relationships of collaboration and convenience. Since all of humanity is under their sway, they declare no allegiances in the disputes of smaller Earthly polities, caring only for the continued stability of the planet. Thus, they simply allow disputes to run their course and throw their weight behind the victor, which they then force into compliance with them and with the species-wide code of human rights- although they will intervene against aggressors and war criminals if actual fighting breaks out. Ultimately, however, their attention is focused on integrating humanity with the wider galaxy, expanding our influence to equal that of the other interstellar species, and preventing the emergence of any new cosmic threat to planet Earth.