The Peninsula Foundation

Tag: global governance

  • BRICS, SCO, and Beyond: Multilateralism as a Sovereignty Safeguard:

    BRICS, SCO, and Beyond: Multilateralism as a Sovereignty Safeguard:

    Introduction

     In an era marked by profound geopolitical transformations and the gradual erosion of the Western-dominated liberal world order, emerging multilateral institutions have emerged as crucial pillars for safeguarding state sovereignty. The BRICS coalition and the SCO represent more than mere economic or regional partnerships– they embody a new paradigm of multilateralism that prioritises sovereign equality, non-interference, and consensus-based decision-making. As traditional multilateral institutions struggle to adapt to contemporary power dynamics, these alternative frameworks offer developing countries pathways to maintain autonomy while engaging meaningfully in global governance.

    The significance of these institutions extends beyond their immediate membership. They represent what scholars term “non-Western multilateralism”- a system of international cooperation that explicitly challenges the hegemonic tendencies of Western-led institutions while promoting a more inclusive and equitable global order. This emerging multilateral architecture does not seek to destroy existing institutions, but rather create parallel frameworks that better reflect the interests and values of the Global South.

    The Crisis of Traditional Multilateralism

    The contemporary crisis of multilateralism stems from structural imbalances that have persisted since the establishment of the post-World War II international order. Traditional institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the UNSC reflect power distributions that no longer reflect current global realities. The Global South, which represents over 80% of the world’s population, remains underrepresented in decision-making despite its growing economic significance.

    This crisis has been further aggravated by the instrumentalisation of multilateral institutions by dominant powers. The “weaponisation of finance” through unilateral sanctions and conditional lending has prompted developing countries to seek alternatives that respect their sovereignty. Recent developments, including the blocking of Russian assets and the use of SWIFT as a political tool, have demonstrated how traditional financial architecture can be used to coerce sovereign states. Moreover, the decline of American hegemony has created what scholars describe as a “multipolar reality” without corresponding multilateral adaptation. The US, while maintaining significant capabilities, faces increasing challenges to its global leadership from rising powers, internal polarisation and diminished moral authority. This hegemonic transition has created space for alternative arrangements to emerge and flourish.

    BRICS: Institutional Innovation and Economic Sovereignty

    BRICS has evolved from an economic concept to a comprehensive institutional framework that challenges Western financial dominance through concrete initiatives. The New Development Bank (NDB), established in 2014 with $100 billion in authorised capital, provides infrastructure financing without the political conditionalities typically imposed by Western institutions. Unlike the World Bank or the IMF, the NDB operates on the principle of equal governance, with founding members maintaining equal voting rights regardless of their economic contributions. The bank’s commitment to financial sovereignty is evidenced by its promotion of local currency lending, reducing dependence on the US Dollar and enhancing monetary autonomy for member states. Since its establishment, the NDB has approved over $32.8 billion across 96 projects, extending beyond the original BRICS members to include countries like Bangladesh, the UAE, Egypt, and Algeria. This expansion demonstrates the institution’s growing appeal as an alternative development finance mechanism.

    The Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA)[1], BRICS $100 billion financial safety net, further exemplifies this sovereignty-preserving approach. Unlike IMF bailout programs that typically require structural adjustment policies, the CRA provides emergency liquidity support without compromising domestic policy autonomy. This mechanism reflects BRICS’ broader commitment to “sovereign equality”- the principle that all states, regardless of size or power, possess equal rights in international affairs. BRICS has also pioneered what can be termed “multipolarity without hegemony”[2]. Unlike traditional power blocs dominated by a single leader, BRCIS operates through consensus-based decision-making, preventing any member from imposing its will on others. This approach has enabled the organisation to survive even amid tensions between members, such as the China-India border disputes, demonstrating institutional resilience.

    SCO: Security and Sovereignty in Eurasia

    The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation presents a different but complementary model of sovereignty-preserving multilateralism. Founded in 2001 and now encompassing ten full members from Kazakhstan to Iran, the SCO operates under the “Shanghai Spirit”- a framework emphasising mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality, and respect for civilisational diversity. This principle explicitly rejects hegemonic behaviour and promotes what member states call “sovereign equality”.   The SCO’s approach to security cooperation illustrates how multilateralism can enhance rather than diminish sovereignty. Unlike NATO’s collective security model, which subordinates national decision-making to alliance commitments, the SCO’s Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) operates through voluntary coordination and information-sharing while respecting member states’ autonomous security policies. This flexibility allows diverse political systems- from China’s one-party rule to India’s democracy- to cooperate without ideological convergence.

    Recent SCO initiatives further demonstrate this sovereignty-preserving orientation. The organisation’s condemnation of Israeli airstrikes on Qatar in 2025 emphasised violations of sovereignty and territorial integrity, reaffirming members’ commitment to the UN Charter and international law. Similarly, the SCO’s consistent opposition to unilateral sanctions and “use of force” reflects its members’ shared experience of external pressure and desire for autonomous development. The proposed SCO Development Bank, approved during the 2025 Tianjin Summit, represents the organisation’s evolution toward comprehensive economic cooperation while maintaining its sovereignty-centric principles. This institution aims to reduce dependence on Western-controlled financial mechanisms.

    Beyond BRICS and SCO: The Emerging Multipolar Architecture

    The significance of BRICS and SCO extends beyond their individual contributions, encompassing their role in fostering a broader “alternative multilateral order”. This emerging architecture is characterised by overlapping institutional arrangements that provide developing countries with multiple options for international cooperation. The intersection between BRICS and SCO- with China, Russia, India and Iran participating in both organisations-creates synergies that multiply their collective influence. This networked approach to multilateralism offers several advantages for sovereignty preservation.

    First, it provides “institutional balancing” against Western dominance without creating rigid opposing blocs. Countries can selectively engage with different institutions based on their specific interests and needs, maintaining strategic autonomy while benefiting from multilateral cooperation. Second, the proliferation of alternative institutions creates competitive pressure on traditional multilateral organisations to reform. The success of the NDB and AIIB has prompted the World Bank to reconsider its lending practices, while BRICS expansion has encouraged greater Global South representation in G20 deliberations. Third, these institutions promote what scholars term “civilisational diversity” by accommodating different political systems and development models without imposing uniform standards. This approach contrasts sharply with the liberal internationalist emphasis on convergence toward Western norms and institutions.

    Challenges Ahead

    Despite their achievements, BRICS and SCO face significant challenges that constrain their effectiveness as sovereignty safeguards. Internal heterogeneity presents the most fundamental obstacle. BRICS encompasses liberal democracies, authoritarian systems, and hybrid regimes with vastly different economic structures and foreign policy priorities. This diversity, while philosophically valuable, complicates coordination on specific issues and limits the depth of integration possible.

    The organisation also suffers from what critics describe as “institutional impersonation”, rather than genuine innovation. The NDB, despite its rhetoric of alternative development finance, continues to rely heavily on US Dollar funding and has yet to break from neoliberal lending paradigms fundamentally. Similarly, the SCO’s expansion has diluted its cohesion without proportionally enhancing its capabilities.

    Geopolitical tensions among members pose additional challenges. China-India border disputes, Russia-Iran competition in Central Asia and Brazil’s complex relationship with both Washington and Beijing create centrifugal forces that limit institutional effectiveness. The organisations’ consensus-based decision-making, while respecting sovereignty, can also enable paralysis when member interests diverge significantly. Moreover, these institutions seem primarily reactive rather than proactive in their approach to global governance, except for the SCO. They struggle to develop comprehensive solutions to transnational challenges such as climate change, cross-border terrorism, pandemic response, or financial instability.

    Implications for Global Governance

    The rise of BRICS, SCO and similar institutions signals a fundamental transformation in global governance architecture. Rather than replacing existing institutions, they are creating a phenomenon of competitive multilateralism, a system where multiple institutional frameworks compete for legitimacy and membership. This competition has both positive and negative implications for international cooperation. On the positive side, institutional competition encourages innovation and responsiveness to members’ needs. The success of alternative development banks has prompted traditional institutions to reform their practices and increase the representation of developing countries. Competition also gives smaller states greater bargaining power by offering alternative forums to address their concerns.

    However, competitive multilateralism also risks fragmenting global governance and reducing its effectiveness in addressing transnational challenges. If great powers increasingly retreat into separate institutional ecosystems, the coordination necessary to manage global problems may become more difficult. The Ukraine conflict has already demonstrated how geopolitical divisions can paralyse international institutions and hinder collective responses to security threats.

    The success of these institutions lies in creating alternatives to traditional development finance, providing platforms for South-South cooperation and articulating alternative visions of international order for contemporary global governance. However, their ultimate impact will depend on their ability to transcend their current limitations and develop more sophisticated approaches to balancing the preservation of sovereignty with practical international cooperation. Their continued evolution will significantly influence whether the emerging multipolar world becomes characterised by cooperation or competition, inclusion and fragmentation.

    Notes:

    [1]Wso, A.A. & Mahmood, R.M. (2025). The Role of BRICS in Reshaping the Global Order: Confronting Western Hegemony in a Multipolar World. European Scientific Journal, ESJ, 21 (17), 24. https://doi.org/10.19044/esj.2025.v21n17p24

    [2] ibid

  • From Global Democratisation to the Battle of World Powers? Contradictory Developments in the Present

    From Global Democratisation to the Battle of World Powers? Contradictory Developments in the Present

    Shortly after the democratic revolutions of 1989-1991, Francis Fukuyama wrote his highly influential essay on the end of history- that is, the end of violent history through global democratization.

    Members of the United Nations Security Council sit during a meeting on Syria at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, NY, U.S. April 5, 2017. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton – RC141DE9DE00. Image credit: world101.cfr.org

    The world has changed so dramatically since the end of the Cold War that it is necessary to look back in order to understand today’s global political situation. In total, there are five different discourses that will be discussed here as representative of historical developments. They range from Fukuyama’s thesis of global democratization to various versions of coming anarchy and global (“new”) civil wars (Kaplan, Kagan, Kaldor, Münkler), Huntington’s clash of civilizations, the concept of global governance and the “rise of the others” (Zakaria, Zhang), a multipolar world of nation-states, and the re-nationalization of world politics. My central thesis is that all five discourses are present in contemporary political conflicts and that we cannot neglect any of them.

    But if you look at the history of democracy, you can almost discover a law of motion of democratic revolutions based on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the French Revolution. It starts with a democratic revolt against a dictator or colonial rule. Then the revolutionaries become radicalized, civil war breaks out, a new, this time totalitarian ruler takes power, and only after his overthrow does democracy prevail.

    Shortly after the democratic revolutions of 1989-1991, Francis Fukuyama wrote his highly influential essay on the end of history- that is, the end of violent history through global democratization. And his thoughts were very timely. What better confirmation could there be when, in just a few years, the old dictatorships from Berlin to Vladivostok, which only called themselves communist but were not, but rather geriocracies, were swept away in a wave of democratisation. The Arab Spring seemed to confirm his thoughts, as here, too, long-standing dictatorships were overrun by democratic movements virtually overnight, as in Egypt and Tunisia. But even then, there were counter-movements that contradicted the assumed linear process of global democratization. Fukuyama, therefore, had to defend his original thesis and argue that, despite all the setbacks, democracy was still at the end of history. In a way, he was echoing Hannah Arendt’s theory of revolution. The reverses of democratization in Russia, many Arab countries, and the global civil wars have often been cited as cultural – Russia, China, and Middle Eastern Islam were still too culturally authoritarian to allow for genuine democratization. But if you look at the history of democracy, you can almost discover a law of motion of democratic revolutions based on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the French Revolution. It starts with a democratic revolt against a dictator or colonial rule. Then the revolutionaries become radicalized, civil war breaks out, a new, this time totalitarian ruler takes power, and only after his overthrow does democracy prevail. The French overthrew their king and got the emperor, Napoleon; the Russians revolted against the czar and got Stalin; the Chinese fought against their emperor and got Mao Tse-tung; the Germans overthrew their emperor after their military defeat and got the leader Adolf Hitler. Resistance to colonial rule also often followed this law of democratic movement: the colonial rulers were driven out and replaced by new rulers.

    In the same year that the Soviet Union collapsed, the terrible civil wars in the former Yugoslavia began, the first Chechen war, followed by countless “markets of violence” and so-called new wars, which in a narrower sense were new civil wars and wars of state collapse. Mass rape became a weapon of war to demoralize the enemy, and an almost complete dissolution of the boundaries of violence took on a life of its own, seeming to make any rational resolution of conflicts impossible. Warlords, drug lords, terrorists, child soldiers, and “archaic” warriors who seemed to belong to the past dominated warfare worldwide. Against this backdrop, Western armies were transformed into intervention armies that were supposed to maintain a minimum of order on the borders of the U.S. “liberal empire” in order to prevent global anarchy (Robert Kaplan) or a “world civil war” (Enzensberger) – at least according to Western discourse. From the perspective of the countries affected by these wars of intervention, however, they were wars to maintain their immediate exploitation (especially in Africa), to keep corrupt regimes that collaborated with Western states alive (Arabian Peninsula), or to eliminate those that opposed the West (Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan). In the open spaces of violence and violent markets, high-value illegal goods were traded: Drugs, blood diamonds, human beings (women and child slaves), weapons and rare earths.

    Linked to these wars of intervention was the apparent cultural triumph of the West, which is associated with the term globalisation, but was, in fact, initially an Americanization, the so-called McDonaldization or Mac World. However, this cultural globalization of the American way of life, combined with U.S. wars of intervention, led to a backlash as many societies saw their cultural identity threatened. Taken together, these two factors triggered Samuel Huntington’s concept of the clash of civilizations.

    In their liberal hubris, his Western critics argued that there could be no clash of civilizations because only the West had produced a civilization – the others were religions or cultures, but not civilizations.

     His book has often been misunderstood as a guide to action for the coming war – but in fact, he had written the book to prevent that clash, and he argued for the U.S. to withdraw from small wars around the world because he saw the liberal identity of the U.S. at risk. Perhaps more importantly, he saw non-Western religions not just as cultures but as civilizations that had grown out of their respective religions. In their liberal hubris, his Western critics argued that there could be no clash of civilizations because only the West had produced a civilization – the others were religions or cultures, but not civilizations.

    While globalization initially had the effect of Americanization, in the medium term, it facilitated the “rise of the others” (Zakaria), the great empires and civilizations that had perished under European colonization and Euro-American hegemony. As a result of their initial economic success (Malaysia, Singapore, the Asian Tigers, China, India, the Pacific Rim countries), they no longer sought to imitate Western culture in order to be recognized as equals, but to develop their own identity, which they considered superior to the West. From the point of view of Western discourse, the “others” were, at best, immature children or barbarians – now the West suddenly sees itself in the role of other civilizations, seeing themselves as superior to the West. One expression of this changed self-image was Zahng Weiwei’s book China – The Civilizational State. We are now experiencing a paradoxical situation in which the West is consumed by fear of decline and the dissolution of its own sense of superiority, leading to the rise of right-wing populist and radical right-wing movements; large parts of the Asian world population are filled with hope for a better life, and the Islamic-Arab world is desperate in the face of unfulfilled promises, leading to the radicalization of young people in Islamist movements.

    The concept of global governance was invented at the beginning of the 21st century as a reaction to advancing globalization. The assumption, correct in itself, was that the absence of a democratic world state did not necessarily mean that there was no possibility of at least regulating global problems, subjecting them to rules, if not solving them. Global governance was based on the idea of cooperation between nation-states, non-governmental organizations, globally active institutions, the emerging global civil society, globally active corporations, and global players. However, the resurgence of big states has pushed global governance into the background, just like globalization itself. Some states want to reverse globalization, at least in the economic and political spheres. This applies at least to Western democracies, whose citizens often see themselves as the losers of globalization.

    The relative loss of importance of the Western states and the institutions they helped to create, such as the U.N., cannot be overlooked – the overstretched role of the U.S. as the world’s policeman is due, on the one hand, to its own lack of investment in development and education, and on the other to the rise of others.

    What we are currently experiencing is not simply a multipolar world of great powers, even if there are signs of a renaissance of great power politics. Instead, we are witnessing a contradictory process of the five discourses alluded to here: Democratization, failed states, the clash of civilizations, further globalization, and the renaissance of great power politics. The still existing, but also partly former, Global South is still dependent on cooperation, even if new forms of cooperation are emerging, such as the expansion of the BRICS, which compete politically but cooperate economically. The relative loss of importance of the Western states and the institutions they helped to create, such as the U.N., cannot be overlooked – the overstretched role of the U.S. as the world’s policeman is due, on the one hand, to its own lack of investment in development and education, and on the other to the rise of others. What remains unpredictable is whether the emerging states of the Global South and the former superpower Russia will make the same mistake as the West in its centuries-long quest for hegemony, namely, to see itself as superior to all others. Eurocentrism would be replaced by an equally problematic ethnocentrism, and a nationalist dynamic would be set in motion that would be difficult for states to control. Even if all current developments point to the contrary and we see a return of tribalism in the form of “us versus them – whoever the others are” discourses, the only option left is to revive intercultural dialogue if we do not want to experience “another bloody century” (Colin S. Gray).

     

    Feature Image Credit: chinausfocus.com