From bystander to shaper

The Global South is pushing for reforms of global governance to reflect the realities of a multipolar world

The 2026 Munich Security Report opened with a blunt verdict: more than 80 years after it was built, the post-World War II order is "under destruction", as "wrecking-ball politics" privileges demolition over reform and transactional bargains over principled cooperation.

The evidence is already institutional.

The World Trade Organization Appellate Body has been unable to hear appeals since December 2019. The International Monetary Fund's 16th General Review of Quotas, concluded in December 2023, raised permanent resources by 50 percent but left voting shares unchanged. Yet the world those institutions were designed to govern no longer exists.

Over the past four decades, the Global South's share of the world economy has risen from 24 percent to more than 40 percent, as pointed out by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi at a news conference on the sidelines of the fourth session of the 14th National People's Congress in March 2026. At the IMF, emerging market and developing economies accounted for about 59.8 percent of global GDP in purchasing-power-parity terms in 2024, according to the IMF's World Economic Outlook. But, representation has not followed — more than 40 sub-Saharan African members together command less than 5 percent. New rules on artificial intelligence, cross-border data, climate finance and sovereign debt are being written in real time, often without meaningful Global South authorship. The question is no longer whether the Global South sits at the table, but whose rules it helps write.

For most of the postwar era, the Global South was a rule-taker, agenda-recipient and financing object. That era is over. The rise is recasting multilateralism in four ways.

First, the Global South is becoming an institutional supplier. BRICS now has 11 full members and a growing partner-member track, and the African Union joined the G20 as a permanent member in September 2023. Second, coordination has moved from isolated statements to standing platforms — BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the G77 and China, and the International Organization for Mediation. Third, Global South demands have shifted from aid to quota shares and standard-setting authority, from the 17th IMF Quota Review to the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization. Fourth, the South's reform program is pro-multilateral rather than anti-Western. At the same news conference, Wang set out that program as true multilateralism: "We should encourage the international community to practice true multilateralism and uphold the UN-centered international system and the international order based on international law. We must always ensure that world affairs are discussed and handled by all nations, and international rules formulated by all countries."

Three tracks should advance together to move the Global South from bystander to shaper, because each supplies what the others cannot.

The first track is reform inside legacy institutions. Because the 2023 IMF quota increase was equiproportional, the US veto was left untouched. Governors then asked the IMF to develop, by June 2025, approaches to a genuine realignment, including a new quota formula, under the 17th Review. The Global South is pressing that work to better track economic weight. It is also pressing for expansion of the UN Security Council to give Africa and Latin America permanent seats on a body whose five permanent members still map the victors of 1945 — an African demand long codified in the Ezulwini Consensus. Restoring a functioning two-tier WTO dispute system belongs on the same list: a trading order that cannot adjudicate its own rules cannot claim to be rules-based.

The second track is incremental institution-building. The New Development Bank has made local-currency lending a strategic target of about 30 percent of its lending for 2022-26, easing members' exposure to dollar debt service and exchange-rate shocks. Participating central banks, including China's, have piloted cheaper, faster settlement on the mBridge platform for multiple central bank digital currencies. The International Organization for Mediation, whose founding convention was signed in Hong Kong in May 2025 and which opened that October, offers a consent-based complement to the International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of Arbitration. The WAICO, launched in Shanghai on July 16 by 29 founding members — most of them from the Global South — and attended by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, is the first intergovernmental AI body not anchored in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development or the G7 advanced economies. It invokes the UN Charter and a people-centered approach to AI that is "beneficial, safe and fair".

The third track embeds development in the global agenda. Building on the G20 Common Framework and the expired Debt Service Suspension Initiative, South-South coordination seeks to stop piecemeal creditor talks from trapping vulnerable economies in incomplete deals — Zambia's treatment, the first completed under the G20 Common Framework, took more than three years to finalize. On climate finance, the Global South insists on operationalizing common but differentiated responsibilities through the Loss and Damage Fund agreed at COP28, whose initial pledges of some $661 million remain far below estimated annual needs that run into the hundreds of billions. China's zero-tariff treatment, effective Dec 1, 2024, for all least-developed countries with which it has diplomatic relations shows how market access — not only aid — can be used for development.

China's role in this shift is distinctive. It has chosen to act as a bridge rather than a leader: an equal partner that connects developing countries to one another and to the North, not a hierarchical spokesman. China's four global initiatives give Global South demands a single diplomatic grammar, organized around sovereign equality, international rule of law, multilateralism, a people-centered approach and real actions; the Group of Friends of Global Governance, launched at the UN in December 2025, carries that grammar into existing caucus politics. The Belt and Road Initiative, together with the New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, supplies incremental public goods without the policy conditionalities long attached to the lending of the Bretton Woods institutions. Inside the G20, China has cast itself as a North-South coordinator, refusing a binary that serves neither camp.

Two misreadings persist. The first treats the Global South as an anti-Western bloc. The 2025 BRICS Rio Summit reaffirmed multilateralism and the UN Charter rather than bloc confrontation; the 2026 Boao Forum likewise held that a greater voice for the Global South is not a bid to overturn the existing system. An anti-Western reading confuses a demand for equal authorship of rules with a demand for a rival order. Global South-built institutions are additive public goods, not replacements for the UN, the IMF or the WTO.

The second casts China as a hegemon-seeker riding Global South solidarity. The bridge role answers it directly: responsibility without hegemony, empowerment without domination.

From bystander to shaper is a sequence — voice, then vote and then rules. The UN marked its 80th year in 2025. Coming after that anniversary, 2026 remains a working window: to implement the Pact for the Future — including its chapter on transforming global governance — to put WAICO into operation, and to give substance to the BRICS digital-economy agenda under India's chairship. Whether that conversion succeeds will be judged less by communiques than by quota shares, dispute systems and standard-setting seats. The task is to turn a demographic and economic fact into a durable institutional presence. A fragmenting world needs anchoring hands, not dividing lines — and the Global South is now among those hands.

The author is a professor at the Institute of West-Asian and African Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn.