The rise of the Global South and its growing rule-making capabilities herald a more inclusive international order
For decades, debate over the Global South's place in international governance has focused on representation: Who has a seat at the table, how much influence that seat carries and whether those voices are heard. Those questions still matter. But something else demands attention: developing countries are increasingly moving from seeking a larger seat or extra seats at the table to helping build the table itself.
The Global South is neither a legal category nor a single political bloc. Global South countries differ greatly in size, wealth, political systems and national interests. However, many face the same development constraints and underrepresentation in institutions largely formed in an earlier era. Their economic weight, meanwhile, has changed markedly. South-South merchandise trade reached $7.2 trillion in 2025, accounting for 28 percent of global merchandise trade, up from 11 percent in 2000. But economic weight and institutional influence have not moved together.
At the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi, President Xi Jinping stressed that international law and international rules should be applied to all, free from double standards, and that multilateral institutions should be reformed to increase the representation and voice of developing countries. The connection is more than diplomatic rhetoric. It points to a larger question about how substantive equality works in international law.
The United Nations Charter rests on the sovereign equality of states. Yet equality does not mean mechanical uniformity. International law itself recognizes that different circumstances may justify differentiated obligations, as reflected in the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities in the climate regime. "No double standards" is therefore better understood not as a demand that every case produce the same outcome, but as a demand that comparable situations be judged by comparable legal criteria, with differences justified by law rather than by identity or power.
Equal application is only one side of the issue. A legal order that claims universal authority is more credible when the states bound by its rules also have a meaningful role in making, interpreting and institutionalizing them. This does not turn meaningful participation into a new rule of customary international law, nor does it require every state to wield identical influence in every institution. It does suggest that participation matters to the legitimacy of multilateral rule-making.
Nor is the Global South new to international law-making. Developing and newly independent states helped shape the law of self-determination, permanent sovereignty over natural resources, the law of the sea and the development dimension of international economic law. What is changing, then, is not whether the Global South participates in international law-making; it has done so for decades. The shift lies in its growing capacity not only to work within existing institutions, but also to initiate and build new ones.
Institution-building is itself a form of legal agency. It helps determine an organization's purposes, membership, decision-making procedures, dispute-settlement arrangements and the rules through which cooperation is organized. China's recent experience offers one illustration of this broader trend. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the International Organization for Mediation and the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization operate in very different fields. Taken together, they trace a progression: supplementing established institutions, filling gaps in the existing architecture and participating early in fields where the rules are still being formed.
The AIIB illustrates the first possibility. Proposed by China, it was shaped through a participatory process involving 57 founding members and has since grown to 111 members across six continents. Just as important, it works with established multilateral development banks rather than apart from them. An initiative originating in the developing world need not produce a parallel architecture; it can add to the supply of multilateral public goods while working alongside existing institutions.
The IOMed takes the story from development finance into the international rule of law. Representatives of 33 countries signed its founding convention in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in May 2025, establishing the world's first intergovernmental international organization dedicated to mediation. Its significance lies not in displacing courts or arbitration, but in adding an institutionalized form of consensual dispute settlement to the existing toolbox. Here, participation is no longer only about helping shape substantive rules. It also reaches the procedures through which disputes are resolved and different legal traditions meet within a common institutional framework.
WAICO points further ahead. In July, representatives of 29 countries signed the agreement on its establishment in Shanghai. The agreement establishes an independent intergovernmental international organization with open membership for all countries, according to the conference chair's statement. Unlike development finance or dispute settlement, AI governance is still taking shape, which makes the timing of participation especially important. For developing countries, the question is not only whether they will eventually comply with global AI rules, but whether their development needs, technological capacities and legal traditions can help shape them before today's technical vocabulary hardens into tomorrow's legal assumptions.
Yet building new institutions does not, by itself, make the international order more legitimate. The capacity to create institutions is not the same as institutional legitimacy. A new organization does not become more representative simply because it was initiated by a developing country. Its claim to legitimacy depends on whether membership is open, governance is genuinely multilateral, procedures are fair, institutions operate with professional independence and accountability, and the benefits they produce extend beyond the interests of their original sponsors.
That qualification matters to the Global North and the Global South alike. A more inclusive international order should not mean replacing one center of rule-making with another, still less creating separate sets of rules for different groups of states. Its promise lies in widening participation while preserving universality. Equal application remains indispensable; broader participation can make that equality more credible by giving more states a meaningful stake in how common rules are made and common institutions are run.
Setting the table, then, is not an end in itself. It matters only if the table remains open. The deeper contribution the Global South can make is not to construct an order of its own, but to help build institutions in which more countries can participate, common rules can command broader confidence, and international law becomes more universal not only in its application, but also in the range of states that help shape it.
The author is an associate professor at China Foreign Affairs University.
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.
