Africa, Latin America, and Global Governance: Contributions to a New Global Order

1. INTRODUCTION

Many of history’s significant transitions can be visualized as solitary voyages into the unknown. At the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama, commanding a small fleet of wooden carracks, achieved what was then considered an act of sublime audacity by sailing from Europe to India. He broke through a psychological and geographical barrier, proving that the vast, feared Atlantic and Indian Oceans were not impenetrable walls but connective highways. His arrival in Calicut in 1498 did more than open up a spice route; it irrevocably altered humanity’s mental map. Civilizations that had developed in profound, mutual ignorance—the kingdoms of West Africa, the empires of the Indian subcontinent, the scattered polities of the Atlantic fringe—were suddenly and violently thrust into a single, tumultuous narrative. Da Gama’s voyage symbolized the end of civilizational isolation, and brought about the traumatic, contested birth of a global consciousness, a process dominated for the ensuing five centuries by the West’s will to power[2].

This distant moment offers more than poetic metaphor; it provides an analytical lens for our own time, also marked by a passage between epochs. The question is no longer one of physical connection—our world is hyperlinked, digitally intimate. The paramount question is the quality and terms of that connection. It is whether civilizations, in their diversity, can co-exist on a basis of mutual respect and shared authority, or whether we are condemned to replay the old, bloody script of domination under new technological auspices.

Just as da Gama’s voyage connected two vast, separate spheres, we now confront two starkly competing visions for the twenty-first century. The first, animated by nostalgia and the anxiety of perceived decline, seeks to reassert a familiar hierarchy. In this vision, the West, interpreting the rise of others not as a return to historical normalcy, but as a threat to a preferred order, resorts to the old playbook: framing relations as civilizational rivalry, practicing selective multilateralism, and wielding financial and technological architectures as coercive tools. It is a defensive vision that attempts to manage a multipolar reality with the unilateral instruments of a unipolar moment that has passed.

The second vision, emerging from the New South, recognizes that the defining opportunity of our era is not managed conflict but transformative encounter. It rejects the fatalistic ‘clash’[3] of civilizations and embraces the arduous, creative work of a long-delayed meeting. This meeting is not predicated on assimilation into a single model, but on constructing a pluralistic community capable of upholding shared, minimalist principles—sovereign equality, human dignity, sustainable development—while making genuine space for civilizational diversity. It seeks a global governance that is polyphonic, capable of harmonizing different voices into a coherent chorus, rather than demanding a monotone recitation of one power’s preferences.

This divergence is, at its heart, a civilizational choice. It speaks to the character of the world we intend to inhabit and bequeath. The task before the international community is whether to navigate toward convergence and collaborative problem-solving, or to retreat into camps of division and bloc politics. In this liminal space between a dying order and one struggling to be born, Africa and Latin America could assume roles of historic and disproportionate magnitude. These colonized regions—so long depicted as peripheral, passive, or perpetually dependent—are now poised not merely to participate in the unfolding century, but to shape its ethical and institutional contours. Their simultaneous emergence as moral, demographic, economic, and strategic forces signals, with growing clarity, that the future of global governance will not be authored solely by the old powers of the North Atlantic. It must be co-written by civilizations that have been long marginalized and misrepresented, but that now command an undeniable centrality.

To understand the profound urgency of this moment—why Africa and Latin America matter, and why they matter now—requires a clear-eyed diagnosis of the old order’s failure. Only by confronting the depth of the old order’s diminishing moral authority, and its structural obsolescence, the necessity of building anew be understood.

2. THE UNRAVELLING OF MORAL AUTHORITY

The international order laboriously constructed out of the ashes of the Second World War was anchored, in theory, on two foundational pillars: universality and legitimacy. Universality promised that the institutions forged at San Francisco and Bretton Woods would serve all humanity, transcending the victors’ circle. Legitimacy rested on the belief that the norms these institutions were designed to uphold—sovereign equality of states, prohibition on aggressive force, and peaceful settlement of disputes—would be applied impartially, consistently, and predictably. The extraordinary privileges accorded to the victors, most notably permanent seats and veto power in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), were tolerated because they were framed not as crude entitlements, but as unique responsibilities for maintaining peace and the multilateral system.

This fragile compact has now shattered. Its disintegration began not with the rise of new powers, but when the self-appointed custodians of the order systematically abandoned the principles that once justified their leadership. For much of the world, the defining rupture was the 2003 invasion of Iraq[4]. This was more than a catastrophic strategic blunder; it was a civilizational breach in the fabric of post-1945 norms. With its manufactured and later debunked objective of tracking down weapons of mass destruction, and launched without the explicit UNSC authorization, the operation delivered three corrosive lessons to the Global South:

1. It demonstrated that the UNSC, the supposed bedrock of collective security, could be bypassed when its deliberations proved inconvenient to a determined hegemon.
2. It revealed that the concept of international law could be subordinated to the doctrine of pre-emptive war and unilateral will.
3. Most damagingly, it proved that normative consistency was a fiction: the rules applied to some with fierce rigor were conveniently ignored by others. 

The Iraq War was the moment the West forfeited its claim to moral authority. This rupture was not an aberration but a precedent. Lately, it has been widened and institutionalized by the unilateral blockade and sanctions regime imposed on Venezuela, which eventually led to the capture of Venezuela’s sitting President, Nicolas Maduro on 3 January 2026.[5]. 

These measures have resulted in significant humanitarian consequences. Notable examples include widespread deprivation in Iraq during the 1990s, the collapse of civilian infrastructure in Venezuela, and the economic crisis in Syria. Sanctions have evolved from a rare diplomatic tool to a punitive instrument. In countries such as Cuba and Iran, the strategy appears designed to inflict maximum economic hardship on civilians to induce political change. This transformation has reinforced the perception that coercion has supplanted diplomacy as the primary recourse for powerful states. This trend is evident when comparing international responses to conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. Consequently, there is a growing belief that the application of international norms is contingent upon political alignment, thereby undermining the principles of universal justice that these measures purport to uphold.

However, no contemporary crisis has more starkly and tragically exposed the corrosive double standards at the heart of the system than the catastrophe in Gaza[6]. The staggering disproportionality of military force directed by the Netanyahu administration against Gaza after the Hamas terrorist atrocity of October 7, 2023, the creation of an unprecedented humanitarian disaster under the watchful eyes of the world, and the selective, often performative, outrage displayed by traditional guardians of the ‘rules-based order’ have revealed an ethical and legal asymmetry that is impossible to rationalize. Gaza is a devastating indictment: the moral unmasking of a governance structure that has failed catastrophically to uphold the values it professes, applying them only when geopolitically expedient. The consistent shielding of one state from accountability, while others are swiftly penalized, has ripped away the last shred of the system’s claim to impartial universality. 

To attribute this erosion of legitimacy solely to Western actions, however, would be a fatal analytical error. The decay is systemic. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine constitutes a flagrant, violation of the most sacred norms of the post-1945 order: territorial integrity and sovereign equality. No historical grievance or perception of strategic encirclement can morally or legally justify such a breach[7]. However, crucially, this act of aggression did not occur in a vacuum. It unfolded within a geopolitical environment actively shaped by decades of eastward expansion of NATO, the abrogation of arms control treaties, and the progressive securitization of European politics. The acute wrongdoing of one major actor does not absolve the chronic provocation and strategic myopia of others. Instead, it illuminates a broader, more dangerous systemic failure, in which international law has become a negotiable commodity in great-power relations, respected only when it aligns with national interests.

Africa and Latin America now stand at a historical, philosophical, and strategic moment. They could play the most relevant role globally. not through a quest for a new hegemony—a paradigm from which they have suffered and the flaws of which they understand too well—but through the patient, principled articulation of a new grammar of international order. Their ascent derives not from triumphalism, but from a profound historical necessity: what a fractured, distrustful world requires are governing perspectives shaped by the lived experience of exclusion, and philosophical traditions that understand harmony, balance, and community, not as rhetorical ornaments, but as indispensable political virtues for survival.

3. THE NEW CARTOGRAPHY OF POWER

The observable decline of uncontested Western authority will not automatically generate a more just or stable world. Historical power transitions are often periods of heightened instability, conflict, and uncertainty—the so-called ‘Thucydides Trap’. What makes the present moment uniquely transformative is not the decline of the old alone, but the simultaneous and substantive rise of new moral, demographic, environmental, and strategic poles that could redefine the very purpose and practice of international life. Africa and Latin America have become indispensable to any credible architecture for the twenty-first century. This indispensability stems not from a desire to mimic the hegemonic impulses of their former overlords, but rather from their potential to challenge and reshape global power hierarchies, addressing skepticism about their genuine influence and strategic importance.

Their emerging influence is not primarily grounded in the traditional, twentieth-century metrics of primacy: overwhelming military arsenals or concentrated financial capital. It emanates from something far more consequential and durable: the moral imagination deeply embedded in their distinct political philosophies, coupled with the historical memory of systemic marginalization. This combination equips them to question, reinterpret, and ultimately redesign the fractured foundations of global governance. 

Africa’s contribution to a new global worldview could be shaped by the ethic of ubuntu[8]. Ubuntu insists that human dignity is not an isolated, individual attribute but an intrinsically relational one, forged in community. It fundamentally rejects the zero-sum thinking that underpins much of realist international relations theory, proposing instead a vision of communal life—and by extension, international life—grounded in mutual recognition, interdependence, and collective flourishing. Genuine cooperation is not a temporary concession or tactical alliance, but the highest expression of political maturity, and the only basis for sustainable security. In a world facing transnational threats, ubuntu-inspired politics shifts the focus from securing the self against the other, to securing the community of which all are part.

In contrast, though also complementing Africa, Latin America has nurtured and contributed to one of the wealthiest and most consistent legal traditions in the modern world. For over a century, well before the establishment of the United Nations, Latin American politicians, jurists, and diplomats were seminal articulators of doctrines that now form the bedrock of international law: absolute non-intervention, the sovereign equality of states, the peaceful settlement of disputes[9]. The region’s bitter experience with the intrusive Monroe Doctrine and recurrent United States interventions forged a deep, principled, and pragmatic attachment to these norms as the only bulwark against stronger powers.

These intellectual and ethical traditions are vital strategic resources in an age of legitimacy deficit. This moral and philosophical capital is now matched by unprecedented material and strategic weight. Demographically, Africa is the future of humanity. By the end of this century, according to UN projections, one in every three humans will be African[10]. This marks a tectonic shift in the center of human gravity, representing an immense reservoir of youth, innovation, and future consumption—and, if mismanaged, a potential source of unprecedented instability. Latin America, with its immense megacities, the vast Amazon rainforest (a critical global carbon sink and biodiversity reserve), continental river systems, and enormous mineral and agricultural reserves, represents the ecological and resource backbone of the global economy. Together, these two regions sit atop the strategic natural resources, from cobalt and copper to lithium and rare earths, that are essential for the global energy, digital, and green transitions.

However, their most pivotal contribution remains civilizational. They possess ethical and cultural frameworks that conceive of multilateral cooperation not as a sign of fragility or a second-best option, but as an expression of strength and the most elevated form of political agency. For the first time since the creation of the modern, Westphalian-inspired international system, Africa and Latin America collectively possess the moral authority, the demographic weight, and the ecological centrality to play a geopolitically necessary, directive role in redefining the foundational purposes and processes of global governance. The question is no longer one of qualification, but of strategy and unity.

4. THE STRUCTURAL CRISIS OF BRETTON WOODS AND DIGITAL COLONIALISM

The profound crisis of contemporary global governance stems not only from the wayward behavior of individual states but also from the obsolete and inequitable design and location of the institutions themselves. The organizations that structure the world’s economic, financial, and developmental interactions—the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the dollar-centric global financial system—were crafted in the aftermath of a world war and at the dawn of U.S. primacy. Their underlying architecture, from voting quotas to governing charters, still overwhelmingly reflects the worldview, anxieties, and interests of that time and the small set of powers that dominated it, even though the world that produced them has vanished. This is governance by anachronism. Reform must include relocating key institutions, such as the UN headquarters, to better reflect today’s global power distribution.

To understand the imperative for a new order, one must examine how the financial and monetary pillars of the old have been transformed from instruments of purported stability into tools of coercion, systemic instability, and entrenched asymmetry. The Bretton Woods system, established in 1944, set up an international economic-governance framework dominated by the political and financial priorities of the U.S. and its Western allies. Its core governance flaw—the allocation of voting rights based on economic contribution (quota), rather than population or equitable representation—remains essentially unchanged, a monument to a bygone balance of power[11]. The distortion is staggering and morally indefensible: Africa, comprising nearly 18% of the world's population, commands a derisory share of voting power in the IMF (around 5%–6%). Latin America remains persistently subordinated to the policy preferences and conditionalities emanating from Washington.

This structural imbalance produces predictable and pernicious consequences. Countries of the Global South facing balance-of-payments crises, or seeking development finance, are routinely subjected to austerity policies, which are often socially devastating and economically myopic. These policies prioritize creditor repayment and ideological orthodoxy, over long-term, sustainable development. National economic sovereignty is systematically curtailed through policy conditionalities that frequently have little to do with sound economics, and everything to do with commercial interests and political alignment. In this dynamic, the promise of global economic stability and development has mutated into a mechanism for reproducing structural dependency and inequality.

Yet, the failures of Bretton Woods pale in comparison to the broader, more insidious distortions produced by the hegemonic status of the U.S. dollar. What originated as a pragmatic post-war anchor for global trade, has evolved into the world’s most potent instrument of unilateral political and economic coercion. The dollar’s exorbitant privilege as the world’s primary reserve, settlement, and invoicing currency, grants the U.S. unparalleled advantages: the ability to externalize the costs of its own fiscal and monetary imbalances onto the rest of the world, the capacity to shape global liquidity cycles through Federal Reserve decisions, and, most consequentially, the means to impose devastating unilateral sanctions through extraterritorial financial enforcement. The global banking and messaging system (SWIFT), though headquartered in Belgium and owned by international banks, operates under the constant shadow of U.S. secondary sanctions.

This weaponization of finance has transformed the global economy into a terrain of acute asymmetric vulnerability[12]. Countries are compelled to hold vast reserves in a currency, the value and supply of which are determined almost entirely by the domestic political and economic priorities of a single state. Interest rate adjustments by the Federal Reserve—made to address U.S. inflation or employment—reverberate destructively across the Global South, generating inflationary shocks, destabilizing capital flows, and triggering debt crises in economies that played no role in causing the original problem. Furthermore, the United States has repeatedly wielded its financial centrality as a political cudgel: freezing the sovereign assets of central banks, blocking entire countries from SWIFT, and disrupting global supply chains through administrative decisions justified not by impartial international law, but by fluctuating geopolitical interest. Sanctions have been normalized from an extraordinary measure into a routine foreign-policy tool, applied to dozens of states with a disregard for humanitarian consequences. Extraterritorial enforcement of sanctions—compelling foreign companies and banks worldwide to comply under threat of being severed from the U.S. financial system—effectively turns domestic U.S. legislation into a form of global legal hegemony, punishing entities and states far beyond any reasonable jurisdiction.

These practices undermine the political legitimacy of the international system and actively destabilize the global economy. They incentivize economic fragmentation, spur the creation of parallel financial and payment systems, and accelerate the search for alternative reserve currencies and settlement mechanisms. The emergence of renminbi settlement systems, the BRICS-led push for alternative payment platforms, and various national projects exploring central bank digital currencies, are rational, defensive responses to the very real financial insecurity and political vulnerability generated by a unipolar monetary system.

Parallel to these entrenched financial asymmetries runs the rapidly expanding and arguably more determinative frontier of digital governance. The twenty-first-century economy and society are increasingly defined not by physical territory alone, but by the control of data, algorithms, and digital infrastructure. Artificial intelligence, digital trade, surveillance technologies, cloud computing, and platform economies are redefining the meaning of sovereignty, security, and development. However, most Global South states are virtually absent from the rule-making processes in these critical domains. They are positioned not as co-authors or equal participants, but as passive consumers of technologies designed in Silicon Valley, or other Northern hubs, governed by standards developed in forums they scarcely influence, and too often built on the extraction and exploitation of data, harvested from their own populations without fair compensation or control. Digital dependency is the new frontier of colonialism. It threatens to replicate and deepen, in the intangible realm of code and information networks, the structural subordination and value extraction that was once enforced through territorial conquest and mercantilist trade. Without digital sovereignty—meaning control over one’s data, algorithms, and cyber-infrastructure—political and economic sovereignty in the twenty-first century becomes a hollow shell, vulnerable to new forms of manipulation and control.

Simultaneously, the nature of the planetary crises we face—from pandemics and climate change, to cyber threats and biodiversity collapse—brutally exposes the inadequacy of institutions built for a world of rigid, Westphalian borders. Viruses do not carry passports, atmospheric carbon does not recognize sovereignty, cyberattacks are oblivious to national jurisdiction, and climate disruption is indifferent to political ideology. Yet, the United Nations system, particularly its most powerful organ, the Security Council, remains structurally and politically incapable of mobilizing the coherent, collective action required at global scale. Chronic fragmentation among the major powers, coupled with a persistent instinct for unilateralism or exclusive ‘coalitions of the willing’, systematically undermines the globally coordinated, multilateral responses needed to face these existential threats to all humanity. The COVID-19 pandemic was a tragic case study in this failure, with vaccine nationalism and intellectual property barriers trumping global health solidarity[13].

The conclusion is inescapable: global governance cannot be resuscitated through timid, incremental adjustments, or the mere inclusion of new members into old clubs. It must be reimagined fundamentally and redesigned from first principles. Embarking on this redesign requires an uncomfortable, often overlooked truth to be confronted: legitimacy in international affairs is not only a question of institutional voting formulas or charters, it is also, profoundly, a question of symbolic and practical geography.

5. FIVE PRINCIPLES FOR GLOBAL SOUTH AGENCY

If Africa and Latin America are to move successfully from the periphery of global decision-making to the vanguard of governance redesign, they must articulate something the rigid hierarchies of the twentieth century never permitted them to formulate: a coherent, affirmative, and strategic intellectual project for a new international order. This project cannot be merely reactive or critical. It must be visionary, principled, and operational. It must offer not just a compelling critique of hegemonic structures, but a practicable blueprint for a world beyond them. The historic transition from perpetual rule-taker to confident rule-maker requires more than symbolic gestures or rhetorical defiance; it demands the deliberate development of guiding doctrines: conceptual and strategic pillars capable of steering the collective Global South through the turbulent, uncertain waters of emergent multipolarity.

Respecting the following five principles is essential if the Global South to assert its central role in shaping twenty-first-century global governance:

5.1. Collective Voice 

For too long, Africa and Latin America have engaged with global governance through fragmented national positions, dispersed regional initiatives, and episodic coordination. Their immense potential influence has been diluted not by a lack of moral authority or demographic weight, but by self-inflicted structural disunity. 

Collective voice does not imply the erasure of diverse national interests, or the homogenization of policy. It signifies the conscious harmonization of positions on fundamental strategic questions, on which shared interests are overwhelming: reform of global financial governance, the principles of climate justice, digital trade rules, and the restructuring of security institutions. It implies that Africa’s continental institutions, particularly the African Union (AU) and its eight Regional Economic Communities (RECs), must establish permanent, institutionalized coordination channels with Latin America’s key mechanisms—the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), MERCOSUR, the Andean Community (CAN), the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), and others. This is not a matter of political posturing; it is the logical, necessary response to structural asymmetry. When the South negotiates separately on systemic issues, it does so from a position of inherent weakness. When it prepares, negotiates, and advocates together, it negotiates from the formidable platform of shared history and shared aspiration, representing a significant majority of UN member states and the world’s population.

5.2. Technological Sovereignty

The terrain of the twenty-first century is being shaped by technologies that dissolve traditional borders and reshape the essence of state sovereignty. No nation can claim genuine political or economic autonomy while remaining critically dependent on foreign-controlled infrastructures for its core data storage, cloud computing, artificial intelligence models, telecommunications backbone, or digital identity systems. Digital autonomy must become a non-negotiable pillar of the Global South’s strategic approach. Technology is not a neutral consumer good; it is the central nervous system of the modern state, society, and economy. To depend on another civilization or corporation for the infrastructure that processes a nation’s confidential communications, its citizens’ health data, its financial transactions, or its political discourse, is to cede a core component of sovereignty.

Africa and Latin America risk becoming data plantations—territories that provide the raw material that fuels the profit-and-power models of foreign tech oligopolies, without transparency, fair compensation, or local control. Achieving technological sovereignty is a monumental task that requires a coordinated, continental approach. It demands significant joint investment in shared digital infrastructure, such as continental data centers and secure broadband networks; the establishment of indigenous AI research institutes focused on solving local challenges; the creation of common regulatory frameworks for data protection and algorithmic transparency; and digital economic policies that ensure platforms operate fairly and respect cultural contexts. 

5.3. Financial Emancipation

Meaningful economic and political sovereignty is impossible within an international monetary system dominated by a single national currency, issued by a state that retains the unilateral capacity to freeze assets, restrict transaction pathways, and impose crippling financial sanctions. The Global South must emancipate itself from the structural vulnerabilities and coercive potential embedded in the Bretton Woods institutions, and, more critically, from the hegemonic position of the U.S. dollar. Financial emancipation does not imply autarky or a reckless abandonment of global economic integration. Instead, it implies the strategic diversification of the instruments and architectures that facilitate that integration.

Africa and Latin America require robust, parallel financial ecosystems that can finance their own development and intra-South trade, without being subject to ideological conditionalities or the constant shadow of extraterritorial enforcement. Institutions including the New Development Bank (NDB), the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the Development Bank of Latin America (CAF), and strengthened national development banks, provide promising embryonic foundations for this new, pluralistic architecture. The ongoing proliferation of local currency settlement agreements, regional cross-border payment systems, and central bank digital currency projects is not an act of political defiance. In fact, they are acts of economic rationality and pragmatic risk management. The world is increasingly unwilling to accept the U.S. Federal Reserve’s domestic monetary policy decisions unilaterally determining economic stability across continents with vastly different needs. Financial emancipation is, therefore, the prudent construction of systemic resilience, and the reclaiming of essential policy space.

5.4. Transnational Stewardship

Africa and Latin America are among the regions most severely impacted by global systemic crises they did not create. They bear the devastating brunt of climate change, despite having emitted little historically. They suffer disproportionately from pandemics, with constrained access to vaccines, despite contributing to the biodiversity used in pharmaceutical research. Their economies are highly vulnerable to volatile global capital flows, despite having negligible influence over the financial rules that govern them. Any legitimate future global governance framework must be constructed on principles of historical fairness, differentiated responsibility, and operational solidarity.

The Global South must collectively champion new frameworks that distribute burdens and benefits justly. This means demanding that climate finance from historical emitters be understood as obligatory restitution for ecological debt, not voluntary charity. It means fighting for mandatory access to green and health technologies, suspending intellectual property barriers that treat life-saving knowledge as private property. 

Africa and Latin America should reinforce their roles as custodians of the world’s great forests and biomes. Stewardship implies assuming global leadership in the sovereign governance of these resources, negotiating their sustainable use for all humanity.

5.5. Institutional Re-geography

The world must confront a simple yet powerfully overlooked reality: international institutions cannot credibly claim universality and impartiality while being physically, administratively, and culturally anchored in the historical geographies of unipolar power. The United Nations, headquartered on territory subject to U.S. law and immersed in New York’s diplomatic culture, is symbolically and practically imprinted by an era dominated by U.S. power and Atlantic-centric perspectives. Its location shapes access, visibility, diplomatic socialization, and reinforces subtle hierarchies.

Relocation of the United Nations Headquarters to a city such as Shanghai would constitute the most profound institutional and symbolic shift since 1945. This would not be a rebuke of the U.S. or a victory for China. It would be, fundamentally, a recognition of new geopolitical and civilizational realities. It acknowledges the eastward and southward shift in global gravity, the rise of Asia as the world’s most populous and economically dynamic continent, and the emergence of a multipolar world in which no single civilization can claim to host ‘humanity's town hall’. 

A UN in Shanghai would be symbolically powerful and practically significant: enhancing operational independence from unilateral host-state pressures and placing the organization in a twenty-first-century megacity that is a hub of Eurasian connectivity, making it more geographically and politically accessible to the global majority. 

6. CONFRONTING THE VETO POWER AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF PARALYSIS

These principles provide a roadmap for agency and structural reform. However, their effectiveness, and the viability of any new order, hinges on tackling the most dysfunctional anachronism at the heart of the current system: the UNSC veto. This institution represents the original sin of the post-1945 order, legalizing inequality at the moment of the UN’s founding[14]. Five states—permanent members (P5)—representing a shrinking fraction of humanity’s population and moral diversity, retain the unilateral legal authority to block any substantive Council action, even on matters of supreme global importance, such as climate security or pandemic response. Reforming the veto is essential because it would directly enhance the Global South’s strategic influence in shaping global security and governance outcomes, empowering its leadership role in the new international order.

Mainstream reform proposals that focus on adding new permanent members (from the G4 or the African Union) without abolishing or severely circumscribing the veto, are mainly cosmetic[15]. They risk creating a larger, more geographically diverse oligarchy that preserves the core privilege of a few, while pretending to distribute responsibility. The world does not need an expanded club of veto-wielders. It needs, ultimately, a global governance architecture that moves beyond the veto concept. Sovereign equality is fundamentally incompatible with the legalized permanent guardianship of a historical directorate. The future legitimacy of global governance must be anchored not in entrenched prerogatives, but increasingly in the deliberative, democratic authority of the General Assembly, or reformed councils, especially on transnational issues.

The realist establishment often dismisses this vision as naïve. However, its dismissal is a form of intellectual surrender to a failed status quo that is costing lives and planetary stability. The abolition or radical limitation of the veto is the main political challenge of our era, but its necessity is a cornerstone of the moral and strategic imperative. It is the ultimate test of whether the international order can evolve from a system of managed competition between great powers, into a genuine community for common problem-solving. The collective diplomatic capital built through practicing the principles of Collective Voice and Financial Emancipation would create the necessary leverage to transform this ‘impossible’ reform into the central, non-negotiable demand of a united Global South. A world in which a single P5 member can paralyze the Security Council is fundamentally flawed. Confronting the veto is not the end of the reform journey, but an essential beginning.

7. CONCLUSION

The twenty-first century will not be defined by the same powers that dominated the twentieth. It will be defined by those civilizational forces capable of imagining what comes after hegemony, after the toxic blend of universalist rhetoric and particularist practice. Africa and Latin America are at a unique and consequential historical juncture. They are not simply reacting to a global order in terminal decay. They are increasingly positioned to co-author its successor. Their collective histories, scarred by colonialism, extraction and exclusion, equip them with an acute, hard-won sensitivity to the dangers of concentrated power and civilizational arrogance. Their philosophical traditions—ubuntu, legalism, communitarian ethics—offer profound, alternative understandings of the interdependence and relational dignity on which any genuine, sustainable multilateralism must be built. In this sense, they are, in the fullest meaning of the term, the custodians of a new moral and political geography for the world.

When Vasco da Gama’s small fleet rounded the Cape of Good Hope, it irrevocably connected two halves of the human story that had developed in isolation. His voyage revealed the fundamental unity of the human condition and the impossibility of returning to a state of civilizational isolation. It was a moment of both breathtaking possibility and tragic constraint—the possibility of encounter immediately overshadowed by the imposition of a hierarchy of conquest.

We now stand on the threshold of a passage of analogous magnitude, but with the potential for a radically different, more equitable outcome. The old mental maps, centered on the North Atlantic, are dangerously obsolete. The West’s claim to universal authority has been undermined by its own internal contradictions: invasions without mandate, sanctions without legitimacy, financial coercion disguised as moral necessity, and a stark selectivity in humanitarian concern. The tragedies of Iraq, Gaza, and Venezuela are not just policy failures; they are symptoms of a systemic failure of legitimacy.

Africa and Latin America, for the first time in five centuries, now possess the aggregate demographic weight, ecological centrality, growing economic heft, cultural authority, and, most crucially, the intellectual and philosophical frameworks necessary to lead this transition. They are called to lead this civilizational turn not because they are blameless, but because they are historically necessary.

The world has waited centuries for this possibility. The winds of history, driven by demography, ecology, and a thirst for justice, have finally shifted. Africa and Latin America now find themselves at the bow of the global ship, not as passengers hoping for calm seas, but as helmsmen and navigators, tasked with reading the stars of their own traditions and the compass of collective need, guiding humanity toward a horizon of shared destiny that has long been sought, but is no longer beyond our reach.

The possible world—a world of genuine multipolarity, rooted in dignity and cooperation—is before us. It will not build itself. It falls, now, to the custodians of the Global South to grasp the tiller, and with clarity, unity, and unwavering purpose, to begin the work of making it real.

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[1] The United Nations Charter (1945), particularly its Preamble and Article 1, articulates the principles of sovereign equality, peaceful settlement of disputes, and collective security. The contrast between these ideals and selective enforcement is a central critique of post–Cold War international relations scholarship.

[2] The symbolic and material consequences of Vasco da Gama’s voyage are analyzed as the onset of a Eurocentric world system, contrasted with the pre-existing world economy.

[3] Samuel P. Huntington’s thesis adopted a deterministic ‘clash of civilizations’ framework, within which he clearly opposed a pluralistic encounter in a new world order.

[4] The 2003 invasion of Iraq, undertaken without explicit UN Security Council authorization, has been widely criticized as undermining multilateral legitimacy, with subsequent inquiries documenting deficiencies in intelligence and decision-making.

[5] Unilateral sanctions on Venezuela have produced severe humanitarian consequences, documented by UN-appointed experts and fact-finding missions. See United Nations Human Rights Council (2020). 

[6] Reports from multilateral institutions and human rights organizations document a humanitarian crisis in Gaza following the October 7, 2023, escalation, alongside legal debates over proportionality, genocide, and state obligations. See International Court of Justice (2024); Amnesty International, Israel/OPT: Investigate War Crimes (London: Amnesty International, 2023); Human Rights Watch, Israel: Apparent War Crimes in Gaza (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2023).

[7] Russia's invasion of Ukraine violated the territorial integrity norm affirmed in UN resolutions, while debates persist about NATO expansion and the erosion of arms control regimes. See, United Nations General Assembly, Resolution ES-11/1 (New York: United Nations, March 2, 2022); and John J. Mearsheimer (2014).

[8] Ubuntu is a relational philosophy centered on communal identity and restorative justice, influencing African ethical and political thought.

[9] Latin American international legal traditions emphasize non-intervention and sovereign equality, expressed through the Calvo and Drago Doctrines and codified in regional treaties. See Donald R. Shea (1955) and Montevideo Convention (1933), Art. 8.

[10] Africa’s demographic transformation will reshape global population distribution, with significant implications for geopolitics, economics, and migration. See United Nations (2022).

[11] The IMF and World Bank maintain asymmetric voting structures that privilege advanced economies, despite reforms, contributing to legitimacy crises. See International Monetary Fund (2023) and Woods (2006).

[12] The U.S. dollar and the SWIFT network have increasingly been used as instruments of geopolitical coercion, prompting global backlash and diversification efforts.

[13] The COVID-19 pandemic exposed failures of global cooperation and vaccine inequity, reinforcing structural disparities between states.

[14] The veto power, embedded at the San Francisco Conference, institutionalized a hierarchy inconsistent with sovereign equality. The drafting history of the UN Charter in Sao Francisco (1945) showed that the veto (Article 27(3)) was a non-negotiable demand by the Great Powers. The veto grants a unique power to the five permanent members (P5) not afforded to any other member state, creating a de-facto hierarchy, despite the UN Charter’s principle of the sovereign equality of all its members

[15] Simply expanding the permanent membership of the Security Council, even to include prominent global actors like the G4 (Brazil, Germany, India, and Japan) or African states, would be a superficial fix that fails to address the core structural flaw of the United Nations: the power imbalance caused by the veto power. The G4 nations have shown some flexibility on the immediate use of the veto, but the African Union's official position (the Ezulwini Consensus) demands the veto right for its potential new seats as a matter of equality. Without curtailing the existing veto power, new members risk merely legitimizing a dysfunctional system in which the original P5 can still paralyze action whenever their interests are threatened. See Binder and Heupel (2020).