The Global South talks back

When the 22nd ASEAN–India Summit met in Kuala Lumpur on 26 October 2025, the optics were telling. India’s Prime Minister addressed the gathering virtually, while the External Affairs Minister represented the country in person. To a casual observer, this may have seemed a matter of scheduling. To seasoned diplomats, however, it carried a quiet symbolism. India was sending a clear message: engagement with Southeast Asia remains a priority, but participation need not be defined by the old hierarchies of presence and power. In a world where influence is increasingly diffuse, India is choosing to define its role not as a follower in a Western-led order, but as a pole in a genuinely multipolar world — one that speaks for itself, and increasingly, for the Global South.

That recalibration mirrors a larger transformation in global diplomacy. Across Asia, Africa and Latin America, nations once treated as peripheral to decision-making are asserting not only a voice but an agenda. They are no longer content to be “included” in institutions built elsewhere; they are shaping new ones. The Global South is no longer waiting for permission to participate — it is demanding partnership. The question now is whether the West, long accustomed to setting the terms of debate, can learn to listen.

The architecture of global governance — the United Nations Security Council, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — still reflects the power map of 1945 more than the realities of 2025. Yet the Global South, broadly defined as the developing and emerging economies of the world, now accounts for roughly 85–88 per cent of the global population and about 60 per cent of world GDP on a purchasing-power-parity basis. These countries are not the margins of the global economy; they are its centre of gravity.

Recent milestones illustrate the shift from symbolism to substance. Under India’s G20 presidency in 2023, the African Union was granted full membership — a change long sought by developing countries. Around the same time, the BRICS group expanded dramatically: invitations were extended to several emerging powers, and by 2024 Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates had joined, followed by Indonesia in early 2025. These moves were not designed to replace Western alliances but to broaden the geometry of global cooperation. The Global South is no longer waiting for a seat at the table; it is building new tables.

Nowhere is this rebalancing clearer than in the politics of climate change. For years, the narrative of environmental responsibility was cast in moral terms that placed developing nations perpetually on the defensive. They were urged to curb emissions even as they struggled to lift millions out of poverty. That narrative has shifted. At COP27 in Egypt in 2022, developing countries secured the establishment of a Loss and Damage Fund — the first real acknowledgement by industrialised nations that those least responsible for climate change are enduring its worst consequences. It was not a triumph of Western charity but of Southern persistence.

Since then, the Global South has advanced a more pragmatic climate agenda — one that ties justice to development. India and Indonesia have made it clear that the path to decarbonisation must remain compatible with growth and energy access. Africa, once seen as a passive victim of climate impacts, is now negotiating directly with global investors for sustainable energy partnerships. Initiatives such as the International Solar Alliance and One Sun, One World, One Grid, both spearheaded by India, are redefining what climate leadership from the South can look like — collaborative, practical and inclusive.

Trade has long been the field where ideals of openness collided with realities of inequality. The promise of “free trade” often translated into structural advantages for the industrialised North, through agricultural subsidies, restrictive intellectual property regimes and corporate-dominated supply chains. The pandemic’s vaccine patent battles exposed those asymmetries in stark terms. In response, the Global South is pursuing new alignments grounded in mutual gain rather than conditional access. The African Continental Free Trade Area — now the largest trading bloc in the world by membership — aims to strengthen Africa’s internal markets and bargaining power. India, too, has exercised strategic autonomy, joining or abstaining from trade pacts according to whether they align with domestic and developmental priorities.

This is not protectionism, but self-definition. The South insists that trade must serve development rather than dictate it. In the emerging economy of artificial intelligence, green technology and digital infrastructure, developing nations are calling for equitable access to innovation and fair digital governance. Globalisation without justice, they argue, is no longer acceptable.

The war in Ukraine further demonstrated how the moral geography of the world has changed. Many nations across the Global South — from India and Brazil to South Africa and Indonesia — declined to frame the conflict through Cold War binaries of good versus evil. They have instead emphasised diplomacy, dialogue and de-escalation. To Western observers, this sometimes looked like fence-sitting; to the South, it was principle. Having lived through decades of intervention and conditionality, these countries reject the idea that global stability must rest on Western leadership alone. Their approach is one of multipolar responsibility — an insistence that peace cannot be imposed, only negotiated.

The Kuala Lumpur summit’s careful choreography reflected that same logic. India’s balanced participation — a Prime Minister speaking virtually and a Foreign Minister engaging in person — embodied self-assurance without overreach. In an era where legitimacy no longer flows from attendance but from agency, that equilibrium between engagement and independence captures the new diplomatic temperament of the Global South.

For Western governments, this transformation poses both a challenge and an invitation. The challenge lies in relinquishing habits of paternalism — the instinct to lecture rather than listen. The invitation lies in forging genuine partnerships on shared challenges: climate adaptation, digital regulation, public health and equitable growth. Listening requires more than empathy; it demands structural reform. The IMF and World Bank must modernise their voting systems. The United Nations Security Council must expand permanent representation. Global finance must address debt traps rather than deepen them. Issues such as food security, technology access and climate resilience are not “developmental sidelines” but global imperatives.

The Western-led order still holds immense institutional and intellectual capital, but its credibility now depends on acknowledging that leadership in this century will be distributed, not monopolised. The Global South’s resurgence is not a rebellion against the West; it is a redefinition of multilateralism. What was once a one-way conversation has become a dialogue among equals. The South is not asking to overturn the global system — it is asking that the system finally reflect the world it purports to serve.

In Kuala Lumpur, India’s measured diplomacy captured that spirit: confident, collaborative and calmly assertive. Across the developing world, from Nairobi to Brasília, Jakarta to Addis Ababa, similar voices are shaping a new vocabulary of power — one that replaces dominance with dialogue, and competition with coexistence. The old world was unipolar in its assumptions; the new one will be plural in its possibilities. The Global South has begun to speak — not in defiance, but in proposition. Whether the West listens with humility, or clings to nostalgia, will determine the character of global politics in the decades to come.

The writer is a foreign policy commentator specialising in India’s engagement with the Global South, multilateral institutions, and the shifting geopolitics of a multipolar world.