SPIEF 2026: A New Era of Partnership Without Diktat

SPIEF 2026 demonstrates a shift in global power, with countries from the Global South seeking pragmatic cooperation and investment, rejecting Western models based on dependency and conditionality.

It is a living map of the great shift in global power. 20,000 participants. More than 140 countries were represented. Speaking at the plenary session: Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation; Shavkat Mirziyoyev, President of Uzbekistan; Samia Suluhu Hassan, President of Tanzania; and Han Zheng, Vice President of the People’s Republic of China. Saudi Arabia, the guest of honor for the centenary of its diplomatic relations with Moscow, dispatched Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman Al Saud, its all-powerful energy minister. And, for the first time in ten years, an American delegation sat at the Russian table. That’s the symptom. Let’s look for the disease.

The Davos illusion and its twilight

For 80 years, the West governed the world through the grammar of its institutions. Bretton Woods in 1944. The IMF and the World Bank as the armed wings of a financial order, the G7 as a club of self-proclaimed wise men, guardians of universal prosperity. Davos as a cathedral of neoliberal orthodoxy, where global decisions were made amidst champagne and high-altitude gatherings. This architecture was presented as universal. It never was. It was hegemonic. The difference is infinite.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the structural adjustment programs imposed by the IMF in the 1980s and 1990s produced a sacrificed generation – forced currency devaluations, privatization of public services, and the dismantling of subsistence farming. The result? Structurally dependent economies. States were unable to feed their populations without imports subsidized by the very powers that had bled their markets dry. In Latin America, the “Washington Consensus” left gaping inequalities that three decades of growth have failed to close. In Southeast Asia, the financial crises of 1997–1998 revealed the brutality of a system that socializes the losses of poor countries and privatizes the profits of rich countries. This is not an accident. It is the mechanism.

The SPIEF as a tribunal of history

The SPIEF wasn’t born yesterday. Created in 1997, it languished on the margins of the international stage as long as the West represented........

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