The international system is not merely evolving; it is undergoing a foundational recalibration. The post-Cold War Pax Americana, a paradigm defined by US hegemony, neoliberal globalisation, and institutional consensus has fractured. In its wake, we are witnessing the emergence of a multiplicitous world order. This is not multipolarity in a tidy, 19th-century sense, but a more anarchic and fluid reality, a polycrisis of clashing geopolitics, disruptive technologies, and climate-driven scarcity.

It is within this interstitial chaos that the Global South, historically the object rather than the subject of international relations, is asserting its constitutive agency. To conceptualise the Global South as a geographic entity is to misunderstand its essence. It is, more accurately, a geo-political and geo-economic construct, a testament to the enduring legacy of colonial and neo-colonial extraction that systematically peripheralised vast swathes of humanity from the core circuits of capital and governance. It represents a coalition of the structurally marginalised, bound by a shared historical grievance: their forced participation in a global order whose rules they did not write.

Today, India emerges not merely as a voice within this coalition, but as its preeminent theorist and institutional architect. The prevailing “new world disorder” is defined by asymmetric multipolarity. While the collective West’s relative dominance wanes, no single power or coherent bloc has emerged to replace it. China’s state-capitalist model and Russia’s revisionist militarism challenge the status quo, but they offer illiberal and hierarchical alternatives.

This has created a strategic vacuum, fertile ground for the rise of “swing states” like India, Brazil, and Indonesia. Their power derives not from overwhelming military might, but from demographic heft, economic gravity, and normative suasion. India’s strategic posture in this........

© The Pioneer