Claiming the multilateral system as Righfully Ours! Reflections from the Global South Women’s Forum 2025 in Bangkok, Thailand.
The 10th Global South Women’s Forum (GSWF 2025) convened by the International Women’s Rights Action Watch Asia
Pacific, aimed to claim the multilateralism system as rightfully ours. As it functions currently, the multilateral system
does not work for us, i.e. women of the
Global South. Alma Rosa Colin Colin from Mexico and working
with Equidad de Género: Ciudadanía, Trabajo y
Familia, a participant at the GSWF 2025 observed that if we want a system
that can break the relations that tie us to the dynamics of dependence,
inequality and injustice, we must wonder if multilateralism ever worked for us.
I would say that it hasn’t. I would go a
step further and say that if one defines multilateralism as an alliance of countries
pursuing a common goal based on principles of inclusivity, equality and
cooperation to foster a more peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world, then
the multilateral system as we know it didn’t just not work for us, it was designed
to fail us.
For me, multilateralism is a
project of the colonisers, and it was always stacked against the countries of
the global south. There were gains from the system without a doubt. But, from a Global South perspective, the system was undermined from the onset and
that undermining has been happening, insidiously, for decades.
Let’s start with the governance of the institutions of the
multilateral system, the UN Security Council or the boards of directors of the
international financial institutions, the World Bank or the International Monetary
Fund (IMF). The UN Security Council is composed of 15 Members: Five permanent
members: China, France, Russian Federation, the United
Kingdom, and the United States, and ten non-permanent members elected
for two-year terms by the General Assembly. More than 50 United Nations Member
States have never been Members of the Security Council.[1] Each
member of the Security Council shall have one vote but on all non-procedural
matters the permanent members need to concur and worse, these permanent member
states all have “ the right to veto” and thereby the ability to block any
decision or resolution.
In the governance of the International Financial Institutes,
the power of states are determined by their position in the world economy. The IMF executive board, which is responsible
for daily operations consists of 24 executive directors (EDs) representing
member countries through constituencies. ED constituencies are divided
according to quotas with some member countries representing only themselves
(this is the case for China, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, Saudi-Arabia, the
UK and the US), while other EDs represent a block of countries. Though decision-making on the executive board
is typically made through consensus with voting kept to a minimum, votes on substantive
issues need 85 per cent approval, granting the US (with its 16.52 per cent vote
share) effective veto power over any major decisions.
The World Bank Group
comprises four organisations, the International Development Association (IDA),
the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the
International Finance Corporation (IFC), and the Multilateral Investment
Guarantee Agency (MIGA), with their own governance structures. Similar to the IMF, member countries are allocated votes based on
their subscriptions of capital and the five largest shareholders across the
World Bank Group are the US, Japan, Germany, France and China. To consolidate the unequal and patriarchal
nature of the institutions, we are told
that under a “gentleman’s agreement” at the time of inception, the IMF managing
director is always a European and the World Bank president a US national.[2]
Global North countries have also used their financial and
political power to undermine the multilateral institutions when these
institutions were seen to be strengthening the voice of the Global South. Two critical examples include the setting up
of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), with negotiation structures that favoured
countries with more bargaining power, while structurally sidelining the UN Commission
on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) which was working towards helping Global South countries secure fairer terms of trade; and withdrawing funding from UNESCO when Palestine was granted full
membership of UNESCO in 2011. The U.S.
stopped paying its dues, resulting in the loss of over 20% of UNESCO's budget
and hundreds of millions in unpaid arrears, officially withdrew from the
organization altogether from 2019 to mid-2023, and again in July 2025. The US
has also withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, the Istanbul Convention and has
disregarded the directives of the International Court of Justice. In my personal experience of being part of pulling
together multilateral agreements or statements, at the Commission of the Status
of Women (CSW), at the adoption of the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk
Reduction or even as far back as the drafting of the Beijing Platform for
Action, I have witnessed how the countries of the Global North try to influence
the wording of these agreements.
So how do we claim the multilateralism as rightfully
ours?
Nicole Maloba from FEMNET
in Nairobi, Kenya also a participant at GSWF2025, situates herself and her organisation in the
macroeconomic space, working on debt justice, tax, care, and trade as women’s
rights issues. She insists that public
debt management, tax rules and trade agreements must be assessed against
African states’ obligations under CEDAW, the Maputo Protocol and the African
Charter. FEMNET is part of that ecosystem: contributing African feminist
perspectives to Financing for Development, to debates on a UN Framework
Convention on International Tax Cooperation, and to feminist re-thinking of
sovereign debt architecture, including through work on feminist public debt
management and Beijing+30 macroeconomic reflections. Maloba feels that the current model just
produces crisis day in and day out and that it is important to organise for a
different financial architecture rooted
in African feminist, decolonial and rights-based principles. Firstly, building
feminist knowledge and power. Secondly, democratising economic governance and
thirdly ending austerity and centring care.
This is Alma Rosa Colin’s contention as well. She talks of the urgency of the need for a
feminist rupture that prevents the same logics of capital from continuing to be
reproduced, the importance of reviewing monetary and fiscal policies at the
meso level where the economic models are implemented in the Global South and
which require profound transformation.
I am reminded that
these calls for transformation were articulated in the Non-Aligned Movement’s
call for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), and that Samir Amin’s theory of delinking
argued that the global south should disconnect from the global capitalist
system to pursue autonomous, people-centred development. Dr Gamani Corea, Secretary General of UNCTAD
for three consecutive terms, whose 100th
birth anniversary was commemorated recently with a talk in Colombo by Dr Carlos
Maria Correa, Director of the South Centre in Geneva, also championed a reform
of the global economy and sought to enhance the influence of the Global South
in international affairs. It was through
UNCTAD that the Group of 77 (G77) was initiated to promote the economic
interests of its 134 members and enhance their joint capacity for negotiation. Sadly, the unity and strength of the G77 has
waned. Global South decision makers are fed a diet of neoliberal economics by
their advisers and so remain hesitant and fearful of going against the
mainstream. Reclaiming multilateralism
as rightfully ours, requires paying attention to the heterodox and feminist
economists and movements that advocate for nationalisation and import
substitution, the cancellation of odious debt, de-growth away from accumulation towards ecological
and social care and de-dollarisation.
We also need to centre the material and concrete realities
of different contexts, and to do this, it becomes imperative to take note of
the articulation of various social movements.
The movements of indigenous peoples for instance, work on reclaiming
natural resources (land), opposing extractive industries such as mining or
logging, asserting their authority, decolonising knowledge systems to recognise
local languages, reassert the value of indigenous knowledge of ecology, healing
and education and challenge euro-centric narratives of development while at the
same time leveraging the multilateral system to pressure states and create
international standards and norms.
Networks like La Via Campesina, a movement
of autonomous peasant organisations that had originated in the recognition that
localised problems were largely coming from beyond the national borders of
weakened nation-states, has grown into a transnational social movement
defending peasant life. Challenging the dictates of the global market, WTO
rules, IMF/World Bank policies, La Via
Campesina has appropriated the
concept of food sovereignty to emphasize the rights of people
producing food, communities and nations to define their own agricultural
and food policies and their right to own their own means to produce
food free from global agribusiness,
and global finance dominance.
It is clear
that we are in a moment of multiple crises, where the dominant order has lost
its legitimacy and is beginning to crumble.
Gramsci’s morbid symptoms are apparent, especially in the way the architects
of the old order are disregarding their own rules, undermining multilateralism and internationally agreed norms and creating political
chaos, economic instability and genocide. Our attempts to control our destruction of the environment has also been rendered futile as we pass the internationally agreed commitment for global warming. But as Jawaharlal Nehru observed, “a moment
comes, but which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to
the new when an age ends and the soul of a nation long suppressed finds
utterance” – and I would like to think that we are in that moment. I see hope in the protest movements of young
people across South Asia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal, and in other nations of
the world, in the election of Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York, in the persistent
activism of Greta Thunberg, and in the resilience of the Palestinian people. Yes, it is time to claim not just the
multilateralism system but the whole world as rightfully ours, and to think
that - “Another world is not only
possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day if you listen very carefully
you can hear her breathe"(Arundati Roy)
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