The Global South Perspectives Network (GSPN) is a coalition of think tanks and independent experts working to advance a more inclusive and fair model of global governance, with a strong focus on UN reform and multilateral policy. Through research, coordinated dialogue, and shared advocacy, the network amplifies Southern perspectives that are reshaping the international system.
Countries producing critical minerals should use the growing demand for their resources to attract investment and expand their economies. Their minerals are needed for the energy transition, advanced manufacturing and defence. This creates opportunities for employment and industrial development that governments have good reason to pursue. However, securing a buyer is not the same as…
Six months have passed since the war against Iran began. Two explicit campaigns have been launched by United States. The first, lasting twelve days, was fought to destroy the nuclear programme and the command structures around it. The second lasted forty days, and was fought to break the state that houses them. Both were declared…
The international community has become preoccupied with reforming its institutions. We debate the future of the United Nations Security Council, the composition of the G20, the legitimacy of international financial institutions and the emergence of a more multipolar world. These are important conversations, but they all risk overlooking a more fundamental problem. The world is…
The process is underway to choose the new UN Secretary-General. Candidates have been declared and hearings held. With Security Council deliberations pending, the situation is revealing of the condition of the international system, and the distance between what that system claims to be and what it has become. Today, the questions about who is best…
The debate over China’s Global Governance Initiative (GGI) arrives at a moment when questions surrounding global governance are becoming increasingly difficult to avoid. Institutions established in the aftermath of the Second World War are confronting pressures they were never designed to manage: shifting economic power, technological disruption, climate change, geopolitical fragmentation and growing dissatisfaction with…
There is an increasing sense that the war in the Middle East is revealing more than a crisis in the regional order. The latest escalation, where the United States and Israel attacked Iran, which in turn attacked the Gulf states, is being considered not only for the various and immediate consequences. It is also illustrative…
The international system appears to be entering a period of profound uncertainty. Geopolitical rivalry is intensifying, confidence in global institutions is weakening and rules that once appeared relatively settled are now being questioned with increasing frequency. In such an environment, the conversation about the role of so-called “middle powers” becomes more important than it might…
The international system today does not appear to be collapsing in any dramatic or spectacular sense. Institutions still exist. Forums continue to convene. Rules remain written down. Yet there is a growing sense that something more subtle, and perhaps more consequential, is underway. The political consensus that once gave multilateral cooperation its coherence is thinning….
The United States’ military operation against Venezuela in early January has been widely reported as a dramatic episode: air strikes on strategic sites, the forced removal of President Nicolás Maduro and the most direct US intervention in Latin America in decades. But to treat the event as merely another regional crisis is to fundamentally misunderstand…
The international system today carries the feel of an era that has outlived its own assumptions. Institutions built with the optimism of 1945 continue to stand, yet their foundations no longer align with the world taking shape around them. The gravitational pull that once held the system together, its shared purpose, its post-war coherence, has…