Is the Rules-Based International Order Dead? A View from the Global South

 

When the rules only apply to some, calling it an ‘order’ becomes an act of political theatre.

The phrase “rules-based international order” is among the most repeated in the vocabulary of Western diplomacy. It appears in summit communiqués, foreign ministry speeches, and think-tank reports with the regularity of a liturgical refrain. It is invoked to condemn Russian aggression in Ukraine, to justify sanctions against authoritarian governments, and to defend the architecture of post-World War II multilateral institutions.

From the vantage point of the Global South — and particularly from Africa — the phrase lands differently. Not as a description of how the world actually works, but as a description of how its architects wish others to believe it works. The gap between those two things is widening. And the diplomatic consequences of that gap are reshaping the international system.

What the ‘Order’ Actually Is

The rules-based international order (RIO) refers broadly to the system of norms, institutions, and agreements that emerged from the post-World War II settlement: the United Nations and its Charter, the Bretton Woods financial institutions, international humanitarian law, and the various treaties and conventions that govern state conduct. Its proponents argue it replaced a world of naked power politics with one constrained by law and multilateral consensus.

The critical scholarship, however, has always pointed to a deeper reality. As political scientist G. John Ikenberry — one of the RIO’s most influential theorists — acknowledges, the order was hierarchical: the United States crafted an arrangement that was open and rule-based in design but served American strategic interests in practice.^[1] For countries in the Global South, whose customs houses were occupied, whose elected leaders were overthrown with the assistance of external powers, and whose economic policies were shaped by conditionalities attached to World Bank and IMF loans, the “rules-based order” was never a neutral system. It was a managed hierarchy.

“After all this time that the North has organised the world according to its interests, it is now up to the South to change the rules of the game.” — Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, G77 Summit, 2023

The Double Standards That Broke the Narrative

For decades, the Global South’s critique of the RIO remained largely rhetorical — voiced in NAM communiqués and G77 declarations, but lacking the systemic weight to alter the order’s functioning. Two developments changed that calculus: the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 prompted a swift and coordinated Western response: sanctions, arms transfers, diplomatic isolation, and repeated UN General Assembly resolutions condemning the invasion. The contrast with Western responses to earlier conflicts — particularly NATO’s 1999 intervention in Yugoslavia, conducted without UN Security Council authorisation, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq — was noted carefully by Global South governments.

Then came Gaza. Israel’s military campaign, which began in October 2023 and extended deep into 2024 and 2025, generated a civilian death toll and humanitarian catastrophe that, by most measurable metrics, exceeded the scale of Russian destruction in Ukraine. Yet the Western response — continued arms transfers to Israel, vetoes of UN ceasefire resolutions, and legal challenges to the International Court of Justice’s authority — was precisely the inverse of its Ukraine posture. At the 2025 Shangri-La Security Dialogue, French President Emmanuel Macron publicly acknowledged that the West’s double standard on the two conflicts had seriously damaged its credibility.^[2]

The diplomatic data bears this out. In February 2025, the UN General Assembly voted on two Ukraine resolutions. The European-backed resolution received 98 votes in favour — compared to the 141 votes a similar resolution attracted in March 2022. The gap of 43 votes represents countries, mostly in the Global South, that have progressively disengaged from a Western-framed consensus they no longer find credible.^[3]

As the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Pennsylvania noted in its 2026 analysis: the RIO “was further weakened when observers in the Global South juxtaposed Western framings and responses to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza” — finding the contrast between the two responses impossible to reconcile with any coherent principle.^[4]

The Global South Is Not Simply ‘Anti-West’

It is tempting — and analytically lazy — to frame Global South scepticism of the RIO as merely pro-Russian, pro-Chinese, or anti-democratic. The Oxford Review of Economic Policy published a careful 2024 analysis by Oliver Stuenkel that pushes back against this simplification. As Stuenkel argues, “views across the Global South vis-à-vis the liberal order are far more nuanced,” and pointing to the Global South as a culprit for the order’s crisis “would be simplistic.”^[5]

The Lowy Institute’s analysis of the emerging post-American order is similarly instructive: the Global South is “not demanding dominance — it is seeking more equitable terms of engagement.”^[6] What African and Global South states are rejecting is not the idea of international rules per se. They are rejecting a system in which the rules are written by the powerful, enforced selectively, and invoked primarily to discipline those who challenge the dominant order.

President Nana Akufo-Addo of Ghana captured this precisely at the 2024 Munich Security Conference, describing an inherent instability in the global order produced by a situation “whereby the so-called Global South, where Africa features, is always at the wrong end of the stick in terms of its take-up of global assets.”^[7]

What Africa Is Actually Doing About It

African states have responded to their disillusionment not simply by withdrawing from multilateral institutions, but by pursuing a more deliberate non-alignment — what scholars are beginning to call “interest-based foreign policy,” as opposed to ideological or bloc-based alignment.

The February 2025 UN General Assembly votes on Ukraine illustrated this precisely. South Africa abstained from both the Ukrainian and US-backed texts, with its delegate arguing: “If we continue doing what we have been doing and it doesn’t reap positive results, then we should consider a different approach.”^[8] This was not pro-Russia. It was principled diplomatic neutrality, grounded in the same non-alignment tradition that animated African foreign policy during the Cold War.

The BRICS expansion is another dimension of this shift. With four new members — Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the UAE — joining in January 2024, and more African nations expressing interest, the grouping represents what Carnegie Endowment analyst Oliver Stuenkel describes as “a growing rejection of a Western-dominated vision of world order,” reflected also in the SCO’s expansion and ASEAN’s growing assertiveness.^[9]

African states are also pursuing institutional alternatives. The AfCFTA creates continental economic depth that reduces dependence on any single external partner. Development Bank of Latin America equivalent institutions are being discussed at the AU level. And the push for UN Security Council reform — to finally give Africa a permanent voice at the table that makes binding decisions — continues to gain diplomatic momentum.

Is the Order Dead or Merely Wounded?

The question of whether the rules-based international order is dead is, in the end, the wrong question. International orders do not die in a single moment. They erode — through accumulated contradictions, declining legitimacy, and the gradual emergence of alternative frameworks.

The China-Global South Project’s editor Eric Olander, delivering the 2025 Mitchell Oration at the Australasian AID Conference, put it bluntly: “The rules-based international order is backward-looking. Countries in Vietnam, Africa or Latin America see it as preserving a system that didn’t serve them well. They look at Gaza and say the rules weren’t enforced. They look at Russia and say the same.”^[10]

E-International Relations’ 2025 analysis introduces a crucial counterpoint: Western hypocrisy, frustrating as it is, “has an upside — it gives developing countries a lever they can pull to effect change. Because the United States and its European allies appeal to moral principles to justify many of their decisions, third parties can publicly criticize them.”^[11] In other words, the order’s normative pretensions, even if imperfectly applied, create accountability mechanisms that a purely transactional multipolar order would not.

The most honest assessment is this: the rules-based international order as it was designed — with US leadership, Western normative dominance, and selective enforcement — is not recoverable. What comes next will be shaped by whether its successor is negotiated through expanded multilateralism or imposed through the competition of great powers. Africa has a role in determining which it will be.

The order is not dead. But it has lost the one thing that made it more than a rationalisation of power: the belief, however imperfect, that the rules applied to everyone. Rebuilding that belief — or constructing something more honest in its place — is the defining diplomatic challenge of the next decade. And it cannot be done without the Global South at the table.

REFERENCES

[1] Ikenberry, G.J. (2022). The Liberal International Order and the Global South. Third World Quarterly / Taylor & Francis. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09557571.2022.2107326

[2] Mishra, A. (2026). What is Happening to the Rules-Based International Order? Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania. https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/iit/atul-mishra-2026

[3] South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) (2025). UN Votes on Ukraine: Shifting Alliances and the Global South’s Role. https://saiia.org.za/research/un-votes-on-ukraine-shifting-alliances-and-the-global-souths-role/

[4] Center for the Advanced Study of India (2026). The RIO and the Gaza-Ukraine Double Standard. https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/iit/atul-mishra-2026

[5] Stuenkel, O. (2024). The New World Order and the Global South. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Vol. 40, Issue 2, pp. 396–404. https://academic.oup.com/oxrep/article-abstract/40/2/396/7691467

[6] Lowy Institute (2025). No One’s World: The Global South Is Navigating a Post-American Order. https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/no-one-s-world-global-south-navigating-post-american-order

[7] Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (2025). A Closer Look at the Global South [citing Akufo-Addo at Munich Security Conference, 2024]. https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/05/global-south-colonialism-imperialism?lang=en

[8] UN Meetings Coverage (2025, February 24). At Three-Year Mark of Russian Federation’s Invasion, General Assembly Upholds Ukraine’s Territorial Integrity. https://press.un.org/en/2025/ga12675.doc.htm

[9] Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (2025). BRICS Expansion and the Global South’s Rejection of Western Order. https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/05/global-south-colonialism-imperialism?lang=en

[10] Olander, E. (2025). China, the Global South and the Post-American International Order. Devpolicy Blog, ANU Development Policy Centre. https://devpolicy.org/china-the-global-south-and-the-post-american-international-order-20251208/

[11] E-International Relations (2025). Why We Fight: The Rules-Based International Order [citing Spektor on Western hypocrisy as leverage]. https://www.e-ir.info/2025/11/11/why-we-fight-the-rules-based-international-order/