Global South-sensitive model of globalization would prevent the danger emanating from overcentralized globalization. Discuss. (2025, 15 Marks)
The idea comes from S. Jaishankar’s remarks at the first Voice of the Global South Summit (12 January 2023): the pandemic had shown “the danger of over-centralized globalization and fragile supply chains”, so the case for a Global South-sensitive model was growing stronger. He framed it as three shifts: from self-centred to human-centred globalisation, from technological patronage to South-led innovation, and from debt-creating projects to demand-driven development cooperation. With globalisation now contested from inside the West as well as from the South, the question is whether such a model would prevent the danger, or only reduce it.
What over-centralisation means
- Production: semiconductors, critical-mineral refining, active pharmaceutical ingredients and vaccines sit in one or two countries, so one shock spreads everywhere. Iran’s restriction of the Strait of Hormuz from March 2026 hit India, which had drawn about 45% of its crude through it.
- Money and rules: the dollar still holds about 57% of allocated reserves, and the US keeps about 16.5% of IMF votes against an 85% supermajority. Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman call this weaponised interdependence: whoever controls the hubs can coerce the rest, as Russia sanctions (2022) and the 2025 US tariffs on India (50% at their peak) showed.
- Structure: in Immanuel Wallerstein’s core-periphery terms, the South still exports raw materials and low-value assembly while importing high-value goods, the surplus transfer that post-colonial critics call neo-colonialism.
What a Global South-sensitive model would involve
- Polycentric supply chains rather than autarky: the India–Japan–Australia Supply Chain Resilience Initiative (2021) and India’s semiconductor push.
- Policy space: Ha-Joon Chang (Kicking Away the Ladder, 2002) shows that rich countries industrialised with the tariffs and subsidies they now deny others; real special and differential treatment and a working WTO, whose MC14 at Yaoundé (March 2026) again closed without a permanent public-stockholding solution.
- Monetary diversification: the BRICS New Delhi Declaration (September 2026) backs local-currency settlement and IMF, World Bank and WTO reform, while rejecting a common currency.
- Finance and technology: India’s Global Development Compact (third summit, August 2024) offers grants, trade and technology sharing instead of debt; open digital public infrastructure; common but differentiated responsibilities against unilateral measures such as the EU’s CBAM.
- Voice: the African Union’s G20 seat (2023) under India’s presidency.
Limits of the claim
- The South is not one actor. China is itself a hub of over-centralisation: India’s trade deficit with it reached about $112 billion in 2025–26. A Southern model could shift the centre rather than disperse it.
- Realists answer that rules follow power; redesign needs the West to surrender privileges it still defends.
- India’s own practice is multi-alignment, not a Southern bloc: it champions the South while joining Quad supply-chain and critical-minerals initiatives with the West.
Conclusion
A Global South-sensitive model would reduce, not prevent, the danger. Shocks will still travel, but more hubs and more voices would stop any one capital from setting the terms on which they land. It is a call for polycentric, not post-global, globalisation, and it depends on established powers accepting shared rule-making as the price of an open system.