Bring out your perspectives on Plausible aims of the Non – Aligned Movement in the post-Cold War period. (2010, 20 Marks)
The collapse of bipolarity left the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) asking: non-aligned between what? The Jakarta summit (1992) answered by turning from bloc politics to development, South–South cooperation and reform of global institutions, and P. V. Narasimha Rao supplied the rationale: non-alignment is every nation’s right to independence and development, whether there is one bloc or more. My perspective is that NAM’s plausible aims lie less in power politics than in norm-setting and collective bargaining for the South.
Aims that remain plausible
- Guarding sovereignty and non-intervention. Amid selective interventions, from Iraq (2003) to Libya (2011), where a protection mandate became regime change, NAM can defend the UN Charter’s restraints on force.
- Democratising global governance. Security Council expansion with fairer African representation (the Ezulwini Consensus) and IMF quota realignment, still deferred under the 16th General Review.
- A just economic order. NIEO-era demands return as debt relief, fairer trade, technology transfer and climate finance on common but differentiated responsibilities; the COP29 goal of $300 billion a year by 2035 shows the gap. On 23 September 2026 the NAM chair, Uganda, asked the General Assembly to negotiate a binding International Covenant on the Right to Development.
- Disarmament and a fair nuclear order. With New START expired in February 2026 and the 2026 NPT Review Conference ending without consensus, NAM’s oldest demand, disarmament by the nuclear-weapon states and not merely non-proliferation by others, regains force.
- Opposing unilateral coercive measures. Secondary sanctions and tariffs that extract alignment; the Kampala mid-term ministerial of October 2025 demanded their lifting.
- New common threats: terrorism, drug trafficking, pandemics (the 2020 virtual summit on COVID-19), and digital and AI governance.
- Peace in West Asia. Palestine, central to the Kampala declaration of 2024, remains a cause on which the South is near-unanimous.
How NAM can pursue them
- Norm entrepreneurship: in the sense of Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink (1998), NAM states can frame issues and build General Assembly majorities, as they once did on decolonisation.
- Soft balancing: T. V. Paul (2018) argues that a coalition of weak states can raise the legitimacy costs of great-power excess without hard power.
- Division of labour with the G-77 for economic negotiation, and links to BRICS and the G-20.
- A core of near-equals: T. P. Sreenivasan (2018) suggests that a partnership of near-equals on the IBSA model may carry this agenda better than the whole movement.
The sceptical view, and my assessment
- C. Raja Mohan (2016) calls NAM a movement “in coma”, dysfunctional even before 1991 because so many divergent interests could never be harmonised. Others urged that it declare its mission accomplished. Heterogeneity, wars among members and a consensus rule that yields bland declarations make broad aims implausible.
- Yet multipolarity raises the value of staying unclaimed, as hedging across Asia, Africa and the Gulf shows. M. K. Narayanan (2016) judged it premature to pronounce NAM dead, and no other forum lets some 120 states speak without invitation.
| Plausible | Implausible |
|---|---|
| Norm-setting, agenda-setting, voting coalitions | A “third force” in military terms |
| Economic and governance reform demands | Mediating wars among great powers |
| Legal codification (right to development) | Enforcing its own declarations |
Conclusion
NAM’s realistic aims are modest but real: to keep sovereignty, development and equity on the global agenda and to bargain collectively on a few issues where numbers matter. Pursued narrowly, with reformed working methods, they give the movement purpose; pursued as rhetoric about everything, they confirm its critics.