Discuss the ways to strengthen the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) to enable it to address the challenges faced by the developing countries. (2020, 20 Marks)
Born at Belgrade (1961) to resist colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism and bloc pressure, and to build bridges between hostile camps, the Non-Aligned Movement lost its structural rationale in 1991; since the Jakarta summit (1992) it has been an organisation in search of an agenda. Yet the grievances of the South have outlived bipolarity. Strengthening NAM means turning a constituency of some 120 states into a bargaining coalition.
The challenges a stronger NAM must answer
- Debt: developing countries owe about $31 trillion of public debt and paid a record $921 billion in net interest in 2024; some 3.4 billion people live where interest outweighs health or education spending.
- Climate finance: the COP29 goal of $300 billion a year by 2035 falls far short of the $1.3 trillion need.
- Technology denial: export-control regimes outside the UN, now extended to semiconductors and AI hardware, and a widening digital divide.
- Coercion and voice: unilateral and secondary sanctions, tariffs, carbon border measures, and IMF quotas still unrealigned (the 16th Review’s consent deadline is 15 November 2026).
- Health equity: pandemic vaccines tracked purchasing power, not need.
Reforming the organisation itself
Robert O. Keohane‘s After Hegemony (1984) shows that institutions work by cutting transaction costs and supplying information and monitoring; NAM does neither. Hence:
- A small permanent secretariat or strengthened Coordinating Bureau to follow up declarations between triennial summits.
- Stricter membership criteria, applying the Belgrade tests so the label means something.
- A crisis-monitoring mechanism, and “coalition-of-the-willing” formulas instead of lowest-common-denominator consensus.
- Specialisation: two or three issues where numbers are leverage (coercive measures, technology access, finance) instead of encyclopaedic declarations.
Re-tooling the agenda
- From rhetoric to bargaining: costed, negotiable positions at the WTO, the IMF and the UNFCCC in place of ritual denunciation of imperialism.
- South–South cooperation with the G-77: trade preferences, scholarships, joint research, pooled natural and human resources, and links with the New Development Bank, cutting dependence on the core, as Raúl Prebisch‘s centre–periphery analysis urged.
- Issues that bind North and South: climate adaptation, migration, terrorism, drug trafficking, and intellectual property in medicines.
- Digital and technological sovereignty: a common position on data flows, AI governance and technology transfer.
- UN-centred multilateralism: return economic questions to the General Assembly; press Security Council reform on the Ezulwini Consensus.
- Values and people: a progressive agenda on democracy, human rights and pluralism, and civil-society exchanges, to give the movement a social base.
Feasibility and India’s role
- Obstacles: heterogeneity (Gulf monarchies to Cuba), wars between members, and competition from BRICS, the G-20 and regional bodies that deliver concrete goods.
- Signs of life: the Kampala mid-term ministerial (October 2025) demanded the lifting of unilateral coercive measures and debt relief; on 23 September 2026 Uganda, as chair, asked the General Assembly to negotiate a binding International Covenant on the Right to Development.
- India: T. P. Sreenivasan (2018) recalls India using the NAM constituency in UN-reform talks, and proposes a core of near-equals on the IBSA or G-15 model. India’s Voice of the Global South summits and the African Union’s G-20 entry (2023) show it can bridge NAM to larger forums.
Conclusion
NAM’s strength cannot come from nostalgia for bipolarity. It must become a negotiating bloc with machinery, a narrow agenda and a working partnership with the G-77. Left declaratory, it stays what C. Raja Mohan (2016) called a movement “in coma”; reformed, it remains the only body the South can enter without invitation.