Indispensable Middle Power (Part-1) |
The unipolar moment may be receding, but the forces that benefited from it are not relinquishing their privileges quietly. Through military coercion, unilateral sanctions, tariff pressure, control over international financial networks and the persistent claim to decide which wars are lawful and whose sovereignty deserves protection, declining unilateralism is attempting to preserve its narrative supremacy and prolong its hold over the global political and economic order. The transition to multipolarity is therefore not an automatic consequence of redistributed power; it is a contest over who will write the rules, how universally those rules will apply and whether the powerful will finally be bound by the same international law they have long invoked against the weak.
There is growing recognition that the emerging order will neither be written nor operated by the great powers alone. Its stability will increasingly depend upon middle powers capable of building coalitions, connecting regions, mediating conflicts and preventing competition among major states from becoming permanent confrontation. Such countries may lack the capacity to dominate the international system, but they possess sufficient diplomatic reach, economic potential, military credibility and strategic geography to shape its rules and outcomes. BRICS embodies this promise—yet its continued exclusion of Pakistan, one of the Global South’s most consequential middle powers, leaves its architecture conspicuously incomplete.
The New Delhi Declaration adopted at the 18th BRICS Summit represents considerably more than another multilateral communiqué. Its defence of sovereign equality, representative global........