As BRICS expands its membership and Western-led institutions face renewed uncertainty, an increasingly familiar question has resurfaced across policy circles, think tanks, and academic debates: who should lead the Global South? The question has gained urgency as the liberal international order enters one of its deepest crises in decades. The return of Donald Trump to the White House has intensified pressures on multilateral institutions already weakened by years of geopolitical fragmentation. From the paralysis of global climate negotiations to renewed trade unilateralism and declining confidence in Western-led institutions, analysts increasingly warn that the post-Cold War governance model is eroding. If traditional Western powers are retreating from the institutions they once built, who will step in?
Yet this conversation rests on a flawed assumption: that the Global South must eventually produce a leader that resembles the historical trajectory of leadership in the Global North. This assumption is deeply embedded in mainstream International Relations theory. Frameworks such as hegemonic stability theory and power transition theory — associated with Kindleberger, Gilpin, and Organski — share a common premise: stable international order requires concentrated power. Leadership is understood as hierarchical, centralized, and materially concentrated in one or a few dominant actors capable of providing public goods, enforcing norms, and shaping institutional architecture. Historically, this framework emerged from specific Northern experiences: British imperial dominance in the nineteenth century and American post-war hegemony in the twentieth.
The problem is that these historically contingent experiences were gradually transformed into universal models. As scholars such as Amitav Acharya, Arlene Tickner and David Blaney have argued, mainstream IR has frequently universalized Western historical trajectories while marginalizing alternative forms of political organization. The question of who should lead the Global South reproduces this bias — and its effects are visible in real time. Every time the question surfaces in a panel discussion or op-ed, it generates the same frustration: China is too asymmetric, India too cautious, Brazil too constrained, BRICS too fragmented. The conversation stalls not because the Global South lacks agency, but because the category being applied does not fit the political reality being described.
This framework becomes increasingly problematic when applied to contemporary Southern powers. China has dramatically expanded its international influence through the Belt and Road Initiative and institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. According to AidData, China became the world’s largest bilateral lender to developing countries between 2013 and 2023. Yet many countries across Africa, Latin America, and Asia remain cautious about replacing dependence on Western financial institutions with new asymmetries centered on Beijing. Chinese influence is substantial, but influence does not automatically produce legitimacy.
India presents a different model. Through the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation Programme, India has trained more than 200,000 professionals from over 160 countries while expanding concessional credit lines across Africa and Asia. Still, New Delhi’s foreign policy continues to emphasize strategic autonomy over systemic leadership ambitions.
Brazil has historically played an important role in coalition-building through forums such as IBSA, BRICS, and the G20. During its G20 presidency in 2024, Brazil successfully repositioned development concerns at the center of global discussions. Yet Brazil’s international influence continues to operate through coalition-building rather than unilateral leadership — a pattern that reinforces the broader argument of this article.
The repeated failure to identify a single leader may reveal less about the weakness of the Global South and more about the inadequacy of our analytical categories. Rather than producing hegemonic leaders, the Global South has historically generated what might be understood as dynamic poles of coordination: flexible, issue-specific arrangements in which different actors assume prominence depending on the agenda, the region, and the moment — without any single one subordinating the rest. This is not multilateralism in the traditional sense, which still assumes a leading power setting the rules. Nor is it simply coalition politics. It is a mode of collective agency in which influence is distributed, rotational, and context-dependent — and in which the absence of a fixed center is a feature, not a failure.
These forms of coordination are visible across multiple dimensions. In development finance, institutions such as the New Development Bank, CAF – Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, and FONPLATA have expanded alternatives to traditional Bretton Woods institutions without functioning as instruments of a singular hegemon. The New Development Bank has approved more than 120 projects worth approximately US$40 billion since its creation. CAF approved more than US$15 billion in operations in 2024, consolidating its role in infrastructure, climate adaptation, and energy transition financing. These institutions rarely appear in mainstream leadership debates despite quietly reshaping development governance from below.
In diplomatic coordination, the Group of 77 — now representing 134 countries — continues to function as one of the largest collective bargaining platforms within multilateral negotiations, particularly on development financing, trade, and climate justice. This logic is not new. The Bandung Conference of 1955 brought together 29 countries representing more than half of the world’s population — without producing a singular leader, and without needing one. What it produced instead was a shared political grammar: a set of principles around non-alignment, sovereignty, and mutual cooperation that proved more durable than any individual hegemon could have guaranteed. The subsequent Non-Aligned Movement institutionalized this pluralist logic further. These are not simply historical antecedents — they are evidence that the model of distributed coordination has already worked, under far more adverse conditions than today.
Current debates about global governance increasingly frame the future in binary terms: either Western leadership survives, or a new hegemon replaces it. This binary obscures the possibility that emerging actors may be constructing alternative forms of governance that are more fragmented, negotiated, and decentralized. As Andrew Hurrell and Oliver Stuenkel have noted, Southern institutions face genuine governance challenges, unequal power relations, and resource constraints. Yet dismissing them because they do not resemble traditional hegemonic leadership misses an important transformation unfolding in global politics.
The Global South may never produce a singular leader because its political trajectories have often been shaped by resistance to hierarchical domination rather than aspirations to replicate it. In a world increasingly defined by institutional fragmentation, hegemonic fatigue, and growing distrust toward concentrated power, the capacity to coordinate without a center — to build collective agency through dynamic poles rather than fixed hierarchies — may not be a weakness. It may be one of the Global South’s most significant contributions to the future of global governance.
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