From the New International Economic Order to the G20: how the ‘global South’ is restructuring world capitalism from within

In the early 1970s the G77 and the Non Aligned Movement (nam) challenged the material and intellectual pillars of the postwar liberal capitalist system through collective action at the UN to establish a New International Economic Order (nieo). The aim was to complete the ‘emancipation’ of the ‘global South’ by creating binding institutional frameworks, legal regimes and redistributive mechanisms correcting historically constructed core–periphery disparities. That ambitious effort failed in the face of ‘Northern’ resistance and national segmentation within the nam. Today re-emerging states of the global South are engaged in a more successful effort to gain voice and alter international hierarchy by claiming a central place in the world capitalist system and restructuring it from within. The vertical late-modern world system centred in the Atlantic and ordered by the ‘West’ is thus gradually giving way to a polycentric international structure in which new regional and transnational ‘South–South’ linkages are being formed. This paper critically reviews the transformation and argues that, while it is creating long sought-for conditions of relative international equality, it has also dampened the emancipatory promise of the anti-colonial struggle.