Model answer & approach
- Global South-sensitive model of globalization would prevent the danger emanating from overcentralized globalization. Discuss. (Answer in 250 words)
Introduction
Over-centralised globalisation concentrates rule-making, finance and technology in a few Northern hands, and its fragility is systemic rather than accidental. A Global South-sensitive model would disperse that authority, which is necessary but not sufficient.
Body
1. The diagnosis: Wallerstein's world-systems theory places the South in a periphery that supplies value it does not capture, and Robert Cox adds that institutions carry hegemony because theory "is always for someone and for some purpose".
2. The mechanism: IMF quotas still give Washington an effective veto, the WTO's single undertaking narrowed policy space through TRIPS and investor-state arbitration, and lead firms govern value chains from outside.
3. The costs: vaccine inequity during COVID-19, with the India-South Africa TRIPS waiver proposal of 2020 only partly conceded in 2022; debt distress in Zambia, Sri Lanka and Ghana under a slow G20 Common Framework; and a climate finance goal at COP29 in Baku of 300 billion dollars against the G77's demand for 1.3 trillion.
4. What the model contains: differentiated obligations under CBDR-RC, restored special and differential treatment, plural standard-setters, and regional architecture such as AfCFTA, the New Development Bank and local-currency settlement.
5. India's version: the Voice of the Global South Summits since 2023 and the African Union's permanent G20 seat won at New Delhi, which reform multilateralism rather than exit it.
6. The caveat: the South is not one interest, since Gulf exporters, China and least-developed states diverge, and decentralisation could harden into rival blocs.
Conclusion
Dispersing authority does reduce systemic fragility, so the claim holds. It works only as reform from within, however, because a South that merely exits will meet the same asymmetries under another name.
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