The spotlight cast on Carney merely illuminates what Dipesh Chakrabarty termed the “inequality of ignorance”: the Global North’s privilege of ignoring much of the experience, production, and accumulation of knowledge in the Global South. The dissonant notes of Carney’s speech in Davos resonated with scholars, policymakers, and activists from the Global South, allowing us to affirm that we are at the forefront of discussions about the farce of the liberal international order constructed by the Global North and about the consequent reproduction of its privileges. Rather than representing the locus of backwardness and dysfunction—as portrayed in Western mainstream media and academia—the Global South represents the future: a space of innovation where alternatives are daily rehearsed, experienced, and debated. Yet this effervescence of ideas is rendered invisible and erased by the geopolitics of knowledge that, since colonial times, has authorized and amplified certain voices such as that of a Canadian leader in Davos while disauthorizing others, even when more numerous, such as those of the Global South.
BRICS can be understood precisely as one of these spaces of institutional innovation and political articulation of alternatives to the liberal international order. BRICS is a grouping of emerging economies Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, Iran, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, an invited member still pending full formal accession whose main purpose is to promote the transformation of the global governance system established after World War II through the reform of traditional financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. It also seeks to contribute to the construction of a multipolar order that reflects the distribution of power in the twenty‑first century and offers greater decision‑making power to countries of the so‑called Global South. Since 2009, the grouping has held annual meetings chaired by one of its member states. The first BRIC Summit without South Africa was held in 2009 in Yekaterinburg, Russia.
However, BRICS did not emerge in 2009 as a tabula rasa; rather, it emerged imbued with memories and lessons from previous struggles conducted within various movements, groupings, and deliberative arenas of the “Third World,” such as the Non‑Aligned Movement, the Group of 77, and demands for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), among others. It is worth noting that all these spaces were permeated by demands for a revision of the liberal international order, which excluded less developed countries from international decision‑making and whose norms such as sovereignty, proclaimed as universal were routinely violated by great powers, not accidentally but as what Stephen Krasner termed “organized hypocrisy.”
The spotlight cast on Carney merely illuminates what Dipesh Chakrabarty termed the “inequality of ignorance”: the Global North’s privilege of ignoring much of the experience, production, and accumulation of knowledge in the Global South. The dissonant notes of Carney’s speech in Davos resonated with scholars, policymakers, and activists from the Global South, allowing us to affirm that we are at the forefront of discussions about the farce of the liberal international order constructed by the Global North and about the consequent reproduction of its privileges. Rather than representing the locus of backwardness and dysfunction—as portrayed in Western mainstream media and academia—the Global South represents the future: a space of innovation where alternatives are daily rehearsed, experienced, and debated. Yet this effervescence of ideas is rendered invisible and erased by the geopolitics of knowledge that, since colonial times, has authorized and amplified certain voices—such as that of a Canadian leader in Davos—while disauthorizing others, even when more numerous, such as those of the Global South.
BRICS can be understood precisely as one of these spaces of institutional innovation and political articulation of alternatives to the liberal international order. BRICS is a grouping of emerging economies Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, Iran, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, an invited member still pending full formal accession whose main purpose is to promote the transformation of the global governance system established after World War II through the reform of traditional financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. It also seeks to contribute to the construction of a multipolar order that reflects the distribution of power in the twenty‑first century and offers greater decision‑making power to countries of the so‑called Global South. Since 2009, the grouping has held annual meetings chaired by one of its member states. The first BRIC Summit without South Africa was held in 2009 in Yekaterinburg, Russia.
However, BRICS did not emerge in 2009 as a tabula rasa; rather, it emerged imbued with memories and lessons from previous struggles conducted within various movements, groupings, and deliberative arenas of the “Third World,” such as the Non‑Aligned Movement, the Group of 77, and demands for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), among others. It is worth noting that all these spaces were permeated by demands for a revision of the liberal international order, which excluded less developed countries from international decision‑making and whose norms such as sovereignty, proclaimed as universal were routinely violated by great powers, not accidentally but as what Stephen Krasner termed “organized hypocrisy.”
It should be recalled that much of the Global South was still under colonial rule when the liberal international order was designed and institutionalized in the post‑World War II period. Looking at the design of its institutions such as the UN Security Council and the Bretton Woods Institutions (IMF and World Bank) it becomes evident that they were structured by inequality, as great powers arrogated to themselves the privilege of veto power, which in practice allows them to invalidate the decisions of the majority of states in the international system. In the case of the Security Council, the victorious powers of World War II granted themselves permanent seats and veto power on the premise that the body’s efficiency depended on the military capacity and special responsibility of the great powers for maintaining order. The prevailing view is that a more democratic Security Council would compromise the body’s efficiency. Yet what we have today is an institution that is neither representative nor efficient. It is scandalous that, even today, when more than half of the world’s conflicts take place on the African continent, no African country is represented on the Council as a permanent member. Africa thus continues to be treated as an object of intervention a topic rather than a subject with decision‑making power or an intelligible voice. Or, to use Carney’s expression, Africa is not at the table but on the menu.
BRICS has adopted a divergent vision: efficiency and representativeness are two sides of the same coin, thereby challenging the notion that the powerful possess an exceptional capacity to foresee and shape the world’s future. In line with critical and feminist authors such as Du Bois and Cynthia Enloe, the periphery is seen as better able to diagnose international problems, since it directly experiences the system’s inequalities and contradictions. Yet this vision is not free of contradictions. For example, Brazil has consistently called for the democratization of the Security Council and has pressed for the inclusion of the issue in BRICS declarations. However, when the time came to expand the number of full BRICS members beyond the original five, Brazilian diplomacy showed hesitation, fearing that expansion could transform BRICS into a new G77, create coordination problems, hinder consensus, and reduce Brazil’s influence within the grouping.
If the post‑World War II period was seen as a turning point giving rise to a new international order, one that, as Carney suggests, enabled countries like Canada to prosper for the “Third World”, these promises never materialized. For this group of countries, the new order retained much of the old colonial order in terms of material and epistemic inequality. These countries remained subject to the international division of labor as commodity exporters, and their voices and aspirations were systematically disauthorized by political and economic elites.
