Pivotal Powers: Multilateral Reform and Minilateral Cooperation

This is a chapter from "Pivotal Powers 2024: Innovative Engagement Strategies for Global Governance, Security, and Artificial Intelligence".

The end of the Cold War was the golden age of multilateralism. The cessation of great-power rivalry and the emergence of unipolarity created conditions conducive for greater regional integration in Europe and Asia. But the unipolar moment is over. China’s rise, its turn as an assertive and aggressive actor in the Indo-Pacific, and its coordination with Russia to influence existing multilateral institutions while creating new ones—at regional and global levels—have generated unprecedented challenges.

Generalized conflict between China and Russia, on one hand, and the United States, on the other, has largely disabled the UN Security Council. Permanent-member veto power has left the body unable to affect Russia’s war in Ukraine or the war in Gaza, despite numerous General Assembly resolutions.

As a result of these and other new challenges, the inability of existing institutions to solve them, and a perceived imbalance in the international system, middle powers are proliferating their own regional organizations and more flexible arrangements in the form of minilaterals. As Dino Patti Djalal, former Indonesian vice foreign minister writes, “while Western nations are beginning to de-risk from China and Russia, and as the space for dialogue between them shrinks, middle powers of the Global South are forming unprecedented economic, diplomatic and strategic links with one another.”

This chapter examines Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa as pivotal powers on issues of governance. All are influential regional powers and leading diplomatic players. Brazil, India, and South Africa are original BRICS members and centrally engaged in questions of multilateral reform. Indonesia is a growing power and a leader in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). All four are agenda shapers in the G20, with Indonesia, India, and Brazil, sequentially hosting the 2022-2024 summits, and South Africa to host in 2025 (the African Union was given permanent membership during the New Delhi summit). Clearly, there are other countries that could have made the cut, especially Türkiye, which, according to the Lowy Institute’s Global Diplomacy Index, now has the world’s third-largest diplomatic presence. But given China’s centrality in the evolving international system, Indonesia was included instead.