Embedded multipolarity in a polarized world

In the present report, submitted pursuant to Human Rights Council resolution 54/4, after exploring various interpretations of the current multipolar international order, the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order suggests that multipolarity should be fully embedded within the normative and institutional framework of the United Nations system. In this vein, he proposes the establishment of a global regulatory delivery index.

During the reporting period, the Independent Expert participated in a number of events, including the following:
(a) Global Civilizations Dialogue, panel discussion on the theme “Building an equal and orderly multipolar world”, Beijing (10 and 11 July 2025);
(b) International Society of Public Law (ICON•S) annual conference, on the theme “At the crossroads of public law”, panel discussion on the theme “Contemporary challenges to global justice”, Brasília (28–30 July 2025);
(c) International Association of Constitutional Law round tables on the themes: “Peace and constitutions”, Lesbos, Greece (4 and 5 July 2025); “Today’s emergencies and wars: a challenge to international law and constitutional frameworks”, Uppsala, Sweden (4 and 5 May 2026); and “Constitutionalism in the age of global ecological challenges”, Istanbul, Türkiye (5 and 6 June 2026);
(d) Chinese Modernization Forum, Tsinghua University, Beijing (4 September 2025);
(e) Human Rights Program and Program of Law and Society in the Muslim Word, Harvard Law School, lecture on “Global human rights and democracy in a multipolar world” (21 October 2025);
(f) “Instrumentalization of the judiciary”, conference, Turkish Bar Association, Ankara (20 November 2025);
(g) Delphi Forum, panel discussion on the question “Is there a role for the United Nations in the New World Order?”, Delphi, Greece (24 April 2026);
(h) World Decolonization Forum, on the theme “Decolonizing international law”, Istanbul, Türkiye (11 and 12 May 2026);
(i) North-South Centre of the Council of Europe, concluding remarks at the thirty-first award ceremony of the North-South Prize, Lisbon (18 and 19 May 2026);
(j) Activities organized in connection with the Ebru Timtik Award Ceremony, Budapest (18 June 2026);
(k) Webinar (discussion with Cory Doctorow and Kim Stanley Robinson), on future governance through the lens of science fiction (19 June 2026).

The Independent Expert held a series of bilateral meetings with States Members of the United Nations in Geneva and New York. In addition, he engaged in exchanges with the South Centre in Geneva, the North-South Centre of the Council of Europe and representatives of non-governmental organizations.

There is a recurrent pattern in the history of international relations: hegemonic powers tend to instrumentalize international law during periods of dominance and to disengage from it as their relative power declines. It is generally admitted that the hegemony of the United States of America has experienced a gradual erosion, further accelerated by the way that globalization has decentralized the economic dominance of the United States. Even the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, spoke of the unipolar dominance of the United States as “an anomaly” and “a product of the end of the cold war”.¹ Nevertheless, a significant body of scholarship continues to argue that the international system remains, in structural terms, unipolar or at least defined by “partial unipolarity”:² the United States has perhaps declined relative to its peak in the immediate post-cold war years, but it remains so far above every other State in aggregate military, financial and technological capability as to constitute the system’s sole pole. A related current of thought recognizes the rise of China as a contesting Power, but claims that it has reached its peak, without being able to challenge unipolarity.³ The “unipolarists” conflate capability preponderance with hegemonic order capacity – two distinct phenomena. A system is not unipolar simply because one State commands the largest military budget; it is unipolar if that State can translate its capabilities into systemic rule-setting and compliance.

1. As cited in Julian Gewirtz, “How China wins: Beijing’s advantages in a revisionist order”, Foreign Affairs, vol. 104, No. 4 (July/August 2025). ↩
2. Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “The myth of multipolarity: American Power’s staying power”, Foreign Affairs, vol. 102, No. 3 (May/June 2023). ↩
3. Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China (New York, W.W. Norton, 2022). ↩

Hegemony requires more than just military might and control of the financial system; it requires legitimacy. The collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 did not result in an end to American hegemony in its bloc, not even to massive reactions, despite the imposition of a 10 per cent universal import charge by then President of the United States, Richard Nixon. The reason is simple: Western States have generally perceived the United States as a benign hegemon and the ultimate guarantor of a liberal economic order, adapting to its shifts rather than contesting its dominance. The situation is different today. There is perhaps no clearer indication of the decline of American might than the coercive policies pursued by the current President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, especially towards allies. The violence of the tariffs is not power, but its opposite. As Hannah Arendt underscored, power is collective, consensual and relational, whereas violence is instrumental and coercive and can destroy power.⁴

4. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1970). ↩

A second school of international relations holds that the emerging order is essentially bipolar, with China and the United States as the new poles structurally analogous to the cold war super-Powers. The claim is that these two countries are sufficiently far above all other States in aggregate capability to define the structural parameters of the system.⁵ It is true that China now exceeds the level the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics reached on almost every relevant dimension, besides the nuclear arsenal.⁶ However, the bipolarity thesis rests on a definition of structural polarity as an antagonism between two countries having similar capacities of power at most levels, including economic, technological, military and demographic. Cold war bipolarity was not merely a distribution of capabilities however. It was a political and institutional architecture: two hermetically sealed alliance blocs, near-total economic separation and an ideological division that compelled third States to align with one of the two poles, in a typical zero-sum game.

5. Øystein Tunsjø, The Return of Bipolarity in World Politics (Columbia University Press, 2018). ↩
6. Jennifer Lind, “Back to bipolarity: how China’s rise transformed the balance of power”, International Security, vol. 49, No. 2 (2024). ↩

None of these structural conditions exist today, despite Mr. Trump’s overtures for a group of two (G⁷-2)7 “condominium”. China not only formally declares that it does not have ambitions to become a super-Power, but also has consistently and deliberately declined to construct an alliance system equivalent to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, preferring instead networks of strategic partnerships that carry no binding military obligations. This is 1 As cited in Julian Gewirtz, “How China wins: Beijing’s advantages in a revisionist order”, Foreign Affairs, vol. 104, No. 4 (July/August 2025). 2 Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “The myth of multipolarity: American Power’s staying power”, Foreign Affairs, vol. 102, No. 3 (May/June 2023). 3 Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China (New York, W.W. Norton, 2022). 4 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1970). 5 Øystein Tunsjø, The Return of Bipolarity in World Politics (Columbia University Press, 2018). 6 Jennifer Lind, “Back to bipolarity: how China’s rise transformed the balance of power”, International Security, vol. 49, No. 2 (2024). 7 C. Fred Bergsten coined the term “G-2” to suggest that China and the United States would provide joint leadership of the global economic system (C. Fred Bergsten, “A partnership of equals, how Washington should respond to China’s economic challenge”, Foreign Affairs, vol. 87, No. 4 (July/August 2008)). GE.26-09529 a strategic choice. In joint statements, therefore, China and the Russian Federation have explicitly affirmed that their partnership is unlike military-political alliances of the cold war type.

7. C. Fred Bergsten coined the term “G-2” to suggest that China and the United States would provide joint leadership of the global economic system (C. Fred Bergsten, “A partnership of equals, how Washington should respond to China’s economic challenge”, Foreign Affairs, vol. 87, No. 4 (July/August 2008)). ↩

Moreover, globalization and the intertwining of global value chains do not allow a bifurcation of the world; globalization has imposed an economic interdependence not just between the putative poles, but among all major countries in the world, which further disqualifies the bipolar argument. The United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had minimal trade, no shared financial institutions and no mutual dependence on integrated supply chains. The complete economic decoupling that was the operational precondition for cold war bipolarity does not exist between China and the United States and cannot occur without costs that would be prohibitive for both economies and for the global trading system as a whole. Even after two successive Administrations of escalating tariff conflict, China and the United States remain among each other’s largest trading partners.

It is true that the “hyperglobalization” of the past, based on the neoliberal tenet of full supremacy of the economy over politics, is over. Today, not only countries, but also transnational companies, try to prioritize the safety of the supply chain over low-cost trade. Data released by the World Trade Organization reveal that, during the height of globalization, from 1995 to 2008, global trade grew at an average annual rate of 9.4 per cent. However, the figure plummeted to 1.7 per cent in the decade after the 2008 global financial crisis. This however does not mean that the world is fragmenting into two distinct economic blocks with different technology standards and cross-border payment and trade systems. “De-risking” is quite different from “decoupling”. The physical economy does not allow such a dramatic amputation of relations, although it is possible that, in the digital and artificial intelligence realms, the gradual estrangement of the American and Chinese sectors will result in two distinct global standards. Even in the Western hemisphere, China is now the top economic partner of 10 of the 12 South American countries. Over the past two decades, Chinese exports to the region grew almost elevenfold, driven mainly by manufactured goods and more recently electric vehicles, while imports from Latin America to China increased fourteenfold, dominated by iron, copper, soy and oil. More indicative of the irreversible trend of unified global value chains is the acceleration of the economic influence of China in the area after Mr. Trump’s assertive posture for a new “Donroe doctrine”:⁸ In 2025 (by November), while Chinese exports to the United States had fallen by 18 per cent, shipments to Latin American countries had increased by nearly 8 per cent, reaching approximately $276 billion.⁹

8. The “Donroe doctrine” is Mr. Trump’s aggressive reimagining of the Monroe Doctrine, to redefine Latin America as an exclusive sphere of American influence. ↩
9. See https://forbes.com.mx/china-consolida-su-presencia-economica-en-mexico-y-resto-de-latinoamerica-entre-fricciones-con-eu/ (in Spanish). ↩

Most decisively, asserting diplomatic agency, most of the rest of the world rejects the bipolar trap and the duopoly, and thus the weaponization of the world economy that those entail. Especially the global South is exercising, with increasing confidence and strategic sophistication, what recent scholars have termed “active non-alignment”, that is, the principled refusal to choose between the two great Powers. These States diversify trade, reroute finance and keep their options open issue by issue, according to their own national and regional interests. For instance, the foreign policy evolution in India, from the original Movement of Non-Aligned Countries to contemporary “multi-alignment”, demonstrated by its simultaneous membership in BRICS and in the security partnership with Australia, Japan and the United States, illustrates this dynamic with particular clarity. As the Minister for Foreign Affairs of India, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, has noted, India and other countries in the global South are not simply sitting on the fence, but rather standing on their own ground. This is the exercise of genuine strategic autonomy that bipolarity, by structural definition, cannot accommodate.

A third family of interpretations holds that the fault lines of the emerging order are primarily civilizational or that the appropriate spatial unit of analysis should be the Großraum (great space) of Carl Schmitt’s legal theory. Samuel Huntington’s prediction that the post-cold war world would be organized around conflicts between seven or eight major civilizations, with religion as the primary differentiating marker, has been demonstrably incorrect on its most consequential empirical tests.¹⁰ Most of the deepest conflicts of the post-cold war era have been within civilizations. The Russian Federation-Ukraine war – the defining geopolitical rupture of the current decade – occurs entirely within what Huntington classified as Orthodox Christian civilization. The rise of BRICS further challenges his thesis: each of its founding members represents a different Huntingtonian civilization, yet they have forged a coalition of interests around international governance and multipolarity. As Amartya Sen has observed, the civilizational framing essentializes identity, suppressing the multiple dimensions of belonging – regional, linguistic, class, professional and generational – that cut across any proposed civilizational boundary.¹¹

10. See Nils Gilman, “Samuel Huntington is getting his revenge”, Foreign Policy, No. 256 (2025); and Davide Orsi, ed., The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ 25 Years On: A Multidisciplinary Appraisal (EInternational Relations Publishing, 2020). ↩
11. Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (W.W. Norton, 2006), chaps. 1 and 2. ↩

The Schmittian Großraum framework has gained traction across the political spectrum, from the left to the right, to frame the world as divided into secular, civilizational “great spaces”; this trend has become particularly prominent in recent discourse surrounding the confrontation between purported “Eurasian values” and the American neoliberal model.¹² The Großraum theory presupposes a cultural and political homogeneity within each “great space”, under the leadership of a hegemonic State, that does not exist in any of the proposed modern equivalents.¹³ The West is no longer a cohesive entity, as it has fractured under the weight of geopolitical shifts and the second Administration of Mr. Trump.¹⁴ BRICS is not a Großraum: it has no single Reich (leading political power) and no shared political idea and has members whose strategic interests are often antagonistic. The so-called “Islamic great space” encompasses Sunni and Shia traditions across Arab, Turkish, Iranian and Southeast Asian cultural contexts with radically different political systems, goals and values. The proposed “Eurasian space” also encompasses peoples who do not share much civilizational affinity.

12. See Alexander Dugin, The Theory of a Multipolar World (Arktos Media, 2021). ↩
13. The European Union may be the only space that could be considered a nascent Großraum, with the Franco-German axis as the leading agent. ↩
14. A January 2026 European Council on Foreign Relations study indicates that only 16 per cent of those in major European Union nations now view the United States as an “ally”, signaling a shift towards a “post-Western” identity. (European Council on Foreign Relations, “How Trump is making China great again – and what it means for Europe”, 15 January 2026, available from https://ecfr.eu/publication/how-trump-is-making-china-great-again-and-what-it-means-for-europe/.) ↩

Even the Monroe Doctrine, which is the archetype of Großraum in Schmitt’s original theory, is no longer a reality in alignment with international law – if it ever was. What began as a non-intervention declaration was converted by the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904 into a licence for repeated United States military intervention throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. That history of United States imperialism is the reason no Latin American State today, regardless of its ideological orientation, would accept a renewed United States Großraum claim over the Western hemisphere. As mentioned above, there are equally strong structural economic reasons why such a claim would be unworkable: China is the largest trading partner for the majority of Latin American economies,¹⁵ a situation that renders any attempt at hemispheric supply chain decoupling economically impossible in a world of integrated global production networks.

15. See Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “The challenges behind China’s global South policies”, December 2024. ↩

The Großraum model and its civilizational variants are not merely analytically incorrect; they are normatively incompatible with the architecture of the post-1945 international order. The concept itself is derivative of the political idea of a Reich that orders its space. The entire construction of the post-1945 human rights system – universal, indivisible and enforceable through international mechanisms independent of the consent of great Powers – is the direct institutional negation of the Großraum logic. 10 See Nils Gilman, “Samuel Huntington is getting his revenge”, Foreign Policy, No. 256 (2025); and Davide Orsi, ed., The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ 25 Years On: A Multidisciplinary Appraisal (E-International Relations Publishing, 2020). 11 Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (W.W. Norton, 2006), chaps. 1 and 2. 12 See Alexander Dugin, The Theory of a Multipolar World (Arktos Media, 2021). 13 The European Union may be the only space that could be considered a nascent Großraum, with the Franco-German axis as the leading agent. 14 A January 2026 European Council on Foreign Relations study indicates that only 16 per cent of those in major European Union nations now view the United States as an “ally”, signaling a shift towards a “post-Western” identity. (European Council on Foreign Relations, “How Trump is making China great again – and what it means for Europe”, 15 January 2026, available from https://ecfr.eu/publication/how-trump-is-making-china-great-again-and-what-it-means-for-europe/.) 15 See Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “The challenges behind China’s global South policies”, December 2024. GE.26-09529 IV. Challenges to multilateralism: the risk of lawlessness and fragmentation of the international order

The multipolar transformation of the global order is neither temporary nor reversible, but its implications for international cooperation remain contested and uncertain. The fundamental choice before States is whether multipolarity evolves into fragmentation and competitive bloc confrontation or whether it can be channelled through inclusive, rules-based frameworks that strengthen rather than undermine international cooperation. Long-standing structural challenges within the United Nations system, including the paralysis of the Security Council due to the recurrent exercise of the veto, and the persistence of unresolved conflicts in the Sudan, Ukraine and the Middle East,¹⁶ have been intensified by recent United States foreign policy aimed at reshaping the international order by raw might. Besides the revival of aspirations of conquest, the invasion in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the unprovoked attack against the Islamic Republic of Iran and the threats against Cuba, the central characteristic of the new American diplomacy is the increasing reliance on unilateral economic instruments, specifically punitive tariffs, as the primary tools of diplomacy. In the words of the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, “the United States is beginning to monetize its hegemony”.¹⁷

16. See A/HRC/60/31. ↩
17. See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/09/canada-mark-carney-defence-spending-budget. ↩

These unilateral actions fundamentally challenge the principle in the Charter of the United Nations of sovereign equality of States (Article 2 (1)) and undermine the collective capacity of the international community to address transnational challenges through cooperative frameworks. The replacement of dialogue and negotiation with economic coercion is blatantly contrary to the emphasis in the Charter on the peaceful settlement of disputes (Article 2 (3)) and threatens to normalize power-based international relations. The resulting climate of systemic uncertainty disrupts global supply chains and disproportionately affects the realization of economic, social and cultural rights, particularly in smaller, trade-dependent economies that lack the economic resilience to absorb such shocks. It risks further undermining the whole United Nations ecosystem in a pattern of recurrent lawlessness, as it is concurrent with other massive violations of the international law, such as the genocide in Gaza and the multiple violations of State sovereignty by several United States interventions in the past year.¹⁸

18. Named operations involving heavy bombardment included those in Yemen (Rough Rider, March 2025), in the Islamic Republic of Iran (Midnight Hammer, June 2025 and Epic Fury, February 2026), in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (Absolute Resolve, January 2026), in the Syrian Arab Republic and in Iraq (Hawkeye Strike, December 2025). ↩

The impact extends beyond immediate income effects: disrupted trade relationships force structural adjustments that can entrench inequality and poverty, undermine social protection systems and limit fiscal space for investments in health, education and infrastructure. The weaponization of trade implies also a normalization of United States economic pressure tactics to achieve objectives unrelated to legitimate trade policy in many cases. In Canada and Mexico in 2025, the invocation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to threaten 25 per cent tariffs explicitly conditioned on enhanced migration enforcement represents an unprecedented linkage of trade policy to border control objectives. In Brazil in 2025, the imposition of a 50 per cent tariff on Brazilian steel, explicitly linked by public statements to ongoing domestic judicial proceedings concerning a former Head of State, constitutes a particularly egregious form of interference. This instrumentalization of economic interdependence to compel domestic policy changes in sovereign States raises serious concerns under the principle of non-intervention in matters essentially within domestic jurisdiction (Article 2 (7) of the Charter). The United States Supreme Court also found the use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, under which the tariffs were imposed, illegal,¹⁹ further emphasizing that these measures are a departure from the rule of law generally.

19. Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, 607 U.S. ___ (2026). ↩

Parallel to tariffs, there is an expanding use of sanctions as vehicle of coercive diplomacy or, in some cases, such as in Cuba, Iran (Islamic Republic of) and Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of), as tools for regime change. While the Security Council has recognized circumstances where targeted sanctions may be appropriate under Chapter VII of the Charter, unilateral sanctions imposed outside this framework are not compatible with international law, particularly when they impede the realization of the fundamental human rights to food, health and human dignity. The extraterritorial application of domestic financial regulations has created what may be characterized as a “compliance chilling effect”, whereby financial institutions worldwide, fearing exclusion from major financial systems, proactively overcomply with restrictions, thereby curtailing legitimate economic activity. This phenomenon disproportionately affects developing countries, restricting access to international banking services, hindering remittance flows vital to household survival and deterring the foreign direct investment essential for sustainable development.

The International Court of Justice, in its judgment in the case concerning military and paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua, issued on 27 June 1986, affirmed that coercive measures designed to deprive a State of its freedom of choice in its internal and external affairs constituted prohibited intervention under customary international law.²⁰ Contemporary unilateral sanctions regimes, particularly when reinforced by secondary sanctions, satisfy the Court’s threshold by design: their explicit purpose is to constrain sovereign choice, while their real aim is frequently regime change, pursued through economic attrition and the systematic hollowing of the targeted State’s capacity to fulfil its obligations towards its own population. Unilateral sanctions thus do not merely undermine sovereignty in the abstract; they generate humanitarian catastrophes in the concrete.

20. See Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America), Merits, Judgment, I.C.J. Reports 1986, p. 14. ↩

The cases of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and Cuba are the most illustrative. Unilateral measures imposed by the United States, unauthorized by the Security Council, ungrounded in any norm of general international law, have weakened the Venezuelan economy, severed the country’s access to global financial markets, blocked the repatriation of sovereign assets and denied ordinary Venezuelans access to medicines, food and basic public services. In Cuba, the subject of the longest-running comprehensive economic blockade in modern history, over six decades of embargo have systematically constrained access to essential goods, development finance and, most recently, fuel supplies. A United States presidential Executive Order issued on 1 May 2026 intensifies, to extreme and unprecedented levels, the economic, financial and commercial blockade. The consequences are tangible and severe: Cuba is experiencing acute energy shortages, with blackouts lasting up to 20 hours per day in many areas, directly impairing the refrigeration of food and medication and contributing to a deepening public health crisis.

Within multilateral institutions, there is a clear pattern of United States “instrumental engagement”, that is, participation calibrated either to reshape institutional agendas according to the preferences of the current Administration or, alternatively, to paralyse current policies. By January 2026, the United States had initiated a rolling process of disengagement from the multilateral institutional framework that, culminating in a Presidential Memorandum of 7 January 2026, encompassed the withdrawal from 66 international organizations and bodies, 31 within the United Nations system and 35 outside of it. This approach manifests in several concerning practices, in multiple contexts, indicatively:
(a) World Health Organization. The formal notice of withdrawal, coupled with the immediate cessation of all financial contributions, has created a critical funding vacuum in global health security infrastructure. The withdrawal affects not only pandemic preparedness but also essential programmes targeting tuberculosis, malaria, maternal and child health and disease surveillance systems;
(b) World Trade Organization. The systematic violation of the most favoured nation principle through arbitrary, country-specific tariff measures has rendered one of the foundational legal obligations of the World Trade Organization increasingly inoperative. The erosion of this principle through preferential tariff discrimination does not merely breach treaty commitments, it fragments the multilateral trading system into a constellation of competing bilateral arrangements, under the threat of tariffs or sanctions, structurally disadvantaging smaller economies that lack the bargaining power to negotiate favourable terms and driving a regression towards the mercantilist architecture that the post-1945 trade order was designed to dismantle;
(c) Climate protection. The United States has withdrawn, for the second time, from the Paris Agreement, and the Administration has aligned itself with major oil-producing States to obstruct a global plastics treaty, to pressure the European Union to abandon climate legislation and to torpedo the first-ever internationally agreed fee on carbon emissions from the shipping industry. The coercive character of this obstruction is not merely rhetorical. Diplomatic sources have reported that an Asian ambassador was warned that his country’s sailors would no longer be permitted to disembark at United States ports if he voted in favour of the shipping emissions agreement; Caribbean diplomats were threatened with visa blacklisting; and the Secretary of State of the United States personally contacted officials in multiple countries to threaten financial penalties and other punitive measures should they persist in supporting the agreement.²¹ At the United Nations in September 2025, Mr. Trump addressed world leaders with the explicit warning that States that did not abandon what he termed the “green energy scam”²² would face national failure, thereby inverting the logic of multilateral cooperation and framing it as a bilateral compliance problem;
(d) Foreign assistance architecture. The Executive Order of January 2025 freezing new obligations for foreign assistance has been deployed systematically as political leverage to pressure Member States to align with specific ideological positions on gender, reproductive rights, climate policy and democratic governance. While States retain sovereign discretion over the design and scope of their assistance programmes, the explicit conditioning of development cooperation on recipient conformity with donor country domestic policy preferences instrumentalizes aid, in direct contravention of the principles of development effectiveness affirmed in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and consolidated in the Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation.

21. Lisa Friedman, Max Bearak and Jeanna Smialek, “Trump officials accused of bullying tactics to kill a climate measure”, The New York Times, 6 November 2025. ↩
22. See https://gadebate.un.org/en/80/united-states-america. ↩

This pattern of coercive unilateralism extends beyond economic and institutional disruption to the direct targeting of institutions or individuals discharging international legal and human rights mandates. In February 2025, the United States imposed asset freezes and travel bans against International Criminal Court judges and prosecutors, in direct response to the Court’s issuance of arrest warrants in proceedings concerning war crimes by Israel. This constitutes an unprecedented assault on the institutional integrity of an international judicial body and, more broadly, on the principle of judicial independence as a foundational norm of the international rule of law. The imposition by the United States of sanctions on the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 constitutes another blatant violation of the immunities attached to international mandates under the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations. It threatens to produce a broader chilling effect and exemplifies the logic by which coercive unilateralism seeks to discipline the institutions of multilateral accountability rather than engage with them.

“Predatory hegemony”²³ may work for a time, but it is doomed to fail. Where there is power, resistance follows. Coercion can extract short-term concessions, but it also accelerates opposition, diversification and movement towards exit options and coalitions. The unilateral acts by the United States have catalysed a degree of collective affirmation of the multilateral normative framework that is itself significant as evidence of the resilience of the international order. The General Assembly, the Human Rights Council and diverse coalitions of Member States, spanning all regional groups, have responded through formal resolutions, public declarations and coordinated diplomatic or economic initiatives that reject the logic of coercive unilateralism.

23. Stephen Walt, “The predatory hegemon”, Foreign Affairs (March/April 2026), available at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/predatory-hegemon-walt. ↩

Individual States, including many that maintain close bilateral relationships with the United States, such as Brazil, Canada and Mexico, have refused to subordinate their multilateral commitments to that coercion – a choice of “active non-alignment” that the Independent Expert considers as one of the defining political features of the current international order. The paragraphs that follow document State practices, institutional initiatives and inter-governmental arrangements that conform, one way or another, to what the present report terms “embedded multipolarity” (see sect. VI below), that is, a diverse, non-hegemonic distribution of power operating within the normative framework of the United Nations system.

In an ironic Hegelian turn of events, the United States, the basic architect of the post-Second World War international order, is undermining that order, and China is emerging as a central actor, with expanding diplomatic, economic and institutional engagement. Immediately following Mr. Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, the President of China, Xi Jinping, in an address at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, positioned China as the new guardian of global rules for free trade. When the United States refused to appoint officials to the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization, China worked with the European Union to create an alternative resolution mechanism, which has ultimately been unsuccessful. The foreign policy discourse of China consistently invokes principles closely aligned with the Charter of the United Nations, including sovereign equality of States (Article 2 (1)), non-intervention in domestic jurisdiction (Article 2 (7)), peaceful settlement of disputes (Article 2 (3)) and international cooperation (Article 1 (3)).

The historical origins of the policy approach taken by China are the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence (mutual respect for sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference, equality, and peaceful coexistence), which were developed jointly by Burma, China and India in 1954 and formed the basis of the 10 Bandung Principles developed in 1955, reflecting the foundational moment of the non-alignment movement, aimed at uniting Asian and African nations against colonialism and cold war-bloc politics. In addition, China is deeply rooted in a realist perspective of the international order, aiming to support the multilateral system and help improve it, in parallel with its national interests. This engagement reflects an affirmation of the United Nations as the central forum for multilateral cooperation while simultaneously advancing proposals for institutional reform aimed at enhancing the representation and voices of developing countries. The emphasis placed by China on the democratization of international relations and its calls for reform of the international financial architecture resonate with long-standing demands from the global South for more equitable governance.

In recent years, China has put forward a number of global initiatives with explicit multilateral ambition, including the Global Development Initiative: building on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development for stronger, greener and healthier global development (2021), the Global Security Initiative (2022), the Global Civilization Initiative (2023) and the Global Governance Initiative (2025). The Secretary-General welcomed the Global Governance Initiative at a Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting as “anchored in multilateralism and underscoring the importance of safeguarding the international system with the UN at its core and the international order underpinned by international law”.²⁴ Chinese diplomacy reflects the view that these initiatives are interconnected. The Global Development Initiative provides the material foundation; the Global Security Initiative safeguards a peaceful environment; the Global Civilization Initiative builds a consensus of values; and the Global Governance Initiative supplies institutional and procedural guarantees. In the context of the Human Rights Council, China has made several proposals based on this framework, such as resolutions on promoting and protecting economic, social and cultural rights within the context of addressing inequalities, on the contribution of development to the enjoyment of all human rights, on promoting accessibility for the full enjoyment of all human rights by all and on marking anniversaries of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

24. UN News, “Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit: Guterres calls for strengthening multilateralism”, 1 September 2025, available at https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/09/1165755. ↩

Against the backdrop of unilateral fragmentation and economic coercion, the partnership agreement between the European Union and the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) emerges as a significant counter-example, although not an uncontested one. Upon full implementation, the agreement will constitute the largest trade arrangement concluded by either bloc, encompassing a combined market exceeding 700 million people. By institutionalizing robust links with the European Union, MERCOSUR strengthens its capacity to balance competing influences and pressures, especially those related to the “Donroe doctrine”, thereby enhancing sovereign agency in the conduct of external economic relations. The presence of a substantive third pillar of engagement, alongside relationships with China and the United States, reduces vulnerability to external economic and political pressure and expands policy space for sovereign development strategies tailored to national priorities.

Such cooperation, anchored as it is in negotiated legal commitments, subject to parliamentary ratification and democratic oversight, demonstrates that multipolarity need not fragment into antagonistic blocs but can coexist with cooperative, rules-based frameworks that advance shared prosperity and mutual respect, while the gap between that aspiration and its present enforceability remains a legitimate object of continued scrutiny. The agreement includes a dedicated chapter on trade and sustainable development, with binding commitments in the areas of environmental protection, climate action and labour rights, including with regard to ratification and implementation of core International Labour Organization conventions. The effectiveness of this chapter has nonetheless been questioned on two grounds. First, two of the four MERCOSUR States that are Parties to the agreement have, in recent years, distanced themselves from key multilateral climate commitments, prompting civil society representatives to ask how a text can present the Paris Agreement as binding while the underlying political commitment to the Paris Agreement is absent in practice. Second, and more significantly from a legal standpoint, the clause on responsible supply-chain management, which operationalizes the sustainability chapter’s human rights and environmental due diligence content, is explicitly excluded from the partnership agreement’s dispute-settlement mechanism, with the consequence that the formal classification of the partnership agreement as “binding” does not entail justiciability or enforceable remedy.

A more structural critique, advanced principally by trade unions, civil society organizations and scholars of the Third World Approaches to International Law tradition, holds that the partnership agreement reproduces rather than disturbs a centre-periphery division of labour inherited from the colonial and post-colonial economic order. The agreement does not alter the underlying trade architecture, under which MERCOSUR exports primary commodities and raw materials while importing European industrial and processed goods. The Independent Expert takes this critique seriously. However, the relevant comparison is not between the agreement and an idealized condition of equal exchange, which exists nowhere in the present international economic order, but between the agreement and the realistic alternatives available to MERCOSUR States under conditions of unilateral fragmentation. Embedded multipolarity does not rest on a claim that institutionalization dissolves structural asymmetry, but rather on an affirmation that the proliferation of institutionalized poles enlarges the sovereign agency of States in the periphery of the international economic order beyond what would be available to them under conditions of either unipolar dependency or wholly deinstitutionalized multipolar competition.

As multipolarity deepens and traditional North-South cooperation faces fiscal and political constraints, South-South and triangular cooperation have emerged as vital modalities for advancing development, strengthening institutional capacity and enhancing strategic autonomy. Rooted in principles of national ownership, mutual benefit and respect for sovereignty, these forms of cooperation complement traditional development assistance while addressing its historical limitations, including conditionality, asymmetry and misalignment with national priorities. South-South cooperation is anchored in established international frameworks, including the Buenos Aires Plan of Action for Promoting and Implementing Technical Cooperation among Developing Countries adopted by the United Nations Conference on Technical Cooperation among Developing Countries in 1978, the Nairobi outcome document of the High-level United Nations Conference on South-South Cooperation, adopted in 2009, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which recognizes South-South cooperation as an important element of international partnership (target 17.6 of the Sustainable Development Goals). Triangular cooperation expands this approach by incorporating a third actor, often a developed country or multilateral institution, that provides technical expertise, financial resources or facilitation while Southern partners retain leadership over substantive priorities and implementation. These policies provide developing countries with alternative pathways for capacity-building and knowledge exchange that reduce dependence on any single donor or political bloc.

Spain occupies a pivotal role as a primary facilitator of South-South and triangular cooperation, effectively leveraging its deeply rooted historical relationships, linguistic commonality and cultural affinities to bridge actors across continents. Through sustained engagement with regional bodies, such as the Ibero-American General Secretariat, the Ibero-American Programme for the Strengthening of South-South Cooperation, and the African Union, Madrid has moved beyond traditional paternalistic donor-recipient dynamics to foster more equitable, horizontal partnerships. Spain has also undertaken important multilateral efforts, such as the “In Defence of Democracy” initiative, launched in 2024 on the sidelines of the seventy-ninth session of the General Assembly and bringing together 22 countries (as of 2026) from both the global North and the global South.

This cooperative leadership is further distinguished by the increasingly assertive and independent foreign policy pursued by Spain. The Government of Spain has asked the European Commission to activate its blocking statute to prevent compliance with United States sanctions ⁠on judges of the International Criminal Court over the Court’s investigation into Israel. By maintaining a principled stance regarding the genocide in Gaza, alongside its consistent opposition to the illegal war²⁵ 25 on the Islamic Republic of Iran, and its condemnation of the invasion in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Spain has positioned itself as a guardian of multipolarity. In doing so, it serves as a practical blueprint for European strategic autonomy, proving that European interests are best served by an ethically grounded, multipolar engagement strategy rather than strict adherence to transatlantic alignment. 25 See https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/03/un-experts-denounce-aggression-iran-andlebanon-warn-devastating-regional. GE.26-09529

25. See https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/03/un-experts-denounce-aggression-iran-and-lebanon-warn-devastating-regional. ↩

South-South and triangular cooperation can strengthen the realization of human rights when explicitly designed with attention to inclusion, equality and participatory governance. Initiatives supporting public administration reform, gender mainstreaming, climate resilience and access to justice not only advance specific development objectives but also build institutional capacity to fulfil economic, social and cultural rights.

Beyond its role as a forum for economic multilateral cooperation, BRICS serves as a platform for advancing proposals to reform existing global governance structures, particularly the international financial architecture. Additionally, it provides development finance when traditional sources face fiscal constraints; enhanced South-South cooperation-building based on shared development experiences; platforms for collective negotiation that strengthen developing-country voices; and institutional innovations that may inspire reforms in established organizations. BRICS countries have consistently called for: enhanced representation of developing countries in International Monetary Fund governance through quota reforms; a greater voice for emerging economies in World Bank decision-making; reform of the Security Council to reflect contemporary rather than post-World War II power configurations; and greater developing country participation in global standard-setting bodies. These reform proposals resonate broadly across the global South and reflect legitimate concerns about the representational deficit in institutions created during a different historical era.

BRICS countries have explored developing alternative cross-border payment mechanisms to reduce dependence on United States dollar-denominated transactions and Western-controlled payment systems. These discussions gained urgency following financial sanctions imposed on various countries and concerns about payment system vulnerability. Initiatives include: bilateral currency swap agreements; expansion of local currency settlement in bilateral trade; development of national payment systems with cross-border interoperability; and exploration of central bank digital currencies for international transactions. From both a human rights perspective and a sovereignty perspective, these initiatives respond to legitimate concerns about excessive concentration of financial infrastructure and vulnerability to unilateral sanctions imposed outside Security Council frameworks. The ability to conduct international commerce without dependence on financial systems controlled by a single country or bloc constitutes a fundamental element of a democratic international order.

If BRICS manages to function as a complementary platform by expanding policy space and addressing governance deficits in existing institutions, it will strengthen multilateralism by making it more inclusive and responsive. Its impact depends significantly on the extent to which its initiatives maintain alignment with the principles of the Charter of the United Nations and international law; incorporate robust human rights, environmental and social safeguards; demonstrate transparency and accountability in operations; remain open to engagement with diverse partners; and contribute to global public goods, including through climate action, investment in infrastructure, pandemic preparedness and contributions to financial stability.

While multipolar, the contemporary international order is also fundamentally polycentric. It is shaped by a plurality of autonomous centres of decision-making and normative production that operate independently of traditional State-centric power. These centres of authority include:
(a) Non-State normative actors (such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and large coalitions of non-governmental organizations);
(b) Transnational regulatory networks (such as the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and the Financial Action Task Force);
(c) Dominant private actors (such as multinational companies, and technology platforms exercising quasi-jurisdictional authority).

This order is shaped by fluid, overlapping and pragmatic blocs of variable geometry, engaging in dynamic “multipartnerships”.²⁶ In order not to evolve in an anarchical manner, this polycentric multipolarity necessitates the multilateral United Nations framework of rules and practices. The analytical framework that both describes accurately the emerging order, and is most congruent with the aspirations of the Charter of the United Nations is what the Independent Expert terms “embedded multipolarity”: a genuinely diverse, non-hegemonic distribution of power across States and regions, operating within and sustained by the multilateral normative framework of the United Nations system.²⁷

26. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “Understanding 21st century power shifts”, The European Financial Review (24 June 2011). This is similar to the concept of “multiplex world order” put forward by Amitav Acharya in “After liberal hegemony: the advent of a multiplex world order”, Ethics & International Affairs, vol. 31, No. 3 (2017). ↩
27. Josep Borrell, then High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission, noted in 2023: “When the number of participants in a game increases, the natural response should be to strengthen the rules governing the game.” Josep Borrell, “Multipolarity without multilateralism,” European Union External Action blog, 24 September 2023, available at https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/multipolarity-without-multilateralism_en. ↩

Embedded multipolarity is the conceptual response to this paradox: it holds that a diverse distribution of power is not only compatible with a robust multilateral normative framework, but may be its most sustainable long-term foundation, provided that the framework is genuinely inclusive, autonomously authoritative and representative of the full diversity of States and peoples that now constitute the international community. The pathway forward lies in what is termed above as “cooperative pluralism”, an international order characterized by multiple, overlapping institutions and initiatives that coexist, interact and occasionally compete, but remain oriented towards shared global objectives, grounded in universal human rights, such as those articulated in the 2030 Agenda. Embedded multipolarity requires openness to diverse approaches and development models within a framework of common norms; transparency and information sharing across institutional boundaries; willingness to learn from varied experiences; mechanisms for coordination among overlapping initiatives; and sustained dialogue through inclusive multilateral forums capable of reconciling diversity with United Nations universality. Even at the beginning of the multipolar world, Henry Kissinger argued that “the contemporary quest for world order will require a coherent strategy to establish a concept of order within the various regions and to relate these regional orders to one another”.²⁸

28. Henry Kissinger, “Henry Kissinger on the assembly of a new world order,” The Wall Street Journal, 29 August 29 2014. ↩

The United Nations remains the indispensable framework for managing the embedded multipolarity. In a number of countries, public opinion of the Organization is still broadly supportive.²⁹ 29 No alternative forum possesses the universal membership, comprehensive mandate, normative authority or convening capacity of the United Nations. The principles of sovereign equality, peaceful dispute settlement, non-intervention balanced against human rights obligations, and international cooperation provide the essential common ground upon which diverse States with different political systems, development levels and strategic interests can engage constructively. 26 Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “Understanding 21st century power shifts”, The European Financial Review (24 June 2011). This is similar to the concept of “multiplex world order” put forward by Amitav Acharya in “After liberal hegemony: the advent of a multiplex world order”, Ethics & International Affairs, vol. 31, No. 3 (2017). 27 Josep Borrell, then High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission, noted in 2023: “When the number of participants in a game increases, the natural response should be to strengthen the rules governing the game.” Josep Borrell, “Multipolarity without multilateralism,” European Union External Action blog, 24 September 2023, available at https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/multipolarity-withoutmultilateralism_en. 28 Henry Kissinger, “Henry Kissinger on the assembly of a new world order,” The Wall Street Journal, 29 August 29 2014. 29 Moira Fagan and Andrew Prozorovsky, “UN seen favorably across 25 countries”, Pew Research Center, 5 September 2025. Available at https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/09/05/unitednations-seen-favorably-by-many-across-25-countries/. GE.26-09529 VII. A blueprint for regulatory delivery: measurement framework, metric specifications and structural constraint adjustment layer

29. Moira Fagan and Andrew Prozorovsky, “UN seen favorably across 25 countries”, Pew Research Center, 5 September 2025. Available at https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/09/05/united-nations-seen-favorably-by-many-across-25-countries/. ↩

Embedded multipolarity is not self-executing. A normative framework that claims to accommodate diverse governance pathways while holding them accountable to shared human rights standards requires a measurement instrument capable of doing precisely that – one that assesses functional delivery rather than institutional conformity and that renders visible the structural constraints, rather than domestic governance deficits, that account for persistent implementation gaps in the global South. The challenge is to ensure that institutional pluralism and diversified partnerships strengthen rather than fragment international cooperation, and thus contribute to embedded multipolarity. To that end, the Independent Expert has prepared a draft global regulatory delivery index, contained in an addendum to the present report,³⁰ which is aimed at responding to a persistent and structurally rooted gap between formal governance commitments and their practical realization. This gap is especially pronounced in the global South, where historical asymmetries, originating in the colonial period and perpetuated through the international economic architecture, continue to constrain both the effective delivery and the accurate measurement of governance outcomes. For these countries, existing measurement frameworks carry a further limitation: by relying on indicators such as treaty ratification, legal incorporation or institutional design, they appear to capture formal alignment rather than functional performance, and may either overstate performance where implementation is weak or render invisible the context-specific pathways of regulatory innovation through which global South governance systems actually operate.

30. A/HRC/63/24/Add.3. ↩

The concept of regulatory delivery – the capacity of governance systems to translate normative commitments into enforceable actions and observable outcomes – addresses this gap directly. A regulatory delivery perspective shifts the analytical focus from structures to results, and from compliance to impact. It assesses not merely whether rules exist or have been formally enacted, but whether they generate enforceable actions, implemented measures and observable outcomes across the full chain, from the identification of a violation to systemic corrective effect. It is especially relevant to the right to development,³¹ whose realization requires assessment frameworks sensitive to diverse development trajectories and institutional environments, including those that have historically been marginalized within globally standardized indices.

31. Declaration on the Right to Development, arts. 1, 3 and 4; and General Assembly resolution 79/170. See also A/HRC/60/31. ↩

The global regulatory delivery index is conceived as a practical instrument of embedded multipolarity: it is aimed at providing a shared analytical language through which diverse regulatory and governance models can be assessed against common normative standards – those of the Charter of the United Nations, international human rights law and the right to development framework – without collapsing institutional diversity into a single template. In a multipolar international order, the central challenge is not only to ensure a more distributed configuration of power, but also to ensure that the distribution remains anchored in multilateral human rights norms and enforceable commitments to equitable development.

Consistent with this function, the proposed global regulatory delivery index is not designed as a ranking mechanism and should not serve as a basis for conditionality. Its purpose is to support dialogue, identify implementation gaps and render visible the diverse pathways through which States translate shared commitments into outcomes. The index incorporates context-sensitive methodologies that account for differences in institutional capacity, data availability and regulatory environment, proceeding from the recognition that equivalent outcomes may be achieved through institutionally diverse regulatory pathways.

The proposed global regulatory delivery index must be understood against the critique, advanced by scholars of the Third World Approaches to International Law and Critical Legal Studies movements, of the role that international institutions and knowledge frameworks have played in reproducing asymmetric power relations under the guise of universal standards.³² As such scholars have demonstrated, the categories through which good governance, rule of law and institutional quality have been measured are not normatively neutral: they reflect particular historical and institutional trajectories and have served to discipline global South States while insulating the structural causes of underdevelopment from scrutiny.³³

32. See, indicatively, B.S. Chimni, “International institutions today: an imperial global State in the making”, European Journal of International Law, vol. 15, No. 1 (2004); Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Sundhya Pahuja, Decolonising International Law (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011). ↩
33. James Thuo Gathii, “Alternative and critical: the contribution of research and scholarship on developing countries to international legal theory”, Harvard International Law Journal, vol. 41, No. 263 (2000); Makau Mutua, “Savages, victims, and saviors: the metaphor of human rights”, Harvard International Law Journal, vol. 42, No. 1 (2001); and Pahuja, Decolonising International Law. ↩

The proposed global regulatory delivery index explicitly rejects this epistemic inheritance. The normative benchmark is, accordingly, drawn from the Charter of the United Nations, the core international human rights treaties, the right to development framework, and the 2030 Agenda – not from the institutional profile of any particular group of States. This inversion has concrete methodological consequences: the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators and analogous externally derived frameworks are replaced, as the normative benchmarks, by the standards of the Charter, the core human rights treaties, the right to development framework and the 2030 Agenda. The legitimacy of this reorientation depends equally on the process through which the index will be developed further. An index designed primarily by Northern institutions and applied to Southern contexts risks reproducing the very dynamics it is designed to overcome. The South Centre, as an intergovernmental institution of developing countries, occupies a central role in this regard: its research on sovereign debt reform, Sustainable Development Goal financing gaps and the normative architecture of the right to development provides direct analytical foundations for the design of the global regulatory delivery index. Further development of the indicators of the index – particularly the composition of the monitoring capacity index and the proxy validation criteria – should be subject to direct input from global South institutions, whose regulatory realities and monitoring ecosystems the index seeks to render visible; consultation with regional intergovernmental organizations, national human rights institutions and civil society networks in the global South is a methodological requirement, not a representational formality.

The proposed global regulatory delivery index is structured around three domains: human rights and participatory governance; environmental sustainability; and social equity. Within each domain, metrics assess regulatory delivery across the full implementation chain, from the existence of applicable normative frameworks, through inspection and enforcement activity, to measurable outcomes, including disparity reduction, impact on absolute poverty and observable changes in environmental conditions. Cross-cutting metrics on policy coherence, budget allocation efficiency, transparency, stakeholder participation and grievance resolution capture the systemic conditions shaping delivery across all three domains. The framing of the first domain in terms of “participatory governance” reflects the normative vocabulary of the Charter of the United Nations and is attentive to the diversity of governance traditions and the risk that institutional frameworks have at times been deployed to discipline States rather than support development. These domains and cross-cutting components are complemented by the structural constraint adjustment layer, which is designed to measure the exogenous structural conditions shaping the environment within which all three domains operate.

The application of the global regulatory delivery index entails the use of a common measurement protocol using tiered data structures that incorporate primary, secondary and validated proxy data, with explicit rules for proxy validation and for handling missing data in order to prevent the systematic exclusion of lower-capacity contexts. The central methodological innovation is the parallel use of level scores and progress scores, complemented by the capacity-adjusted identification rate, to correct for detection bias (resulting from limited institutional capacity) against a monitoring capacity index composed of indicators of institutional, civic and informational monitoring capacity. Progress scores measure improvement relative to a country’s own baseline, normalized against a performance frontier. A third scoring output – the structural constraint adjustment factor – is proposed for the second phase, producing adjusted scores presented in parallel with the primary domain scores.

The performance frontier must be defined with care. Deriving it from the institutional profile of high-performing developed States would reintroduce precisely the benchmark bias the index is intended to overcome. Instead, the frontier must be anchored in normatively defined thresholds drawn from the right to development framework, the Sustainable Development Goals and the core human rights instruments, supplemented by the full evaluation of country performance, including high-performing global South contexts. This approach draws on the methodological evolution of the human development index of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which progressively incorporated inequality-adjustment mechanisms to prevent aggregate averages from masking distributional failures.³⁴ Explicit safeguards against baseline manipulation require that progress scores be computed against independently verified historical baselines subject to third-party review. The proposed global regulatory delivery index draws on adjacent instruments, such as the human rights indicators framework set out by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights,³⁵ the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) productive capacities index,³⁶ and the toolkits developed by the Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies with regard to Sustainable Development Goal 16, but is analytically distinct from those instruments, as it focuses specifically on the capacity of governance systems to translate normative commitments into enforceable action.

34. UNDP, Human Development Report 2010 (New York, 2010), pp. 215 ff.. ↩
35. See Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Human Rights Indicators: A Guide to Measurement and Implementation (New York and Geneva, 2012). ↩
36. See UNCTAD, UNCTAD Productive Capacities Index: Methodological Approach and Results (Geneva, 2021). ↩

The most consequential gap in existing measurement frameworks is the systematic failure to account for structural externalities constraining regulatory delivery. By treating governance performance as primarily a function of domestic institutional choices, prevailing indices implicitly absolve the international economic architecture of responsibility for delivery failures. This is analytically indefensible and normatively unacceptable from a right to development perspective. Regulatory delivery failures in the global South are frequently caused not by domestic governance deficits but by the conditionalities attached to International Monetary Fund and World Bank programmes, which have required fiscal retrenchment, privatization and deregulation as conditions of financing, directly reducing the resources and regulatory capacity available to States; by sovereign debt obligations that channel a disproportionate share of public revenue to external creditors, compressing fiscal space; by sanctions regimes that disrupt regulatory systems; and by the transfer-pricing and profit-shifting practices of transnational corporations, which erode the tax base available for public services. These constraints are not incidental dysfunctions of the international system, but rather constitutive features of its architecture.³⁷ A measurement framework that ignores those constraints risks attributing to domestic governance failure what is in fact a product of structural inequality.

37. See David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford, 2003); Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization: The Management of Contemporary Society (London, 1997); Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (2004); and Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly J. Silver, Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System (Minneapolis, 1999). ↩

The proposed global regulatory delivery index incorporates attention to externalities imposed from the international financial organizations, sanctions regimes, transnational corporations and sovereign debt obligations through dedicated metrics: the externalities mitigation ratio, which measures the relationship between mitigation responses and documented adverse effects attributable to external actors; and the climate policy financing adequacy ratio, read together with the sovereign debt obligations measure, which captures whether external fiscal constraints prevent the translation of environmental commitments into funded policy. The redistributive constraint mitigation ratio performs the equivalent function in the social equity domain, measuring whether redistributive protections are preserved under externally imposed fiscal constraints. The elevation of this dimension to a fully elaborated conceptual pillar, including a structural constraint adjustment layer, is envisioned; a structural constraint adjustment factor, which disaggregates delivery gaps in order to distinguish between those attributable to domestic governance choices and those attributable to externally imposed constraints, is proposed as a priority objective for the second phase of the development of the index, as detailed in section 5 of the addendum containing the proposed index.

The risk that the global regulatory delivery index itself could be appropriated as a conditionality instrument, as occurred with the ease of doing business index and the worldwide governance indicators of the World Bank, must be addressed through structural safeguards rather than declaratory assurances. Such safeguards should include: a multi-stakeholder oversight body with majority global South representation empowered to issue binding guidance on the application of the index; an enforceable prohibition on the use of global regulatory delivery index scores as inputs into conditionality, loan assessment or aid allocation frameworks; a mandatory misuse review mechanism; and an opt-in framework ensuring that the index cannot be applied to States without obtaining their consent to its methodology and governance arrangements.

In the present report, the Independent Expert has documented concerning trends towards unilateralism, coercive economic statecraft and the instrumental use of interdependence as leverage for political objectives unrelated to legitimate policy concerns. These trends undermine the principles of sovereign equality, peaceful dispute settlement and international cooperation enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations. He has also identified examples demonstrating that multilateral diplomacy remains viable even amid geopolitical complexity. Multipolarity can become an opportunity for more inclusive, equitable and resilient global governance, but only if States channel it through cooperative frameworks anchored in Charter principles and international law.

The legitimacy of the United Nations depends on its capacity to remain relevant, responsive and representative. This requires accelerating long-delayed institutional reforms; strengthening the capacity of the United Nations to facilitate dialogue across geopolitical divides; enhancing development system effectiveness and coherence; ensuring that human rights remain central to the work of the United Nations across all pillars; and demonstrating tangible value in addressing transnational challenges that no State can manage alone. A global regulatory delivery index could be a useful tool for achieving this goal.

The Independent Expert suggests recommendations to enhance multilateralism in the context of multipolarity, as set out below.

If a number of States of the global South welcomes the idea for a global regulatory delivery index, the Human Rights Council may wish to request the Secretary-General, in consultation with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, UNCTAD, UNDP, the South Centre, national human rights institutions, regional intergovernmental organizations and civil society networks in the global South, to establish an inter-agency expert consultation process with a view to:
(a) Assessing the feasibility of further developing the global regulatory delivery index as a voluntary, non-prescriptive analytical tool used only with the consent of the State concerned;
(b) Conducting pilot applications in a limited number of interested States, with particular attention paid to the proxy data validation framework and the level/progress scoring architecture;
(c) Developing the methodology for the structural constraint adjustment factor – which would disaggregate observed delivery gaps in order to distinguish between those attributable to domestic governance choices and those attributable to externally imposed constraints – as a priority objective of the second phase of the development of the index, building on the existing externalities mitigation ratio, climate policy financing adequacy ratio and redistributive constraint mitigation ratio metrics set out in the addendum containing the proposed global regulatory delivery index;
(d) Reporting to the Human Rights Council on the outcomes of this process and on a proposed governance framework for the index, including the institutional safeguards described above.

The Independent Expert recommends that all States:
(a) Reaffirm, through concrete legislative, budgetary and diplomatic measures, commitment to the principles of the United Nations as a “Charter of the United Nations-embedded multipolarity”;
(b) Ensure that development cooperation serves sovereignty and human rights;
(c) Protect democratic open policy space while upholding their international obligations;
(d) Consider the establishment of a global regulatory delivery index.

The Independent Expert recommends that major Powers:
(a) Refrain from instrumentalizing economic interdependence and weaponizing trade relationships, financial systems and development assistance to extract political concessions;
(b) Support and do not obstruct international adjudication by, among others, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization and regional human rights courts;
(c) Leverage strategic autonomy constructively, ensuring that institutional pluralism strengthens rather than fragments multilateral cooperation.

The Independent Expert recommends that the United Nations system:
(a) Facilitate inclusive dialogue on multipolarity;
(b) Strengthen development system coherence, especially between traditional development cooperation and emerging South-South modalities;
(c) Systematically monitor the human rights impacts of the economic policies of international financial institutions;
(d) Support institutional reform processes, especially for international financial institutions, in particular the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which should expedite quota and voice reforms to reflect contemporary economic realities and enhance developing country representation;
(e) Reduce conditionality and enhance policy space;
(f) Enhance transparency and accountability.

The Independent Expert recommends that the private sector and financial institutions:
(a) Respect international and domestic regulation and conduct human rights due diligence;
(b) Avoid overcompliance with unilateral measures;
(c) Support transparency initiatives, including the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, beneficial ownership registries and project-level reporting.

The Independent Expert recommends that civil society organizations:
(a) Monitor development cooperation across all modalities;
(b) Build South-South civil society networks;
(c) Participate in institutional accountability mechanisms and, in particular, actively utilize complaint mechanisms and accountability processes in both traditional and emerging development finance institutions, documenting cases where projects fail to meet environmental, social or human rights standards and pursuing remedy for affected communities.