SUMMARY
• The post-WWII rules-based order was built by Western powers and promised universal norms, but has been marked by inequality, hypocrisy, and selective enforcement, often sidelining the Global South.
• Institutions like the UN Security Council are structurally flawed, with veto power allowing major powers to block action on crises affecting the Global South (e.g., Gaza, Myanmar, Syria), highlighting the gap between procedural legitimacy and real justice.
• Despite its flaws, the system offered weaker states a platform for voice, visibility, and diplomatic leverage—preferable to a return to unrestrained power politics—but now that order is eroding rapidly.
• Double standards by Western powers (e.g., contrasting responses to Ukraine vs. Gaza) have delegitimized the international order, accelerating a shift toward a fragmented, power-driven global system.
• The Global South must prepare for a more uncertain world by building regional resilience, diversifying partnerships, reducing dollar dependence, and strengthening South–South cooperation to navigate a future where old rules no longer reliably apply.
The modern international order did not emerge organically; it was consciously constructed from the wreckage of two world wars. Its intellectual and institutional foundations were laid in the mid-twentieth century through a dense web of treaties, norms, and organisations—from the United Nations and Bretton Woods institutions to international law and multilateral diplomacy—designed to prevent a return to total war. This “rules-based order” promised predictability, restraint, and collective security, replacing raw power with codified norms. Yet from its inception, the system reflected the priorities of its architects rather than a universal consensus. Order was not merely about peace; it was about managing power, stabilizing markets, and preserving influence in a rapidly decolonizing world.
Europe occupied a central, if paradoxical, role in this arrangement. Having for centuries exported imperial domination and then nearly destroyed itself, Europe became both the cautionary tale and the moral anchor of the new order. Western Europe, rebuilt under American security guarantees and economic patronage, emerged as a normative power championing human rights, sovereignty, and multilateralism—while essentially insulating itself from the harsher applications of those same rules beyond its borders. The broader “developed world,” led by the transatlantic alliance, came to dominate the institutions, enforcement mechanisms, and narratives of legitimacy. What followed was an international system that spoke the language of universality but operated through deeply unequal power hierarchies—an imbalance whose consequences are now becoming impossible to ignore.
For many countries in the Global South, from Bangladesh to nations across Africa, Latin America, and South Asia, the post–World War II international order has been both a promise and a paradox. On the one hand, institutions like the United Nations—and especially the UN Security Council (UNSC)—offered a formal platform premised on sovereign equality, collective security, and peaceful dispute resolution. In theory, smaller and developing states could appeal to universal norms and international law to protect their interests and dignity on the world stage. Yet in practice, the architecture of decision-making has often sidelined these voices. The UNSC’s structure—rooted in the wartime power balance and dominated by five permanent members with veto power—has repeatedly demonstrated its fragility and ineffectiveness in responding to protracted crises that matter to the Global South. From the Syrian civil war and Yemen to historic omissions like Rwanda in 1994, and genocides in Palestine and Myanmar, the inability of the Council to act decisively reflects deep power asymmetries rather than an objective assessment of human suffering or security threats.
Yet the international order has not been entirely without value for countries like Bangladesh. For states emerging from colonial rule and facing development challenges, multilateral institutions have provided normative frameworks, economic engagement, and diplomatic visibility that individual diplomatic networks alone could not achieve. Membership in the UN and its related bodies allowed Bangladesh to participate in peacekeeping operations, contribute to global security efforts, and thereby enhance its international profile and practical capabilities. The country’s extensive participation in UN peace operations has not only brought financial and capacity-building benefits but also fostered deeper engagement with global security governance, shaping aspects of its own domestic security outlook.
At the same time, the Global South’s critique of the international order has grown more assertive. Developing countries have pressed for reform of the Security Council to reflect contemporary geopolitical realities better and to break the entrenched hierarchies that privilege a narrow set of Global North actors. They have also sought to leverage South–South cooperation and regional institutions as alternative venues for agenda-setting on climate finance, development, and peacebuilding. These efforts underscore that while the existing global order has delivered symbolic and material benefits, its weaknesses—especially in institutional representation, responsiveness, and equity—remain a persistent constraint on the aspirations of many countries outside the established centers of power.
The experience of the Global South with the international order is best understood through cases in which legitimacy existed without justice and process without resolution. The Rohingya genocide in Myanmar illustrates this paradox starkly. Despite overwhelming evidence of crimes against humanity—documented by UN fact-finding missions, international human rights organisations, and scholarly research—the international system proved structurally incapable of delivering accountability. Great power shielding at the Security Council, particularly by China and Russia, neutralised meaningful collective action. For Bangladesh, which absorbed over a million Rohingya refugees, the international order nonetheless became the only viable arena to internationalise the crisis. Dhaka pursued remedies through the UN General Assembly, the International Court of Justice (via The Gambia), and sustained multilateral diplomacy. While this strategy conferred moral legitimacy and international sympathy, it delivered little tangible relief. The system functioned procedurally but not restoratively—highlighting how legality can exist without justice when major-power interests intervene.
This pattern extends far beyond South Asia. Across regions, the international system has repeatedly failed to provide durable solutions to entrenched conflicts, instead facilitating temporary stabilisation through coercion, mediated bargaining, or incentive-based diplomacy led by global powers. The Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan remains the most enduring example: decades of UN resolutions, bilateral agreements, and third-party mediation efforts have neither resolved the core political grievance nor prevented cycles of militarisation. Scholars of conflict resolution note that significant power involvement has prioritised crisis management over conflict transformation, seeking to avoid escalation rather than address root causes. Similar dynamics are evident in Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and across Latin America, where external mediation—often driven by strategic interests—has frozen conflicts rather than healed them. The result has been a landscape of unresolved disputes, where sovereignty is formally respected but substantively hollowed out by power asymmetries.
What emerges, therefore, is an international order that has been ineffective and unfair, yet not entirely illegitimate for the Global South. Its mechanisms have rarely enabled restorative justice, whether through the Security Council, international mediation, or global governance institutions. The blatant abuse of veto power by the US in stopping any meaningful recourse in abetting the ongoing Gaza genocide is a prime example of not only the international order’s ineffectiveness, but also the apparent complicity in the genocide, and frankly, the UK, Germany, and other European countries, the so-called upholders of civic moral high ground, are no less so. Instead, outcomes have depended on the preferences of dominant states, enforced through vetoes, sanctions, selective engagement, or geopolitical trade-offs. The Global South has often found itself navigating a system in which moral claims are acknowledged but subordinated, and in which international law is invoked selectively rather than universally applied.
Yet despite these profound deficiencies, the post-1945 international system retained an enduring—if fragile—optimism for countries like Bangladesh. Compared to the pre-UN era of imperial dominance and unrestrained power politics, the system offered voice, visibility, and procedural legitimacy. Even when justice was denied, the existence of forums, norms, and legal pathways allowed weaker states to contest narratives, mobilise global opinion, and resist total marginalisation. In a world that might otherwise have reverted to a pure “jungle rule” of unchecked coercion, the rules-based order—however compromised by veto power and vested interests—still represented a constrained arena where power could be challenged, if not overturned. It is precisely this gap between promise and performance that now defines the crisis of the international order—and explains why its apparent unraveling is felt so acutely across the Global South.
It is with a peculiar irony that I now write this analysis in the past tense, a linguistic slip that reflects a deep-seated dread of the direction the world seems headed. As I drafted these lines, the choice of tense unintentionally assumed that recent events are already historical — not ongoing crises, but landmarks of a vanished era of international cooperation. That subconscious shift crystallises a fear that the international rules-based order, once the scaffolding of global stability, is now being buried in real time: hammered down not by accident but by the very powers that once claimed to uphold it; diminished not gradually but with striking, almost cavalier force. What felt at first like a stylistic quirk now seems eerily appropriate for a moment when norms meant to prevent the very horrors we witness are being treated as quaint relics of a fading world.
Recent coups against international legal norms—from the Gaza genocide, to the U.S. attack on Venezuela, and now the brazen threats surrounding Greenland—offer stark justification for this sense of looming collapse. Observers have begun to argue that these actions mark a turning point in the global legal order, where the foundational principle that sovereign states should not be subject to unilateral force is being openly discarded and reinterpreted for geopolitical ends. The rhetoric around Greenland underscores how far this erosion has advanced. Denmark and Greenlandese leaders have rejected any notion of ceding sovereignty. At the same time, European states warn that such threats, even if rhetorical, severely undermine the legal and normative structures that have underpinned international relations since 1945. Meanwhile, the ongoing Gaza genocide continues under the shadow of a global system that promised accountability and protection for civilians but has so far failed to translate legal norms into meaningful intervention or justice. The convergence of these episodes in disparate regions shows not isolated policy failures but a systematic weakening of the norms that once restrained even great powers — a weakening that feels less like drift and more like dissolution.
At the core of this erosion lies the West’s persistent double standards, which have hollowed out the credibility of the rules-based order from within. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was rightly condemned as an egregious violation of sovereignty and international law. Yet, similar principles were conspicuously suspended when Israel’s prolonged occupation and military conduct in Gaza were framed almost exclusively through the language of self-defense, despite mounting evidence of collective punishment and civilian devastation. Scholarly critiques have long noted that selective enforcement of international law—whether in Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, or through sustained tolerance of settlement expansion in occupied Palestinian territory—has transformed norms into instruments of convenience rather than constraint. This duplicity has not merely stalled the evolution of the international order; it has actively delegitimised it, reinforcing perceptions across the Global South that rules are invoked to discipline adversaries while allies operate above accountability.
This is why the metaphorical use of the past tense feels apt: there is a growing perception among scholars and commentators that the rules-based international order, long critiqued for its contradictions and uneven application, is no longer the operative framework for global politics but rather a historical phase giving way to a more fragmented, power-driven era. As analysts have begun to argue, restoring a credible international legal order may require more than reform — it may demand a fundamental philosophical and institutional rebuilding, acknowledging that the old agreements have been so compromised they can no longer serve as the basis for global governance. If these trends hold, then looking back — even in the present — becomes a melancholic exercise in mourning what the post-1945 world once represented: a fragile, flawed, yet hopeful attempt to transcend pure power politics. What we now witness is perhaps not the immediate collapse of global cooperation itself, but the decisive closing of one chapter of international order and the uncertain, perhaps darker, opening of another.
The steady withdrawal of the United States from international treaties and multilateral forums has become one of the clearest signals that the guardianship era of the post-1945 order is over. From arms control agreements and climate commitments to human rights mechanisms and trade dispute systems, Washington’s selective disengagement has communicated not retrenchment but recalibration toward unilateral power. This posture increasingly resembles an imperial logic: rules are acceptable only when they bind others more than they constrain the United States itself. This has been the case for years now, but the blatancy of the situation is what seems to bring out the morbidity of the current scenario. For many observers, this moment marks the pivot at which skepticism about the system turns into resignation—the sense that the international order is not merely malfunctioning, but entering its final phase.
Even if the United States were to reverse course and rejoin these treaties and forums, it is far from clear that global confidence could be restored. Trust, once broken, does not regenerate through procedural returns alone. Allies and adversaries alike have absorbed the lesson that commitments can be abandoned with each electoral cycle, and that legality is contingent on domestic political convenience. These doubts are not confined to the Global South. Across Europe, faith in American stewardship has been quietly but decisively shaken, as strategic autonomy debates gain momentum. For middle powers and developing states—long aggrieved by the system’s duplicity and fragility—any renewed U.S. multilateralism would be viewed less as reassurance than as a tactical pause rather than a structural recommitment.
This erosion of credibility suggests that the international order’s crisis is not reversible through restoration, but only survivable through transformation. The rules-based system, already compromised by selective enforcement and veto paralysis, now confronts the reality that its principal architect no longer claims even rhetorical fidelity to its foundations. What remains is an interregnum defined by uncertainty, where norms persist formally but lack the coercive or moral authority that once gave them meaning.
In this environment, Global South countries must prepare for a harsher, less forgiving world. Militarily, this does not imply reckless arms races, but credible deterrence, diversified security partnerships, and stronger regional defense coordination. Economically, resilience must replace dependency – supply-chain diversification, regional trade mechanisms, food and energy security, and reduced exposure to sanctions leverage will be essential. Politically and diplomatically, Global South states must deepen South–South cooperation, invest in regional institutions, and speak with greater collective coherence in global forums. Logistically, states will need to be crisis-ready—covering migration management, disaster preparedness, cyber resilience, and strategic reserves—because instability will increasingly spill across borders.
Financially, the Global South must also begin insulating itself from the structural vulnerabilities created by U.S. dollar hegemony. This will require the gradual development of parallel financial arrangements—local-currency trade settlements, regional payment systems, currency-swap agreements, and alternative development financing—that reduce exposure to sanctions, liquidity shocks, and extraterritorial pressure. Equally important is deepening intra–Global South trade based on complementary competitive advantages, where energy, food, manufacturing capacity, labor, and technology are exchanged on more equitable terms. Such arrangements would not seek isolation from global markets, but resilience within them—ensuring that interdependence serves mutual development rather than reproducing asymmetric dependence.
The shape of the new world order remains contested. In the worst-case scenario, the collapse of norms accelerates into open power competition, proxy conflicts multiply, and weaker states become battlegrounds rather than actors. In the best-case scenario, a more plural, negotiated order emerges—less moralistic, more transactional, but anchored in mutual restraint among major powers and stronger regional balances. The most likely middle scenario is uneven multipolarity: fragmented authority, episodic cooperation, and frequent crises managed without being resolved. For Bangladesh, this means anticipating sustained geopolitical pressure, economic volatility, and humanitarian spillovers, while also new openings for strategic autonomy. Dhaka must hedge rather than align unquestioningly, strengthen regional diplomacy, protect economic lifelines, and invest in national resilience. The coming months and years will not reward idealism—but they will reward preparedness, adaptability, and sober realism in a world where the old rules no longer reliably apply.
The writer is Political and International Affairs Analyst. He can be reached at: simonbksp@gmail.com
