(a) Of late, centrist and centre-left political parties have been facing setbacks while centre-right parties have been in…

(a) Shift in Global Ideological Realignment

The contemporary global political landscape reflects a structural realignment marked by the retreat of traditional centrist and centre-left parties and the ascendancy of the centre-right. The decline of the centre-left stems from severe economic dislocations—notably post-2008 austerity backlash, deindustrialization, and the erosion of working-class welfare guarantees under hyper-globalization—alongside cultural anxieties surrounding rapid immigration and fragmented identity politics. This exhaustion is evident across major democracies: the SPD's fall to about 16 per cent in Germany's February 2025 election, which returned the CDU/CSU under Friedrich Merz; working-class shifts away from the Democratic Party in the United States, culminating in Donald Trump's 2024 victory; Giorgia Meloni's rise in Italy in 2022; and the prolonged electoral marginalization of the Indian National Congress, though it recovered to 99 seats in 2024.

Conversely, the right has consolidated power through two distinct currents that should not be conflated: a mainstream centre-right that has absorbed tougher positions on immigration, and a radical populist right (the National Rally, AfD, Fratelli d'Italia) that mobilises through nationalism, "welfare chauvinism"—restricting redistributive social security to native citizens—and strategically moderating doctrinaire neoliberalism with state-directed industrial policy. However, this trend is neither monolithic nor absolute. Centre-left parties won decisively in the UK (Labour's landslide of July 2024), Australia (2025) and Mexico (2024), and Canada's Liberals held power in 2025, while Scandinavian social democracies have shown institutional adaptability, partly by tightening their own immigration stance. In Latin America the pattern is mixed: left governments hold Brazil and Colombia, but the right has won in Argentina (2023), Ecuador (2025), Bolivia (2025) and Chile (2025). Anti-incumbency after inflation shocks, rather than a simple ideological swing, explains much of the pattern.

(b) Collective Security and Responsibility to Protect (R2P)

Collective security and R2P represent distinct normative evolutions in multilateral security governance. Conceptually, both frameworks reject unilateralism, operate through multilateral institutional mechanisms, and affirm that state sovereignty is subject to international accountability. Yet, they diverge fundamentally in scope, goals, methods, and legal foundations.

In scope and goals, classical collective security under the UN Charter (Articles 39–51) addresses inter-state military aggression to safeguard sovereign equality and territorial integrity. Examples include the UN-authorised responses in Korea (1950) and against Iraq's invasion of Kuwait (Resolution 678, 1990). In contrast, R2P—proposed by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2001) and adopted in paragraphs 138-139 of the 2005 UN World Summit Outcome—focuses on intra-state mass atrocities, specifically genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, placing civilian protection above regime survival. In methods, collective security relies on coercive Chapter VII sanctions and military enforcement. R2P operates through a graduated, three-pillar framework emphasizing prevention, international capacity-building, and timely collective response, with military force as an exceptional last resort.

Historical applications illustrate these operational tensions: the 1999 Kosovo crisis exposed the legal limitations of collective security in preventing humanitarian disaster without Security Council authorization; the 2011 intervention in Libya sparked controversy when R2P implementation crossed into externally driven regime change; and the Syrian conflict exemplifies the complete paralysis of both mechanisms under great-power veto politics.

(c) Reimagining Globalization: The Global South-Sensitive Model

Overcentralized, Washington Consensus-driven globalization has generated acute structural imbalances through IMF and World Bank structural adjustment conditionalities, asymmetric WTO trade rules, and persistent democratic deficits in global economic governance. A Global South-sensitive model counters these vulnerabilities by advancing polycentric, equitable development.

Its core features include robust Special and Differential Treatment (S&DT) in trade, unencumbered technology transfer, loss-and-damage climate justice financing, and epistemic decolonization that validates local developmental priorities over Western-centric orthodoxies. Operationally, it relies on alternative financial networks to reduce vulnerability to external shocks, such as the internationalization of India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI), BRICS local-currency trade settlements, and institutional financing through the New Development Bank (NDB) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). India's Voice of the Global South summits (from 2023) and its role in securing the African Union's G20 membership (2023) illustrate the political push. Institutional reform requires revitalizing UNCTAD as a primary development-oriented negotiating forum and overhauling the WTO to restore policy space for industrialization, ensuring that South-South cooperation through groupings like IBSA balances global economic governance.