A Global South 2.0? Evaluating the Concept of World Majority in Russian Foreign Policy

The idea of world majority, floated by Russian experts after 2022, seeks to simultaneously offer a foreign policy direction for the country while also building a meta-category to define the non-western world. As an emerging concept, this article seeks to be one of the first systematic approaches towards understanding what the world majority stands for and how it reflects Russian foreign policy thinking, through engagement with the political and expert discourse. It argues that while the concept would be a useful tool for Russian foreign policy, it offers a weak proposition for a broader application beyond its borders. The article also argues that the characteristics of the world majority are a near perfect replication of the already established ideas of the global south, thus failing to offer a new interpretation of the international system to the non-western world. Having established their similarities, the article uses the challenges faced by the global south to predict the faultlines that can be expected to hinder the real world implementation of the world majority. It also highlights just how difficult delivering a common agenda through such meta-categories is, bringing into question the true value of these concepts.