Russia, China, Africa and Multi-polarity

Abstract

The rise of countries such as China, India and Brazil, and Russia’s repositioning itself as a major actor in the world order post-Cold War, especially during President Vladimir Putin’s era, has seen a renewed interest in the possible emergence of a multi-polar world. Scholarly sites (Armijo, 2007; Clegg, 2009) are not the only ones invoking such an idea. Ruling elites in China, Venezuela and Russia view the consolidation of what they consider as an emergent multi-polar world order as vital in the emergence of a balanced and just world order. Echoing this view, the President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, recently declared that, ‘the world should be multi-polar. Unipolarity is unacceptable, domination is impermissible. We cannot accept a world order in which all decisions are taken by one country, even such a serious and authoritative country as the United States of America. This kind of world is unstable and fraught with conflict’ (quoted in Weitz, 2009). As we highlight later, the notion of multi-polarization as the organizing principle in the world order peppers the foreign policy discourse of Chinese intellectual and ruling elites.