The 21st century is not just another stage of globalization. It is a historical-spatial transition in which the power structure of the international system is redefined: a prolonged, conflictive, and “disordered” passage where global political economy rearranges itself around new poles, new networks, and forms of confrontation. Within that framework, the liberal order built under U.S. primacy goes through an authority crisis and faces a structural dispute over the control of production, technology, finance, and the rules of world trade. What is at stake is not only the leadership of a single power but the very architecture of international hierarchy: who commands, under which rules, and with what instruments that authority is sustained.
For decades, globalization was designed, regulated, and disciplined from the Global North. The United States not only exercised military primacy but also structured the normative, financial, and technological architecture of the international system. Far from being configured as an anarchic sphere of competition among equals, the world order functioned as a hierarchy in which the center’s authority translated into the capacity to define rules, establish standards, and condition development trajectories.
That hierarchy was not sustained only through direct coercion but through more sophisticated mechanisms of structural domination: control of the reserve currency, centrality of financial infrastructures, regulation of capital flows, definition of technological standards, and intellectual property regime. The provision of “stability” and “order” simultaneously operated as a discipline mechanism. Subordinate actors accepted—through calculation, necessity, or pressure—a set of asymmetries that limited their strategic autonomy.
In this way, globalization did not eliminate power relations: it institutionalized them. The centrality of the dollar, the rules of trade and investment, and the global technological architecture consolidated a framework in which the system’s core retained structural command capacity, while broad regions of the world were integrated under conditions reproducing financial dependence, productive vulnerability, and normative subordination.
Today that legitimacy is in crisis. And in that crisis, the Global South stops being a passive periphery to become a strategic space where the reorganization of world power is determined. Competition no longer expresses itself only in classic military or diplomatic terms but in the economy as the central field of dispute. Geoeconomics has become a direct instrument of power: financial sanctions, technological restrictions, investment controls, capital flow regulation, industrial subsidies, and standard-setting function as structural pressure mechanisms.
Contemporary interdependence, far from guaranteeing stability, can become a weapon when control of the “bottlenecks”—global financial infrastructure, payment systems, critical inputs, technological platforms, logistical nodes—is concentrated in the hands of a dominant actor. Coercion no longer needs tanks or naval blockades; it can be exercised through the very architecture of the global financial and technological system. Discipline shifts from the military plane to the control of networks sustaining global production and trade.
That is why it is no longer simply about economic growth or demographic expansion in Asia, Africa, or Latin America. The central question is who defines the rules of development, who controls critical infrastructures, and who establishes the technological standards that organize the world economy. It is, ultimately, about material sovereignty and structural power.
In other words, it is not only a temporary dispute over influence but a redefinition of the principles organizing the system. The ongoing transition may lead to a recomposition of hierarchy under new modalities of discipline—more technological, more financial, more regulatory—or it may open a relative multipolarity in which the Global South expands real decision-making margins. But in any case, the scenario is no longer that of a neutral globalization: it is one of systemic competition intersected by hybrid conflicts, technological disputes, and the reconfiguration of world power architecture.
Editor: Zhiyu Wang
