Technology as the New Sovereignty
Perhaps nowhere is the North-South asymmetry more consequential than in emerging technologies. Artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, and biotechnology are redrawing power hierarchies faster than diplomacy can respond. Seventy percent of AI patents originate from five advanced economies; less than five percent emerge from the entire developing world. Without structural investment in human capital and indigenous R&D, the South risks becoming a data colony, just a consumer of digital value created elsewhere.
At Valdai’s session on technological sovereignty, experts warned that dependence on imported algorithms could prove more coercive than traditional sanctions. The challenge is not simply about catching up but about designing ethical architectures that ensure meaningful human control, transparency, and distributive justice.
This message reverberated through the Beijing Xiangshan Forum 2025, which proposed a Digital Silk Road Charter linking AI governance to developmental equity. It recognised that the future of global order will depend less on who owns data and more on how data serves humanity. For Pakistan and its partners, this means aligning technological ambition with normative leadership, and crafting regulatory frameworks that protect sovereignty while encouraging innovation.
Security Through Development
The traditional vocabulary of deterrence and defence is being replaced by a broader calculus of resilience. Climate vulnerability, cyber insecurity, and food scarcity now constitute threats as real as military coercion. The Global Peace Strategy Forum (GPSF) argues that these domains are intertwined; the absence of justice in one eventually undermines stability in another. The Boao and Xiangshan dialogues both converged on the same insight: sustainable security must grow out of inclusive development.
For Pakistan, this understanding complements its strategic posture. Full Spectrum Deterrence (FSD) ensures credible security, but Full Spectrum Development ensures sustainable peace. Neither can be substituted for the other. Integrating economic revival with strategic stability – through initiatives like the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), renewable energy investment, and digital infrastructure – illustrates how national resilience can underpin regional balance.
A South-Led Normative Renaissance
The post-pandemic decade has witnessed an awakening of Global South intellectual capital. Institutions from Baku to Jakarta, São Paulo to Pretoria, and Islamabad to Beijing and Moscow are no longer content to be data points in Western analyses; they are becoming authors of new paradigms. The Global South is not demanding a veto – it is demanding a voice. Its central proposition is moral as much as material: that peace cannot be secured by the few for the many, and that sovereignty today must be exercised through responsibility rather than isolation.
In this respect, the Valdai Discussion Club, the Boao Forum, and the Xiangshan Forum form complementary nodes of a new epistemic geography, a geography that connects Eurasian realism with Asian developmentalism and Southern solidarity. These are not ideological projects; they are forums of reconciliation, between growth and justice, technology and ethics, power and legitimacy.
Reclaiming Agency: The Path Ahead
What, then, must be done? The following three directions stand out:
Institutional Fairness
Reform of global financial, trade, and technology regimes must embed representation, not just participation. Voice without a vote perpetuates dependency.
Knowledge Equity
Intellectual monopolies must yield to plural scholarship, through open access, multilingual research platforms, and joint South-South think-tank consortia.
Ethical Governance
AI, climate engineering, and biotechnology require moral compacts as robust as legal ones. The South can lead by offering inclusive standards rooted in shared humanity.
These imperatives are not utopian; they are urgent. Without them, multipolarity could devolve into fragmentation, a world of many powers but little purpose.
Conclusion: From Power to Principle
The Valdai spirit this year captured a vital lesson: the era of empire is over, but the era of shared stewardship has barely begun. The task of our generation is to bridge that interval with imagination and will. Inclusivity is not charity, sustainability is not luxury, and cooperation is not concession – they are all conditions of survival in an age where crises travel faster than diplomacy.
From the perspective of the Global South, particularly Pakistan, multipolarity presents not just risks to be managed but spaces to be led. The question is not whether power will redistribute, it already has, but whether principle will follow. If nations can convert competition into coordination and hierarchy into partnership, the twenty-first century may yet redeem the unfulfilled promise of the twentieth.
That, ultimately, is the moral mandate of multipolarity, to ensure that the geometry of global power is balanced by the symmetry of human dignity.
The Valdai Discussion Club was established in 2004. It is named after Lake Valdai, which is located close to Veliky Novgorod, where the Club’s first meeting took place.
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