How did you come to choose your research topic?
I was originally fascinated by the largely improvised procedural innovations of several significant global negotiating processes that all culminated around the same time (2015–16): the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Paris Agreement, and the selection of the ninth UN Secretary General. All involved more participatory forms of deliberation, and showed that a UN faced with crisis and deadlock could still find ways to produce ambitious agendas with broad-based buy-in. I wanted to study how this moment of experimentation worked, through concepts such as institutional layering. I realised, however, that questions of procedure were inseparable from the other issues debated throughout these events. I dropped the Secretary General selection case, as the research scope was becoming too broad; I added the 2015 Financing for Development (FfD) conference as it was closely intertwined with the SDG negotiations.
Can you describe your research questions and the methodology you use to approach those questions?
Many puzzles converged in this thesis. I wondered about the increasingly prevalent view, in the scholarship as well as popular commentary, that centres the ideational and political agency of emerging/rising powers such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) in formulating a coherent challenge to the global status quo order, with the overall Global South demoted to a more passive role. A framework in stark contrast to the initial postcolonial period, roughly from the 1960s to 1980s, when a coalition of countries then known as the Third World formulated, despite its size and diversity, a relatively coherent and ambitious alternative vision of global order. Despite the growing dismissal of that older “North-South” framing, this dichotomy still demonstrably holds across several issue areas of multilateral governance. As it turned out, the SDG and climate negotiating processes proved to be especially fitting windows into such matters. The central question, then, concerned the substance of the North-South relationship as manifested through multilateral negotiations: was there still a recognisable ideological content to it? And if so, what was it, and how does it relate to the broader North-South history going back to the 1970s?
Given that I am studying public discourse, especially the type developed through and for coalitional politics (thus serving as a signalling and coordination tool), I answered these questions using discourse analysis. Through this qualitative approach, specifically, I identified key consistencies across the proposals and supporting arguments deployed by relevant actors across the studied negotiations, and interpreted them in light of the aforementioned broader historical perspective.
What are your major findings?
These coalitions — the Global North and the Global South — do in fact reproduce their respective ideological cores in mirroring ways, across the axes of participation at the decision-making input of global governance, and responsibility at its implementation output. This proved a defining, consistent factor across all three studied negotiations, and one that firmly situates these events within the aforementioned broader historical dynamic. Thus, the South, across fora, consistently upheld a state-centred democratisation of global institutions, enabling and enabled by a redistribution of resources following a strict North-to-South unidirectional binary. The North, by contrast, put forth a more hybrid, multistakeholder system, enabling and enabled by a universalist approach to burden-sharing, with special assistance targeting only the neediest. Both sides adapted their preexisting stances to the main innovative component across these agendas: universality. Indeed, unlike the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the SDGs would apply to every country; likewise, unlike the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement introduced obligations for nationally determined contributions from all. While Global North delegations, in this context, pushed to overcome the dichotomous North-South framing itself (which for decades shaped the allocation of international development and climate finance, as well as differentiated responsibilities for cutting emissions), the Global South defended such differentiation as essential for achieving universal participation. In this way, the thesis asserts the enduring salience of “North-South” independently from the rising powers’ framework in the political struggle over the shape and direction of global governance. Another contribution lies in demonstrating that these negotiations can be jointly analysed as part of the same process of institutional redesign across UN-centred multilateralism, one that affords a uniquely apposite window onto these co-constituted ideological-discursive formations.
What could be the policy implications of your thesis?
Despite being a nebulous concept on many fronts, the Global South embodies a genuine identity category that does shape behaviour in noticeable ways. These countries cannot be conceived primarily as an income bracket, due to their shared political vision which straddles varying economic conditions. So, on a policy level, practitioners navigating the changing world order, including the negotiation of a post-2030 sustainable development agenda and a post-Paris Agreement climate agenda, may benefit from a deeper understanding of how this coalition functions as a coherent actor across several issue areas; and, likewise, how the Global North has itself coalesced around a distinct universalist vision in recent years. It might encourage actors to separate the aspirations of rising powers from those of the broader South, and thus to enhance the process of multilateral diplomacy around many of the gravest issues facing humanity. It may, hopefully, also encourage said South to further organise politically in such a distinct manner (as I argued in a recent piece for Global Challenges).
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On 19 February 2026, Lucas Dias Rodrigues Dos Santos defended his PhD thesis in International Relations/Political Science, titled “North-South, Unfinished Business: Postcolonial Worldmaking in Climate and Sustainable Development Multilateralism”. Committee members were Professor Cédric Dupont, Thesis Director, Honorary Professor Thomas Biersteker, President of the Committee and Internal Member, and Professor Emeritus Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner, The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, USA.
Citation of the PhD thesis:
Dias Rodrigues Dos Santos, Lucas. “North-South, Unfinished Business: Postcolonial Worldmaking in Climate and Sustainable Development Multilateralism.” PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, 2026.
Access: An abstract of the PhD thesis is available in the Geneva Graduate Institute’s repository. As the thesis itself is embargoed until June 2029, please contact Dr Dias Rodrigues Dos Santos for access.
Banner image: part of Global North and Global South, a map showing a common depiction of the Global North and the Global South, as divided by the Brandt Line. However, it is important to note that there is not universal agreement regarding where some countries belong within this framework. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc./Kenny Chmielewski.
Interview by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.