ABSTRACT
Global governance has always been a contested process. In particular, poor and middle-income countries have repeatedly challenged the structure and agenda of global economic governance since its post-war inception. They have done so by organising politically into a variety of different alliances from which to articulate their demands and then respond to the way those demands have either been met or not met. This chapter argues that there has taken place a ‘long battle’ for global governance, a battle that is far from over and bound to continue into the foreseeable future. We suggest that such a focus acts as an important corrective to conventional understandings of the modern history of global governance, precisely because it highlights the sometimes hidden, sometimes challenging, but nearly always critical, voices of the huge majority of non-dominant countries that were always part of and subject to the workings of the emergent post-1945 global order. This chapter aims to tell, or perhaps more accurately re-tell, the story of this battle, bringing forward the under-noticed and under-researched roles played and perspectives taken by those countries of the world that have been variously described over the past 70 years or so as ‘poorer’, ‘ex-colonial’, ‘Third World’, ‘underdeveloped’, ‘less developed’, ‘developing’ and lately ‘emerging’.
