Description
Analyzing emerging powers’ participation in multilateral institutions allows us to identify a number of assumptions about the conditionalities for power (influence) and the power of measurements in the composition of foreign policy agendas. These institutions, such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and the World Bank, are considered by many scholars and analysts 'relevant' sources of knowledge and authority when it comes to the categorization and ranking of countries according to selected data. When the conditions for power are simply taken for granted, the debate about change or the future of our world order is limited to a narrow set of social, political, economic and/or development indicators and measurements. In this paper, I look at the notions of 'emergence', 'rise', or 'development' in the context of established and contested conditions necessary for the discursive constructions of a country's spatial and temporal positionings, considering that their very own condition as ‘emerging’ implies not simply a particular spatiality and temporality, but a spatio-temporal organization that may enable or not the perpetuation of foreign policy agendas that are aligned with racist and gendered power dynamics to the detriment of difference and plurality.
