While the North-South framing of international relations is often criticized, numerous studies still find that the more than 130 developing countries, despite their growing economic heterogeneity, act with cohesion in multilateral settings across several issues. Against conclusions that they are bound only by a shared rejection of the status quo, this dissertation posits a positive ideological core that marks a continuity between what was called the Third World and what is now the Global South. A continuity stemming from an enduring shared material reality of postcolonial fragile sovereignty, metabolized into a coherent political identity through social interaction at the multilateral level; thus North and South are co-constituted. This process operates across two axes, as both rethink participation at the input of global governance, and responsibility at its output. For the South: a state-centered democratization of global institutions, enabling and enabled by resource redistribution per a strict unidirectional North-to-South binary. For the North: a more hybrid, multi-stakeholder system, enabling and enabled by a universalist approach to burden-sharing, with special assistance for the neediest. This is done through discourse analysis of three broad-ranging multilateral processes culminating in 2015, marking significant changes for their respective regimes: the talks incubating the Paris Climate Agreement, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the Third Financing for Development (FfD) Conference. As such, this dissertation also posits that these negotiations can be jointly analyzed in this way, inscribing them into a broader North-South history.
