A New Coalition for Multilateralism Faces an Early Credibility Test

On September 21, Canada joined Australia, Barbados, Brazil, the European Union, India and Kenya in launching a new Partners for Multilateralism (P4M) coalition on multilateralism, international law, and peace and prosperity to help strengthen the multilateral system and turn shared principles into practical action.

Four CIGI experts offer perspectives on what it will take for the coalition to deliver on that promise.

Protecting Information Integrity

One of the biggest threats to societies around the world today is the constant attack on information integrity. These attacks are being supercharged by the continuous high-speed development of emerging technologies, which are outstripping our ability to govern and perhaps soon control them. If states and their people cease to have access to reliable information flows, it becomes extremely difficult to agree on anything else. Therefore, a foundational building block for the P4M should be to put in place agreements paired with concerted action to protect information integrity globally.

Information flows are inherently global, and as such, coordinated global action is needed to protect information integrity. The United Nations has its Global Principles for Information Integrity, and many similar proclamations and agreements exist, but they must be expanded, more widely adopted, and turned into bodies capable of effective action. Action must be strategic, as efforts to “govern” information can be fraught and have led to blowback within countries around the world. However, there is an increasing consensus that social media platforms and big tech companies are central to the proliferation and spread of dangerous disinformation flows. As such, effectively governing these giants is an important first step.

It is likely only through collective action and strong, organized, principled multilateralism led by an organization such as the P4M that greater success can be achieved in relation to protecting information integrity, which is essential to subsequently dealing with other serious global challenges.

Building Interoperable Payments

The concentration of international payments in a narrow set of settlement currencies and financial messaging networks has exacerbated friction in global trade in recent times. Dependence on these arrangements has exposed countries to high intermediary costs, external policy pressures and potential restrictions on access, strengthening demand for greater financial autonomy.

The BRICS’ recent efforts to expand settlement in national currencies and explore alternative payment arrangements at the New Delhi Summit in September 2026 reflect this demand. Yet the emergence of parallel systems could deepen fragmentation if differences in technical standards, regulation and governance limit their compatibility. Greater choice requires arrangements that remain connected, interoperable and commercially viable.

P4M could bridge this divide by bringing emerging and developed economies together around a shared framework for payment interoperability. Its contribution would be to align emerging alternatives with an open international financial system, while giving developing countries meaningful influence over the rules governing their participation.

A practical first step would be a voluntary payments corridor among willing members, supported by transparent conversion pricing, committed liquidity and agreed rules on data access, settlement finality and responsibility for losses.

Success may be measured through lower transaction costs, reliable and faster settlements, and wider currency options. Such cooperation would demonstrate that greater monetary autonomy and a more integrated financial system can reinforce one another.

How to Deliver Measurable Results

There is great risk that this initiative becomes yet another group of states with lofty goals but without much substance. To do nothing would not be cost-free, as global citizens have lots of concerns and a huge deficit of trust in governments and institutions. Simply, citizens are tired of photo ops of leaders that lead to nowhere, so P4M needs to move beyond symbolism and optics.

To give this group legitimacy and visibility, it needs to show outcomes and impact where global institutions are failing. There’s no shortage of issues — from technology and affordability to climate and productivity — that need to be tackled, but choosing issues where there’s a common global concern and that can be addressed is the most effective policy option at the moment.

Social media and youth resilience is one such issue that is building citizen support and can be better tackled when done in unison with other governments. This will also provide a powerful signalling to technology companies that bad behaviour won’t be tolerated. Another area is battling disinformation online, particularly when it leads to social harms such as racism, violence against women and epidemics. For example, deepfakes are rampant, and the technical tool of watermarking these generated images and videos can help stem them when many states support these actions. At minimum it can mitigate their vitality. Data privacy needs to be greatly strengthened, and there’s great opportunity to bring in a GDPR-like regulation to be more systemic and universal. Cyberthreats are also steadily on the rise, and malware used to extract ransom continues to create a perverse market for bad behaviour. Changing laws to make payments of ransomware illegal could disrupt the market logic of the many bad actors with ties to rogue states from profiting off a legal loophole that incentivizes companies to pay said ransom. Lastly, promoting responsible artificial intelligence (AI) by holding AI companies to account when their products result in harm and violence is vital as well. All of the above initiatives have far more heft when all the member countries sign on to advance them.

The political appetite for measurable action is there, but leaders need to show the intent of wanting to lead in the presence of the fractured world we live in. The P4M can be a useful tool to get these dialogues into motion but with growing public distrust toward government, talk is cheap and measurable results need to be made.

Organizing Around Plurilateral Chapters

In a world fractured by geopolitical tensions, middle powers face a stark choice: succumb to pressure to take sides — thereby deepening divisions — or join forces to face common challenges and preserve their sovereignty. The P4M initiative, advanced by Prime Minister Mark Carney, offers a promising path toward the latter.

Shared principles could help hold such a middle-power coalition together. However, with major powers unlikely to remain on the sidelines, prolonged debates over abstract principles could stall cooperation and expose divisions. I would rather favour a concise common foundation based on concrete challenges and clearly defined objectives.

Partners could differ in their national interests and the urgency they attach to the declaration’s concerns, from economic coercion and armed conflict to climate change and AI. Requiring everyone to advance together on every issue risks reproducing the multilateral cooperation paralysis this initiative should help overcome.

I therefore suggest organizing P4M cooperation into “plurilateral chapters”, allowing partners to choose where they can contribute and make meaningful commitments. These “chapters” should remain open to others willing to observe and eventually join.

Such a flexible coalition, united by shared principles, common challenges and well-defined objectives, could give middle powers greater autonomy and capacity to pursue cooperation and avoid succumbing to pressure to take sides in a fractured world.