DISCUSSION BRIEF – Global South Perspectives on the Peace and Development Nexus: Potential of South-South and Triangular Cooperation for Addressing the Impact of Conflict on Global South Countries
by Adel M. Abdellatif*
March 2026 Introduction: A Moment of Reckoning We are living through a convergence of crises: conflicts, climate disruption, economic fragmentation, and digital fracture. These forces do not bear down equally. Their weight falls most heavily on countries of the Global South — those least responsible for generating global instability, yet absorbing a disproportionate and compounding share of its consequences. This is not a new dynamic, but its contemporary scale is. The deep integration of the global economy means that conflicts no longer remain contained within their geographies. Through interconnected markets for energy, food, finance, and trade, they cascade across borders, triggering secondary crises in countries often thousands of miles from the front lines. Global South countries — characterised by structural heterogeneity, limited fiscal buffers, and constrained institutional capacity — are the most exposed and the least equipped to absorb these shocks. With only 35 per cent of Sustainable Development Goal targets on track for 2030, and with the United Nations projecting a global economic downturn that could spiral beyond manageable parameters, the structural position of Global South countries demands urgent analytical and policy attention. This brief initiates a structured conversation among development practitioners, policymakers, and scholars on how South-South and Triangular Cooperation (SSTrC) can serve as a strategic, peer-grounded mechanism to help Global South countries anticipate, absorb, and recover from the development shocks that conflicts generate. It draws its analytical foundation from the 2025 UNOSSC Global Report, which — for the first time — introduces a strategic foresight lens into SSTrC analysis. I. The Asymmetric Logic of Conflict Shocks The starting point for any serious engagement with this topic is asymmetry. Conflict-generated shocks flow through the global economy with little regard for borders, but with acute sensitivity to structural position. Least Developed Countries (LDCs), Small Island Developing States (SIDS), landlocked developing countries, and net importers of food and energy face cascade effects they did not cause and cannot easily absorb. The 2025 UNOSSC Global Report documents how shocks since 2020 — the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and escalating trade tensions — have become ‘more intense, widespread, and interlinked,’ leaving lasting impacts on development across the Global South. The ongoing conflict in the Middle East reinforces this trajectory. The development implications are multidimensional. Landlocked economies dependent on transit corridors face different exposure than agriculture-based economies disrupted by fertilizer supply chains, or emerging markets susceptible to capital flight and currency depreciation. Across all profiles, the consequences are similar: inflationary pressure, fiscal stress, rising debt burdens, eroding social gains, and sharpened gender inequalities, with women and girls bearing heightened costs. II. The Peace and Development Nexus: Towards a Southern Lens The linkage between peace and development is well-established in international policy discourse. The distinctive contribution of the 2025 UNOSSC Global Report lies in its Southern-centred reading of this nexus: one that positions peace not as a precondition externally delivered, but as a dynamic that development cooperation can actively build from within. The report argues that SSTrC — extended through triangular partnerships — is uniquely positioned to address the root causes of conflict: poverty, inequality, resource scarcity, and weak governance. Joint initiatives in sustainable agriculture and water management can mitigate resource-based tensions in transboundary regions; shared educational programmes can foster intercultural understanding; and the dialogue platforms inherent in SSTrC can serve as mechanisms for preventive diplomacy, confidence-building, and conflict resolution — reducing reliance on external interventions that may not align with local realities. This represents a shift from an instrumental view of peace as a prerequisite for development, to an integrated view in which development cooperation is itself a peacebuilding modality. The report frames this through a ‘human security’ lens — encompassing physical safety, economic security, social protection, environmental resilience, and political stability — as ‘a powerful pathway to sustainable peace.’ Critically, SSTrC does not replace multilateral frameworks or North-South cooperation; it complements and strengthens them, injecting greater equity, national ownership, and contextual relevance into the global development architecture. III. SSTrC as a Strategic Response: Priority Dimensions for Reflection How can SSTrC serve as an effective mechanism for Global South countries responding to conflict-generated development shocks? The following questions are offered to guide practitioner and policy dialogue:- Transmission pathways and visibility. Through what mechanisms do conflict shocks reach geographically distant countries — and why do the development costs borne by secondary shock-absorbers (net food importers, remittance-dependent economies, landlocked transit states) remain systematically underweighted in global analysis and policy response? What would it take to make these exposure pathways legible to international frameworks?
- Limits of multilateral architecture. Where do current multilateral frameworks — in trade, finance, food security, and debt relief — reveal structural limits when tested against the development scenarios Global South countries are most likely to face? What does that gap imply about the kind of architecture — regional, South-led, or hybrid — needed to fill it?
- Counter-cyclical design. How can SSTrC be operationalised as a counter-cyclical, conflict-responsive mechanism — capable of expanding support precisely when conflict shocks contract the fiscal space and institutional capacity of vulnerable countries? What financing, institutional, and governance innovations are required?
- Comparative advantage. Where does SSTrC hold the greatest comparative advantage relative to other cooperation modalities in addressing the peace-development nexus? In what contexts — fragile states, conflict-adjacent regions, countries experiencing secondary shocks — does SSTrC offer pathways that conventional North-South cooperation cannot, or should not, attempt to replicate?
- Knowledge systems and Southern epistemic capacity. What investments in data, research infrastructure, and Southern knowledge systems are needed to enable Global South countries to better anticipate, document, and respond to conflict-generated shocks through SSTrC — and how can this platform contribute to building that capacity?
