The research team, led by Carlos Hernán Gonzalez Parias of Tecnológico de Antioquia with colleagues from Esumer and Universidad Tecnológica del Perú, examined the period from 2018 to 2026, tracking how the three countries responded to leadership changes of contrasting ideological orientation. Brazil swung from the right-wing government of Jair Bolsonaro to the third administration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Colombia moved from the conservative Iván Duque to its first left-wing president, Gustavo Petro. Mexico transitioned from one variant of the left to another, from Andrés Manuel López Obrador to Claudia Sheinbaum. Each transition produced a measurable shift in what the government contested—and none produced a break with the institutions themselves.

The study’s central conceptual move is to redefine what political scientists call selective contestation as a bounded, observable category rather than an elastic label for any expression of dissatisfaction. Under the framework, a behavior qualifies as selective contestation only when three elements are jointly present: the state continues participating in a multilateral institution and fulfilling its core obligations; it targets an identifiable institutional object—a named norm, a decision-making procedure, a distribution of benefits or representation; and it seeks to modify, resist, or redirect that object rather than merely voice disapproval. Criticism aimed at abstractions such as unipolarity or globalism, the authors argue, is rhetorical criticism, not contestation. When a state seeks to leave, the behavior is exit. When it simply diversifies partnerships without changing an institutional arrangement, it exercises ordinary foreign-policy autonomy.

Within that category, the researchers distinguish four dimensions by their object. Normative contestation targets a rule of the order itself, such as democratic conditionality or the prohibitionist drug regime. Procedural contestation targets decision rules and claims to authority, including the composition of the UN Security Council and the distribution of IMF quotas. Distributive contestation targets allocations of benefits and costs, from climate finance to vaccine access. Institutional contestation targets the forum itself, through selective participation, forum shifting, or the construction of parallel institutions. The instruments used to contest these objects form a gradation of intensity: reform advocacy from within is least costly, selective non-compliance more so, and forum construction most intense because it threatens an institution’s centrality.

The empirical technique is as revealing as the findings. The team applied dictionary-based, computer-assisted content analysis to twenty-two official national statements delivered to the UN General Assembly between September 2018 and September 2025, using Python with natural language processing libraries to preprocess, tokenize, and lemmatize the texts. Each passage was coded against a four-dimensional dictionary, with explicit rules for what counts and what does not—generic sovereignty rhetoric with no institutional object, for instance, was coded as rhetorical criticism and excluded from contestation profiles. Two researchers coded the corpus independently, resolving discrepancies against the coding rules. The discourse analysis was then paired with coding of observable institutional behavior—membership records, UN voting alignment, financial obligations, and participation in alternative forums—tracked through a cut-off of 31 January 2026.

Brazil’s trajectory produces the study’s most striking contrast. Under Bolsonaro, the coding shows high normative contestation—national sovereignty terms averaged 8.5 mentions per statement—paired with almost no procedural contestation and low institutional loyalty rhetoric. Yet the institutional record tells a different story: Brazil withdrew from no major institution, its UN voting alignment with the United States rose from 45 percent in 2018 to a 62 percent average across 2019 to 2022, and it retained its self-declared developing-country status even after a joint statement with President Trump in March 2019 committed it to forgoing special and differential treatment in current and future WTO negotiations. Under Lula, the profile inverted. Multilateral cooperation terms jumped to 12.5 mentions per statement, institutional reform references to 7.0, and climate justice to 11.0. Brazil cleared accumulated arrears to the UN, WTO, and ILO, regaining suspended voting rights; used its 2024 G20 presidency to secure a Call to Action on Global Governance Reform; and leveraged its 2025 BRICS presidency and COP30 in Belém to press distributive demands on climate finance and dollar dependence.

Colombia moved from the comparison’s low-contestation pole to one of its most active cases. Under Duque, statements averaged 10.2 mentions of multilateral cooperation with only 0.8 references to institutional reform, and the government’s instrumental use of multilateral forums to pressure Venezuela did not qualify as contestation under the inclusion rule because it targeted no part of the arrangement itself. Under Petro, the coding reveals the highest-frequency theme in the entire corpus—climate crisis at 18.5 mentions per statement—combined with 7.5 references to critique of capitalism and 8.0 to institutional reform. His September 2025 address to the General Assembly challenged U.S. drug policy and called for collective UN action on Gaza, prompting the U.S. delegation to leave the chamber. The administration’s most consequential move, however, was institutional: Colombia secured a non-permanent Security Council seat for 2026 to 2027 with 180 votes on 3 June 2025, entering the system’s principal decision-making body to advance a reform agenda from within.

Mexico presents the study’s most consistent pattern, and its most codified constraints. The constitutional principles of Article 89, Section X—self-determination, non-intervention, peaceful settlement of disputes—and the Estrada Doctrine of 1930 anchor a defensive repertoire that persisted across both administrations. Under López Obrador, statements averaged 14.3 mentions of non-intervention and sovereignty, with 4.2 references criticizing unilateral sanctions; the government withdrew from the Lima Group in 2020 and proposed vaccines as global public goods. Under Sheinbaum, the same doctrine now operates with greater multilateral presence: attendance at the G20 in Rio, the CELAC summit in Tegucigalpa, and the G7 in Kananaskis, where she criticized what she termed the economy of destruction produced by rising military spending. On 3 January 2026, following the U.S. military operation in Caracas, Mexico condemned the intervention as a violation of Article 2 of the UN Charter. The authors note that this case rests on sixteen months of conduct and no presidential general-debate statement, making it the most provisional of the three findings.

From the comparison, three analytical types of selective contestation emerge. Asymmetric selective contestation, present in Brazil under Bolsonaro, pairs radical rhetorical challenge to norms with cosmopolitan content—environmental obligations, WHO authority, human-rights conditionality—with accommodation of the economic architecture. The proposed mechanism is coalitional: where a governing coalition is organized around sovereignty and identity claims but depends on internationally integrated economic sectors, contesting cosmopolitan norms is cheap and contesting economic arrangements is costly. Constructive selective contestation, present in Brazil under Lula and Colombia under Petro, combines institutional loyalty with procedural and distributive contestation, operating as a voice strategy in Hirschman’s sense: governments that regard the order as unequal but reformable press for change from within. Defensive selective contestation, present in Mexico across both governments, is doctrinally anchored, narrow in object, and triggered reactively by external events.

The explanation the authors propose locates selective contestation at the intersection of three levels, each doing distinct causal work. The systemic level—eroding U.S. hegemony, rising China, high exit costs—explains why all three states remain inside institutions and gain room to diversify, but it cannot explain why Brazil’s contestation profile reversed between 2022 and 2023 from an unchanged systemic position. The domestic level—ideology, coalition composition, leadership perceptions—explains the direction of variation: right-wing governments contested norms while accommodating economic arrangements; left-wing governments contested distributions and procedures while affirming institutional loyalty. The institutional level explains the bounds: Itamaraty’s career structure and examination-based recruitment, Mexico’s constitutionally codified doctrine, and Colombia’s inherited repertoire of alignment-with-invitation each supplied intermediate options while raising the cost of departing from them. The authors are careful about what the design can establish: with three cases selected because they display the phenomenon and no negative case examined, the four proposed conditions—exit costs, institutional flexibility, asymmetric bargaining power, domestic constraints—cannot be shown to be necessary, and the mechanisms are plausible rather than demonstrated.

What the analysis ultimately reveals is a middle-power strategy that is neither loyalty nor revisionism but recalibration. Contestation concentrates where formal equality diverges most from effective distribution—Security Council composition, climate finance, differential treatment in trade, and the drug-control regime—while trade and financial sub-orders were the least contested across all six governments, and in two were sites of active accommodation. The longer-term stakes are considerable. If institutions fail to incorporate the reform demands of their own members, the study suggests, the plausible outcome is not mass withdrawal but a gradual erosion of legitimacy from within, with incentives for alternative forums—the BRICS New Development Bank, local-currency payment mechanisms, CELAC alongside the OAS—that compete without replacing. And if middle powers conclude that selective contestation yields no substantive reform, pressure may build for more disruptive strategies, from exit coalitions to selective boycotts. Whether the institutions of the post-1945 order prove flexible enough to convert this opposition into renewal, the authors conclude, will depend on their capacity to adapt—much will hinge on that capacity, and the evidence from Latin America suggests the clock is running.

Subject of Research: Selective contestation of the liberal international order by Latin American middle powers

Article Title: Selective contestation of the liberal international order: institutional adaptation strategies in Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico (2018–2026)

Article References: Gonzalez Parias, C. H., Londoño Ossa, G. A., Velásquez Ochoa, J. A., Acosta Strobel, J. A., & Castilla Cabezudo, J. L. (2026). Selective contestation of the liberal international order: institutional adaptation strategies in Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico (2018–2026). Frontiers in Political Science, 8, Article 1957231. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.1957231

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2026.1957231

Keywords: Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, liberal international order, selective contestation, contested multilateralism, middle powers, UN General Assembly, UN Security Council, BRICS, G20, COP30

The study rests on a conceptual framework borrowed from social theory. Oboh anchors his analysis in Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the public sphere, the notional space in which governments, media, and citizens exchange views on matters of common interest. Since Habermas’s work was translated into English in 1962, scholars have used the idea to explain how democratic societies negotiate collective concerns. Contemporary researchers of counterpublics have extended the model, arguing that the public sphere is better understood as a multiplicity of overlapping publics rather than a single unified arena. Social media, Oboh notes, has accelerated this transformation: citizen journalists now create virtual spaces where people process their thoughts and share ideas on any issue of public interest, much as Habermas envisioned for the print-era bourgeois public sphere.

Within that framework, the media occupy a pivotal position. They are, metaphorically, the nexus that connects countries and regions in a notional space, and for most people they are the primary source of political information, including information on the conduct of governments and citizens. Oboh argues that the thoughts and feelings people hold about Africa are partly built on what media report about the region, and that media can also serve as ideological weapons projecting the views of their proprietors. A government that performs well in office, he observes, gains little public credit if the media fail to report that commitment, which is why objective coverage matters both for accountability and for image formation.

To test these propositions empirically, the study adopted a survey method with a non-probabilistic, purposive sampling technique. The sample was drawn from staff and students of Benson Idahosa University and from media practitioners in Benin City, Nigeria. A total of 384 questionnaires were distributed and 368 were retrieved, an attrition rate of 4.3 percent. The instrument was a structured questionnaire with 29 items in four sections, covering respondent background, the effects of media coverage, the effects of government actions, and the effects of citizens’ conduct on the African image. Responses were recorded on a five-point Likert scale, with mean scores above 3 indicating general agreement and standard deviations capturing the dispersion of opinion. Three null hypotheses were then evaluated using the Pearson correlation coefficient.

The results on media coverage were the clearest. The statement that media coverage of the good things done by Africans creates a good image for Africa recorded the highest mean in its block, 4.26, signaling strong agreement, while the claim that media reports of government actions do not affect Africa’s image scored a low 2.18, indicating disagreement. The grand mean of 3.44 for the media block suggested that respondents broadly accepted that the media exert a reasonable influence on how Africa is viewed. Statistically, the Pearson correlation between media coverage of African affairs and the public view of the African image was r = 0.365, a positive moderate relationship, with a significance value of 0.000, well below the 0.05 threshold. The null hypothesis of no correlation was therefore rejected: the more the media cover African affairs, the more other regions are likely to know about the continent.

Government actions also proved consequential. The single strongest item in this block was the statement that corruption by some African leaders has an impact on the image of Africa, with a mean of 4.11. The grand mean of 3.21 indicated that respondents believed government conduct shapes public assessment of the region, although a fairly high standard deviation of 1.32 revealed considerable diversity of opinion. The Pearson correlation between government actions and the public view of the African image was r = 0.340, again a positive moderate relationship significant at 0.000, leading to rejection of the second null hypothesis. In plain terms, when governments act in ways aligned with public expectations, the image of the region improves; corruption and misgovernance do measurable reputational damage.

The evidence on citizens was weaker but still significant. The grand mean of 2.95 for the citizen block showed respondents were essentially neutral about how much individual conduct shapes the continental image, and a standard deviation of 1.28 confirmed a fair diversity of views. Yet the Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.229, significant at p = 0.000, indicated a weak positive relationship between the actions of African citizens and the public view of the African image. The third null hypothesis was rejected as well. Oboh interprets this to mean that how African citizens relate to members of other regions, including what they share on social media, does feed into external perceptions, even if the effect is smaller than that of media and government.

Beyond the survey, the study situates Africa’s image problem in the structures of global politics and economics. Oboh argues that the region’s difficulties today stem less from colonialism than from misplaced priorities by past and present leaders who ignored citizens’ welfare. He highlights the debt burden as a central constraint: between 1970 and 2002, Africa received 540 billion dollars in loans, paid back 550 billion, and still owed 293 billion at the end of 2002. Some African nations remain aid-dependent, with foreign assistance exceeding 50 percent of government expenditure in certain cases, a dependency that erodes economic sovereignty. He also points to the absence of a permanent African seat on the United Nations Security Council, noting that UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called for reform of the council’s outdated structure and criticized its lack of representation for Africa as undermining the body’s credibility and legitimacy.

The digital dimension runs throughout the analysis. Oboh argues that technological development is not value neutral, and that Western control of digital technology shapes how virtual spaces frame discussions of globalization and digital governance. He urges African governments to use both legacy and new media to project their positions, and to exploit social media networking sites to share the continent’s own narratives and correct impressions that have undermined its image. At the same time, he warns that citizen journalists sometimes circulate untrue stories about African governments, and that such stories carry negative consequences precisely because audiences abroad are more likely to believe accounts shared by African citizens about their own governments than accounts shared by outsiders.

The study’s conclusions come with candid limitations. Because the sample was purposive and drawn entirely from Nigerian academia and media, the findings reflect an African perspective on Africa’s image and cannot be generalized to non-African audiences; Oboh recommends that future research survey international respondents or compare African and non-African viewpoints directly. His recommendations are nonetheless pointed: media organizations should report factual accounts of government actions; governments should encourage inclusive, participatory democracy; citizens, at home and in the diaspora, should feel a sense of ownership in their governments’ success and report on them objectively; and the United Nations should consider making Africa a permanent member of the Security Council to enhance both the continent’s image and its contribution to global peace. The overarching message is that Africa’s reputation is a joint enterprise, and that governments, media, and citizens who work more closely together on socioeconomic development will, in the process, reshape how the committee of nations sees the region.

Subject of Research: Public perceptions of how African governments, media, and citizens influence Africa's global image

Article Title: Impact of the actions of governments, media, and citizens on public view of African image

Article References: Oboh, G. E. (2026). Impact of the actions of governments, media, and citizens on public view of African image. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 206. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00373-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00373-y

Keywords: Africa, public sphere, media coverage, governance, citizenship, survey research, Habermas, correlation analysis, African image, UN Security Council, foreign debt, social media