Platform 011 begins from the proposition that naming is never neutral, nowhere more so than in a time of deepening geopolitical fracture and global polycrisis. Categories can shape how we perceive existing realities, generate collective cultural imaginaries and theoretical frameworks, and consolidate political solidarities between disparate constituencies. Yet they can also reduce complex and conflicted historical experiences and social processes to abstract and falsely universalising rubrics and narratives.
Over the past two decades, the category ‘Global Majority’ has gained currency within art, educational, and political contexts as an alternative to terms like ‘BAME’ (Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic), ‘BIPoC’ (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour), and ‘Global South’. First introduced in the early 2000s by Rosemary Campbell-Stephens as part of a broader effort to decolonise language around race and ethnicity in the United Kingdom, the term was intended as a gesture of affirmation and empowerment, soliciting those who had been ‘minoritised’ within white-majority societies to realise their numerical and cultural strength by naming a form of belonging and identification on a global scale.
When Ibraaz opened its new London centre in October 2025, it described itself as ‘a brave space for art, culture, and ideas from the Global Majority’. Platform 011 emerged, in part, out of a self-critical interrogation of Ibraaz’s adoption of this moniker. While the circulation of the term is relatively recent, the idea of the Global Majority has multiple potential genealogies and has previously found symbolic and material expression during different historical moments of internationalism, including Third Worldism, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), Pan-Arabism/- Africanism/-Asianism, and Black Lives Matter. Rather than treating the Global Majority as a stable and self-evident classificatory label or demographic fact, Platform 011 asks what is at stake when individuals, institutions, and political collectives enunciate this seemingly straightforward collective noun. What becomes perceptible when it is deployed as an expression of unification and what material specificities or divisions does it obscure or eclipse? Who remains outside its frame, whose interests does it serve, and who has the agency to define it? Is a single or conclusive definition even possible or desirable?
Across essays, conversations, visual and sonic thinking, fiction, poetry, and moving image, Platform 011 locates the Global Majority as both a potential methodological framework for investigating the global entanglements and mutual alliances engendered by the ongoing histories of colonial-capitalist globalisation, and an epistemological device to think outside of the border logics and majority-minority hierarchies of the nation-state order. What would it mean to articulate the shared conditions and inheritances of geographically and temporally dispersed injustices and struggles as something more than merely parallel or analogous? In what ways can art and culture prefigure or constitute models of collective world-making and kinship that go beyond state-sanctioned forms recognition?
Throughout Platform 011, we will be working with Guest Contributing Editors (GCE) from around the globe to bring distinct histories, practices, and perspectives into relation, while holding open the tensions and contradictions that these juxtapositions inevitably produce. The GCE role is intended to expand and extend the geographical and interdisciplinary breadth of Ibraaz Publishing’s editorial team in London by inviting editors to commission a series of responses across a range of media and genres. We will also collaborate with Untold Narratives, a development programme working with writers structurally marginalised by community or conflict, to bring writing and cultural production from Sudan and South Sudan into wider circulation.
As Platform 011 evolves over the coming nine to twelve months, artists, writers, thinkers, cultural workers, and activists working in different geopolitical contexts and disciplines will be invited to test the affordances and limitations of the Global Majority as an organising principle or regulative ideal, and to probe the role that art, language, organisational infrastructures, political affiliations, emerging technologies, archival research, and publishing might play in imagining and realising new forms of transnational solidarity and planetary belonging.
Contributors Shahidul Alam / Louisa Yousfi / Gargi Bhattacharyya / Omar El Akkad / Kathryn Yusoff / Maya Indira Ganesh / Najlaa Eltom / Mayada Ibrahim / MK Harb / DJ Diaki / Su Yu Hsin / Abhishek Nilamber / Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda / Law Yuk Mui / Sara Rajae / Amanda Tropicana / Gael Rocha // Ibraaz Publishing Anthony Downey / Niamh Dunphy / Alex Fletcher / Sarah Hamed /Lina Lazaar / Hammad Nasar / Odessa Warren // Guest Contributing Editors Omar Berrada / Eugene Yui Nam Cheung / Nadim Choufi / Nana Oforiatta Ayim / Djamila Ribeiro / Zoé Samudzi / Shela Sheikh / Michelle Wong, amongst others ...