Platform 011 begins from the proposition that naming is never neutral, nowhere more so than in a time of deepening geopolitical fracture and global turbulence. 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 identities 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, it was intended as a gesture of empowerment, soliciting those who had been ‘minoritised’ by white-majority societies to realise their numerical and cultural power 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’. While the circulation of the term is fairly recent, the idea of the Global Majority has multiple potential genealogies and has previously found expression during different historical moments of international struggle and resistance, 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 through the deployment of this unifying term and what does it obscure or eclipse? Who remains outside its frame, whose interests does it serve, and who has the agency to define it?
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 systems of power produced by colonialism and racial capitalism, and an epistemological tool that enables us to think outside or beyond existing forms of identity and community organised around the political borders of the nation-state. When might the shared conditions and inheritances of geographically and temporally dispersed injustices and struggles be articulated as something more than merely parallel or analogous? In what ways can art and culture both prefigure and constitute alternative futures and transcultural models of collective world-making?
Throughout Platform 011, we will be working with guest contributing editors from around the globe to shape conversations that bring distinct histories, practices, and perspectives into relation, while holding open the tensions and contradictions that these relations inevitably produce. We will also collaborate with Untold Narratives, a development programme working with writers structurally marginalised by community or conflict, to support bringing 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 idea and practice, and to probe the role that art, language, organisational infrastructures, political affiliations, rapidly developing technologies, archival research, and publishing might play in imagining new forms of transnational solidarity and planetary belonging.
Ibraaz Publishing
Anthony Downey
Niamh Dunphy
Alex Fletcher
Sarah Hamed
Lina Lazaar
Hammad Nasar
Odessa Warren
Guest Contributing Editors
Nana Oforiatta Ayim
Omar Berrada
Eugene Yui Nam Cheung
Nadim Choufi
Djamila Ribeiro
Zoé Samudzi
Shela Sheikh
Michelle Wong