ACCOUNTABILITY IN GEOPOLITICS · PT III  

THE GRAMMAR OF NON-ALIGNMENT

Rule-Shaper or Rule-Taker

Part One of this series read the New Delhi Declaration as a document organised around omission — a text that could gesture at grievances against Washington and Moscow without ever naming either. Part Two found the same instinct closer to home, in the quiet, unexplained handoff of the Berbice port file from Chinese to American patrons, and in a security-cooperation architecture that has never been made to answer for what it means alongside Huawei’s entrenched surveillance footprint. Both cases showed a state; or a bloc of states — protecting room to maneuver by declining to say plainly what it wants and from whom.

Prime Minister Modi offered a phrase at the summit that deserves to be taken seriously rather than filed as a rhetorical flourish: the Global South, he said, should stop being a rule-taker and start being a rule-shaper. It is worth asking what that would actually require, and then asking whether Guyana — a small state with more leverage available to it than its size would suggest, sitting on one of the largest per-capita oil discoveries in modern history — has used any of it.

THE ONE CONTRACT WHERE THE TEST IS NOT HYPOTHETICAL

Guyana does not need an abstract theory of rule-shaping. It has a live, specific, currently pending opportunity to exercise it: the 2016 Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement with ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC. This newsroom’s own reporting, in the “Stabroek Surrender” series and its subsequent installments, has laid out the mechanism in detail. The contract contains no ring-fencing between projects, meaning that new developments — Uaru, Whiptail, Hammerhead, worth a combined US$32.2 billion — enter the same undivided cost-recovery pool the consortium’s exploration and development costs have drawn from since the beginning. The July 2026 milestone widely celebrated as a turning point, the moment Guyana’s profit share crossed fifty percent after Exxon confirmed full recovery of its initial US$55 billion in costs, is offset by exactly this feature: each new project resets the clock on what can be recovered before the state’s share improves further.

Christopher Ram, the Guyanese chartered accountant and attorney who has pressed this argument longest and most precisely, has pointed to Article 32.1 of the agreement, which does not require a finding of impossibility, hardship, or breach to reopen its terms. It requires only that Exxon consent. That is a materially different proposition from what President Ali has offered publicly: that the contract’s A contract clause that can be reopened by mutual agreement is not a wall. It is a door the government has chosen not to knock on.

Article 32.1 does not require impossibility or breach to reopen the contract. It requires only that Exxon consent. That is a door, not a wall — and the government has chosen not to knock on it.

SANCTITY OF CONTRACT, SELECTIVELY APPLIED

What makes “sanctity of contract” a harder position to defend on its own terms is that the government has not, in practice, treated the Stabroek agreement as untouchably sacred. Audit deadline extensions have been granted. A gas feasibility study the contract itself contemplates has never been conducted. These are not renegotiations of headline fiscal terms, but they are departures from strict enforcement — evidence that the government is capable of treating the agreement’s obligations as negotiable when the negotiation runs in the consortium’s favour, and inflexible only when the negotiation would run in the state’s.

This is the precise inversion of what rule-shaping would look like. A rule-shaper, in Modi’s own formulation from the summit floor, does not simply accept the terms an established power offers and defend that acceptance as principle. It names what it wants changed and uses whatever leverage it holds to change it. Ram’s full renegotiation proposal — a sunset on the tax waiver by 2029, royalty escalation from two to six to ten percent, ring-fenced cost centres so new projects cannot dilute the state’s position, a recovery ceiling cut from seventy-five to fifty percent of revenue, and cash-funded decommissioning backed by parent-company guarantees rather than the current, weaker liability structure — is not a radical document.

It is the kind of counter-offer any government confident in its own leverage would put on the table and let Exxon accept, modify, or walk away from. Guyana has not put it on the table. It has instead described the table itself as fixed.

WHAT ACTUAL LEVERAGE WOULD LOOK LIKE

None of this requires Guyana to become adversarial toward Exxon, any more than genuine rule-shaping requires BRICS to become adversarial toward Washington or Moscow. The distinction Part One drew about the New Delhi Declaration applies with equal force here: there is a difference between careful diplomatic language that preserves room for a negotiated outcome, and careful diplomatic language that exists to avoid the negotiation altogether. BRICS, whatever the limits of its declaration, did at least gesture toward the substance of its members’ grievances — tariffs, sanctions, restraint in an active war — even while declining to name names. Guyana’s public position on Stabroek has not gestured toward the substance of Ram’s argument at all.

It has simply asserted that the conversation is closed, using a phrase, “sanctity of contract,” that the government’s own conduct elsewhere in the same agreement does not consistently honor.

This is the throughline across all three parts of this series. BRICS proved that a bloc of eleven states, several of them at odds with one another, could produce a declaration vague enough to hold together without ever taking the harder step of assigning responsibility. Guyana has shown the same skill on a smaller stage — first in the unexplained silence over who built, or was meant to build, the Berbice port, and now in a fiscal contract whose own text offers a legal path to renegotiation that has simply gone unused. A rule-shaper opens the door provided for in its own contracts. Guyana has the door.

What has been missing is not leverage, and not even a legal argument — Ram supplied that months ago. What has been missing is the willingness to use the word “renegotiate” in public and mean it.

This concludes “The Grammar of Non-Alignment.” Part One examined the New Delhi Declaration’s engineered vagueness; Part Two traced the same pattern through Guyana’s unexplained Berbice port patron handoff and its parallel security and surveillance arrangements; Part Three has tested the resulting claim to “rule-shaping” against the one contract where Guyana holds a clear, unused legal path to renegotiate its own terms.