What Does the Global South Want?
The term ‘Global South’ is evocative, but it also elicits a range of reactions. For some, it represents a project-in-the-making by the poorer and formerly colonised nations demanding global justice, solidarity and equity. Others are more dismissive of the potential for collective action, pointing to the great diversity and differing interests within the ‘developing’ world. For yet others, it is a problematic state-centric construct that doesn’t take into account transnational solidarity of racial minorities everywhere, including in the wealthy world.
However, I submit that the Global South is a relevant and useful construct. But not quite in the way many of its critics – and adherents – portray it. To look for a grand project of solidarity or a single leader is to try to answer the wrong questions. The Global South in our time is best described, not as an organised collectivity, but as an analytic framework grounded in geopolitics above all else.
This is not to deny that alternative framings reveal important truths. The long shadow of colonialism explains many current fault lines and conflicts. Economic marginalisation and debt distress are painful realities in much of the ‘developing’ world, already reeling from the abuses of the neoliberal era and the aftermath of Covid-19. The great diversity among these states is also something that cannot be discounted in any analysis.
But more germane – and useful – is an understanding of the Global South as a ‘geopolitical fact’. Geopolitical logic reveals a huge swath of states in Latin America, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands that lie outside the core of the great power system, which is comprised of the three great powers – the United States, China and Russia – and their core allies. States at the core of the great power system (especially those under a nuclear umbrella) enjoy an elevated sense of security, status and economic opportunity. But the Global South must fend for itself in an international system it does not dominate; governed by rules it mostly did not make.
