As a construct, the ‘Global South’ polarizes views in the social and political sciences. On the one hand, proponents often think of it as a kinder alternative to the chequered genealogies of the ‘Third World’ or the ‘developing world’. For some, it captures the Asian-African solidarity against colonial powers in the shape of the now-forgotten Bandung. On the other hand, some resist the woolly term for it presumably reproduces the very politics of othering it seeks to criticize, ever so trapped in the language of the ‘Global North’. That it is oblivious to the struggles of the powerless and the dispossessed in so-called ‘advanced economies’ and, of late, to the epistemic marginalization of the ‘Global East’.
Yet, we want to retrieve the conceptual promise of the Global South as a political imaginary aimed at forging solidaristic ties between and among peripheries, no matter the hemisphere. We put forward the language of the ‘global souths’ to refrain from monolithizing the conditions of ‘southernness’.
With these tensions in mind, in what ways do we recalibrate our understanding of the Global South in the face of current cataclysms in world politics? Why and how must we commit to it as a different kind of knowing? Or as a sort of Bandung 2.0, but from below? Are there more reflexive alternatives to the concept? In what ways does it inspire radically alternative ways of world-making in various disciplines? What happens when voices from the global south/s come together and think through these issues dialogically?
Unsettle your assumptions about what the concept of the ‘Global South/s’ means! From the politics of the ‘Third World’ to subversive practice, see our working, non-exhaustive Global South/s Reading List that attempts to situate the contested concept, not least from the global histories of anti-imperial struggles, in world politics, and as a praxis of knowledge generation.