Locating the Global South
Locating the Global South: Introduction
Geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists highlight that global interconnectedness is woven into everyday life and visible to observers.
Starbucks branches worldwide, with their sameness, represent cultural homogenization associated with globalization.
In Manila and New Delhi, the stark contrast between Starbucks and nearby shantytowns reveals the unevenness of globalization.
Shantytowns exhibit poor sanitation, informal economic sector employment, child labor, and the threat of eviction for commercial development.
Residents of these shanties lack political influence in weak states, where governments are too poor, weak, corrupt, and unstable to supply basic needs.
Poverty in the global south is more confronting, and this north/south divide is engendered by globalization.
The shanty represents the tenacity of the local, unable to participate in cosmopolitan culture, revealing the inherent unevenness of globalization.
Left-wing critics view the forced liberalization and marketization of developing economies as globalization or neo-liberalism, led by IFIs like the WB, IMF, and WTO, saddling these economies with debt and vulnerability to global economic shocks.
This form of globalization is uneven, applying different economic norms to the developed and developing worlds.
The WB and IMF often demand developing economies cut government spending and raise interest rates to reduce inflation, leading to catastrophic results.
The developed world doesn't apply the same austerity standards to itself, as seen in the US Federal Reserve's response to the 2008 credit crunch.
Anti-globalization critics argue that the contradictions of neo-liberalism cause and reinforce poverty in the global south, with structural adjustment deepening inequality.
The shanty and Starbucks are both symbols of globalization; globalization creates both affluence and poverty, pushing some into modernity while leaving others behind.
Analysis of globalization requires studying those left behind.
The global south operates under various logics and is articulated by multiple subjectivities.
Inequalities between countries necessitate categories like the global south.
Globalization challenges the dominance of the state but produces changes in state structure, requiring responses from states.
The term ‘global south’ and its antecedent forms like the ‘Third World’ emerged as inequalities were produced through political projects like colonization and neo-liberal globalization.
People have responded to these projects, reshaping global political engagement.
Contemporary globalization has reshaped the contours of the global south, partially prefiguring its future.
The global south is less likely to fall into static notions of identity.
Conceptualizing the Global South
Conceiving of the global south is of primary import to those engaged in social and political action against global inequality.
Critics and activists use the global south as a banner to rally countries victimized by violent economic 'cures' of institutions like the IMF.
Critics of cold war-era power politics deployed the term 'Third World' or the logic of non-alignment.
Changing geopolitical circumstances mean these terms each have specific historical nuances we cannot disregard.
All these terms point to common phenomena: the underdevelopment of certain states/peoples and their lack of representation in global political processes.
The term ‘global south’ and similar categories are relevant to the study of globalization.
The terminology may evolve, the effects of large-scale political projects make it necessary for scholars and activists to use terms like ‘global south’.
The question is not ‘what the global south is’ but ‘for whom and under what conditions the global south becomes relevant’.
‘The Global South is everywhere, but it is also somewhere, and that somewhere, located at the intersection of entangled political geographies of dispossession and repossession’.
The global south is thus both a reality and a provisional work-in-progress.
The global south should not be defined a priori but rather articulated in the context of provisional and mutable processes of political praxis. This allows us to historicize it and remain mindful of its evolution.
The global south can be located in between the objective realities of global inequality and the various subjective responses to these.
There is no uniform global south, and academic analysis is in a better position to document its articulation rather than set its ontological limits.
The Global South is a symbolic designation meant to capture the semblance of cohesion that emerged when former colonial entities engaged in political projects of decolonization and moved toward the realization of a postcolonial international order.
The ‘former colonial entities’ are almost all categorizable as states in an international system of governance.
The terms ‘Third World’, ‘developing world’, and ‘global south’ are all ways to represent interstate inequalities.
We are discussing imbalances of aggregate economic and political power between states.
This conception of the global south is a simplification that allows for analytic consistency.
The focus on the state and interstate dynamics creates a methodological narrowing, which ignores the richness of non-state politics.
A continued emphasis on the state and interstate politics remains politically and analytically relevant.
Objections to Emphasizing the State
First, there are forms of power inequality that cannot be reduced to discussions of state politics.
Jonathan Rigg emphasizes the everyday nature of politics in the global south, where local practices subtend, transcend, and overwhelm statecraft.
Research on peasant movements has revealed how everyday resistances operate under a political logic outside state politics and institutions.
Bayat theorized the notion of ‘nonmovements’ or the ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary encapsulated in the ‘discreet and prolonged ways in which the poor struggle to survive.
Nonmovements, though they may alter and challenge the state, are not always direct challenges to it.
Second, not all of the formal colonial entities are states.
Raewyn Connell conceives of aboriginal Australia as integral to the imaginary universe of the global south, despite it being formally part of a wealthy developed state.
Similar arguments can be made about other indigenous peoples displaced by powerful, often white, settler colonialists.
The process of globalization places into question geographically-bound conceptions of poverty and inequality.
The increase and intensification of global flows spread both poverty and affluence.
Spaces of underdevelopment in developed countries may mirror the poverty of the global south, and spaces of affluence in the developing world mirror those of the global north.
A CEO from a technology start-up in India is more akin to that of an American or European CEO than an Indian compatriot in a Mumbai slum.
A jobless former autoworker in Detroit with a bad mortgage may share experiences closer to that of a Third World laborer.
The concentration of power and wealth in the one percent to the detriment of the other 99 in the global north illustrates that viewing inequality through a simple interstate lens is inadequate.
Various forms of inequality cut across national boundaries, and Marx was correct to claim, ‘the proletariat has no country’.
There is a global south in the global north, and vice versa. There are, as well, interstitial spaces like the US#x2013 Mexico borderlands where ‘the Third World grates with the First and bleeds’.
Analyzing States and Interstate Inequalities
The decolonization process produced states, now recognized as sovereign under the system of international law promoted by the United Nations.
The likelihood of being poor is higher for people who live in states now considered associated with the global south, in regions like Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America.
Many of these formerly colonized countries are the same ones inadequately represented in global organizations like the WTO and the various international banks.
The vibrancy of the Latin American Left stems largely from the recognition that global free trade has failed countries qua countries.
Resistance to global trading regimes is also largely organized through states, as evidenced by the emergence of the Group of 33 in the WTO.
Solutions to problems produced by globalization are largely forwarded and articulated on a state level.
States may not be ‘ideal for the purpose of a much more globalized world’, global institutions have yet to prove that ‘they can diminish international inequalities’.
The state remains ‘the main mechanism for social transfers’, making it the strongest vehicle for social redistribution.
This redistributive function of the state becomes crucial in the context of economic globalization, where the goal of neo-liberal economists and institutions is precisely to dismantle local state oversight.
Development in the global south must begin by ‘drawing most of a country’s financial resources for development from within rather than becoming dependent on foreign investments and foreign financial markets’.
Such solutions require a continued reaffirmation of the unequal position of states in the global south.
States have the ability to protect the environment, and the global environmental crisis is a reflection of interstate inequality.
Governments of the north, though having the ability to regulate polluting companies, do so inadequately.
A more robust climate policy can only emerge if northern states acknowledge their disproportionate capacity to damage the environment.
Even phenomena largely considered ‘transnational’ are the results of state policies.
Acts of deterritorialization such as labor migration need to be placed in the context of the state.
The increase in overseas Filipino workers began with a deliberate move on the part of the Marcos regime to send labor outside the country.
A similar phenomenon occurred during Suharto's New Order regime in Indonesia. In both countries, migrants boost the domestic economy of their respective countries, and the state's economic growth is highly reliant on remittances.
Transnational global spheres are already prefigured by the policies of state authorities.
The state will continue to be an important unit of analysis despite the deterritorializing effects of globalization.
This is more pronounced in the context of the global south, where an economically activist state is a necessary response to forces such as international business, international financial institutions, and foreign state power – none of which citizens in the global south can easily influence.
In the global south, the struggle for autonomous governance is largely waged as a struggle to democratize the state in order to make it responsive to the needs of people on the ground rather than the demands of external power.
Colonialism, Modernity, and the Creation of Global Inequality
Since the global south is a metaphor for interstate inequality, fluid and evolving, it is not so important to distinguish the term ‘global south’ from its antecedent forms. Our task should be instead to locate the concept in a wider history of world politics.
In many respects, the global south is a product of Western imagination.
The Spanish conquest of Latin America in the sixteenth century produced what we now recognize as Latin America. During this time, the monarchy of Spain conceived of the New World as a site of evangelization for the Christian faith.
The conquistadors saw non-Christian peoples as lesser beings, requiring enlightenment by a Christian civilization.
In the early nineteenth century, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel believed that a universal ‘Spirit’ propelled world history, leading humankind to higher levels of consciousness. His conception of this Spirit had a geographical imaginary embedded in it: world history begins in Asia and finds its apotheosis in European civilization.
Hegel did not believe the African continent was part of history.
Hegel's work and those of similar thinkers like Immanuel Kant informed European legal and military policy towards non-European entities.
The French mission civilisatrice allowed for the subjugation of vast parts of Africa and Southeast Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Even the United States, which sought to distinguish itself from the colonial powers in Europe, deployed a similar logic upon colonizing the Philippine islands in 1898. US President William McKinley declared a policy of ‘benevolent assimilation’ for the Philippines – colonialism with a smile.
Within this logic, the subjugation of whole peoples was not inherently problematic, and its violences could be passed off as excesses of benevolent civilizing endeavors.
Civilizational discourse shaped the birth of the international order. European international lawyers founded the Institute of International Law in 1873 and agreed that ‘barbaric’ races were outside the ambit of international law.
It was only in 1944, during the creation of the United Nations, that Western powers officially abandoned this racialist discourse.
Colonial logic continues to seep into the grammar of world politics through theories that either homogenize the global south or present its development in linear terms.
American economist Walt W. Rostow's modernization theory became a key foreign policy precept of the Kennedy administration. For Rostow, the United States, with its special ‘way of life’, needed to play an active role in promoting the modernization of other countries as a way for them to catch up with Western powers.
The notion of development and the emergence of economic sub-disciplines meant to address Third World poverty emanated from an impulse to universalize Western social scientific rationality and capitalist doctrines like property rights.
'
The global south, therefore, continues to be imagined and re-imagined by those who dominate it even as movements from below reshape these constructions through resistance.
Samuel Huntington's theory of a ‘clash of civilizations’ rehashes many of colonial stereotypes associated with so-called backward civilizations.
Francis Fukuyama's theory about the ‘end of history’ manifesting in the complete triumph of Western capitalism and liberalism turns the West into the telos of political organization.
Thomas Friedman has been articulating global progress in terms of a binary between embracing free trade and being left behind by the pace of international economic and technological developments.
.
In this ideology, global economic integration is not only inevitable given the rise of new technologies – it is, more importantly, a normative international goal.
While globalism may, indeed, be a historically-specific ideology, it nonetheless continues to borrow from notions of linear progress and development that originated in colonial discourse.
Representations of global marginality arise partially as a reaction to universalist ideologies, the global south is now increasingly defining itself against globalism.
The global south has been the specter and the necessary counterpoint of global modernity as it has been articulated in various forms.
There would have been no civilization had there been no barbarians, no development without underdevelopment, no globalism without parochial localism, no Lexus without the olive tree.
Challenging the Colonial Order
The notion of solidarity among colonized states was present from the beginning of anti-colonialism, serving as the foundation for contemporary conceptions of the global south.
Resistance against Spanish colonialism in Latin America and the Philippines benefitted from the increased interaction of political dissidents amidst an early phase of globalization in the late nineteenth century – a globalization that allowed for the spreading of anarchist and anti-colonial ideas.
Anticolonialism, though it emphasized domestic nationalism, was also an internationalist project, and it has also largely been a project of the political Left.
The Socialist International did not prioritize the struggle of colonized peoples in its policies. It would take a more radical and militant reinterpretation of socialism for these struggles to be recongnized.
After the Bolshevik revolution, Lenin founded the Communist International (Comintern) in 1919 as an alternative locus of socialist internationalism. Lenin argued that capitalism's strength is premised on the creation of new markets via imperialism.
Lenin's International became more inclusive of colonized peoples than its predecessor. In 1920, the Comintern organized the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku. In that conference, Lenin urged Communists to forge ties with nationalist elites and radical peasants in their fight against colonialism.
In 1960, Ho Chi Minh remarked that associating imperialism with capitalism made a détente with the nationalisms of the colonized world.
The international Left in its various incarnations has continued to articulate modes of solidarity with the global south. As I discuss below, however, the Communist Left would not be above accusations of neo-colonialism.
The end of the Second World War was the highpoint of decolonization. Since the creation of the United Nations in 1945, over 80 ex-colonies have gained independence.
through the United Nations that international law ceased to formally divide the world into civilized and uncivilized nations.
As more countries decolonized, the cold war loomed over the post-war reconfiguration of world politics.
In this tripartite vision, the Third World consisted of non-aligned countries, charting a middle way between the first and the second worlds. The founding moment for this non-aligned movement was the Asia-African Conference held in Bandung in 1955.
Indonesian president Sukarno set the tone for the conference in his opening speech, declaring that what united the countries of the Third World was not a common identity or culture, but a common resistance to new forms of colonialism.
The countries were not just wary of first world imperialism, but also of ‘communist colonialism’ especially the repressive policies of the USSR against Eastern European states and China's against Indochina and Taiwan. Thus non-alignment became a generalized condemnation of the aggression of powerful states directed at weaker ones.
In examining the inherent disjoint between the universality of human liberties and the hierarchies created by colonialism and authoritarianism, Third Worldism, in its initial configuration, became a vehicle for the mainstreaming of human rights.
In the 1960s and the 1970s, the international Left's interest in the post-colonial world intensified.
Radical visions from the Third World became integral to the global language of protest. Today, however, the old language of Third Worldism is no longer tenable. On a narrow empirical level, a tripartite world no longer exists.
Dirlik hints at the fact that Third Worldism is implicated in a greater project of global modernity, as indeed the tripartite model emerges from a linear conception of progress.
Berger challenges any form of politics based on territorial nation-states, contending that even a reconceptualization of the Third World as global south, if it remains embedded in ‘territorial politics’, will suffer the same political pitfalls. This puts into question the centrality of interstate inequalities discussed earlier.
The Global South as Neo-Internationalism
As of 2012, Greece, along with other European economies, is proving to be the worst hit by the global financial crisis that began in 2008. Among the major European states, the only relatively stable economy is that of Germany.
Greece, the birthplace of Western democracy, is starting to resemble the ‘backward economically underdeveloped countries of the global south as more and more citizens lose jobs and government continues to scale back public spending.
The economic prescriptions to Greece by Germany and the IMF are the same as the ‘cures routinely recommended for countries of the global south.
The ills of the global south are being globalized, and the Greeks seem to be sharing struggles because people in Greece will become more aware of neo-liberalism's deleterious effects.
The global south has routinely provided models of resistance for the world, and it continues to do so. The guerrilla struggles of the colonized world served as inspirations for the Western Left. Groups within the American civil rights movement drew explicitly from the pan-Africanism of the immediate post-war period. Gandhi's non-violence, initially directed at colonial authority in India, is now part of global protest culture.
Protests of the Arab Spring inspired the Occupy movement in the West because a similar globalization of the south's concerns is arising in discussions of the global environment. Amidst the existential threat of climate change, the most radical notions of climate justice are being articulated in the global south.
The governments of the global north have proven too beholden polluters to promote swift and decisive action against global warming. In this context, it has been governments and groups from the global south that have been articulating blueprints for environmentally sustainable growth.
The government of Bolivia under Evo Morales criticized the inability of Western states to develop a truly effective replacement for the Kyoto protocol during negotiations in Copenhagen. Their endorsement of the ‘rights of mother earth’ is allowing for a fundamental rethinking of global environmentalism outside economistic models that merely seek to manage environmental catastrophe.
As global problems intensify, it becomes more and more necessary for people in the north to support alternatives from the south. The effects of global warming have hitherto been most pronounced in the south.
Superstorm Sandy hit New York in October 2012, and its flooded streets looked like those of Manila or Bangkok. It is in this context that it becomes imperative for the world to share the struggles of the global south.
The ‘global’ in ‘global south’ does not only mean that the south is in the globe. It also signifies that the south continues to be globalized. The global south, while embedded in specific geographic imaginaries, represents emergent forms of progressive cosmopolitanism. It is an always emergent and provisional internationalism.
While there have been previous attempts at crafting collectivities that challenged interstate inequality, many of these have fallen into the pitfalls of essentialist identitarian politics.
Nationalism in the colonies allowed for the challenging of Western dominance and the collapse of formal colonialism
Pan-Asianism, though having different variants, also began as a reaction to colonialism. In response Hau and Shiraishi propose that the concept be rethought as ‘a networked formed through intellectual, physical, emotional, virtual, institutional, and even sexual contacts, or some combination thereof’.
the global south has always been a network. The Bandung conference, for instance, was premised not on a common primordial identity shared among its delegate states. Rather, the meeting occurred as various states were negotiating a historical conjuncture in which the threats of new colonialisms came into focus.
while not all these struggles can be reduced to the activities of states, it is important to note how many global movements (even those that are non-state-based and transnational) seek to redress interstate inequality.
De-emphasizing territorial and state-based politics entails abstracting from concrete struggles in the global south. It does nothing to buttress existing movements for environmental sustainability, food security, and economic justice.
it stem from the subjective experiences and needs of those who construct and reconstruct the global south from the ground up.
The global south is not essentialist, nor does it premise the struggle for global justice on common identities or cultures. Solidarities in the global south are based on common, shifting causes. And yet, it is not an emotionally barren, transactional concept. From its very inception, it has premised one of the most morally potent ideas of history: universal human equality.