Global South

Origins and Evolution

The term 'Global South' was first used in 1969 by American New Left activist Carl Oglesby in a special issue of the Catholic journal Commonweal on the Vietnam War. Oglesby argued that centuries of Northern 'dominance over the global South' had produced an unequal world order. The term spread rapidly in the early 21st century, appearing in hundreds of publications annually by 2013 and becoming a core vocabulary of international political discourse.

The conceptual predecessor is the 'Third World.' French demographer Alfred Sauvy coined this term in his 1952 article 'Trois Mondes, Une Planète' to describe countries that belonged to neither Cold War bloc and shared colonial experience. The 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, marked the emergence of these countries as political subjects, leading to the first Non-Aligned Summit in Belgrade in 1961.

Relation to the Global North

The Global South is defined in structural asymmetry with the Global North (Northern America, Europe, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand). Dependency theory and world-systems theory analyze this North-South relationship as an exploitative division of labor between core and periphery. The demand for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), raised at the 1973 Algiers Non-Aligned Summit, was an attempt to institutionally remedy this inequality.

Critical scholars such as Jason Hickel contest the narrative that the Global South is economically 'catching up,' estimating that the Global North extracted approximately $10–11 trillion from the Global South in 2015 alone.

Criticism and Debate

The term is criticized for being overly broad, collapsing vast differences between, say, Brazil and Burundi or China and Chad. It is also charged with obscuring class inequalities within both 'South' and 'North.' Nevertheless, it is widely preferred in academic, policy, and social movement discourse over hierarchical, deficit-oriented terms like 'Third World' or 'developing countries,' precisely because it foregrounds agency rather than lack.

The 2020s Revival

The geopolitical significance of the Global South surged after the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war. The refusal of many Global South countries to join Western sanctions against Russia, the expansion of BRICS, and the North-South perception gap over the Palestine question demonstrated that the concept is not merely an academic category but a fault line of real-world politics.