The venerable concept of the “Global South” has enjoyed a remarkable revival as a descriptor of postcolonial and developing country solidarity in world affairs. The term’s resurgence, however, has also engendered pushback, with many calling for a phase-out of the expression. Writing in the Financial Times, columnist Alan Beattie calls the label “patronising, factually inaccurate, a contradiction in terms,” and “deeply unhelpful.” In Foreign Policy, Indian strategist C. Raja Mohan argues that the phrase “denies agency to individual countries by treating them as one bloc” with “fluid boundaries and vague criteria for inclusion.”

Some criticism of the term is superficial, based on a literal interpretation of the phrase as denoting countries below the equator, with critics noting, for example, that India falls above that line, while wealthier Australia and New Zealand fall below it. Others carry more weight, like the charge that the Global South is often used as a sloppy, catchall synonym for “developing countries” or the “Third World.” Further, the analytical purchase of the phrase is limited because the concept purports to capture an array of nations that differ markedly in their governing systems, economic circumstances, strategic alignments, and cultural identities.

Such critiques should not, however, obscure the term’s continued political salience and symbolic potency more than half a century after the phrase was coined. Across the decades, the concept of the Global South has resonated with governments and citizens of lower- and middle-income countries because it is an expression of perceived exclusion from—and rejection of—enduring hierarchies in world politics. Using the Global South and related terms became advantageous, including for members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) that sought to avoid choosing sides in the Cold War, precisely because these terms unified a diverse set of nations behind a common program: to amplify the voice and agency of countries in historically subordinate positions by pooling their economic and political strength to force a rebalancing of global power.

Historical analysis thus illustrates that, rather than using the Global South to mean a rigid grouping of nations, it is more helpful to understand it as an organizing principle to guide a reimagining of a more just international economy and world order. Appreciating the continuity between twentieth-century anticolonial movements and contemporary political issues clarifies the perspectives and choices of many in the Global South for policymakers in the United States and the rest of the so-called Global North. To some in the world, the central divide in the international sphere remains that between the dominant North and the aggrieved South, rather than that between democracies and autocracies.

The Global South and Theories of Colonialism and Imperialism

American political activist Carl Oglesby is thought to have coined the term Global South in 1969 in Commonweal to denote a set of countries beset by the “dominance” of the Global North through political and economic exploitation. Oglesby’s work (After Vietnam, What? Commonweal - 1969) built on an earlier twentieth-century intellectual tradition, often radical and left-wing in nature, that portrayed the global order as created by a wealthy and politically powerful subset of nations. Such nations, from this perspective, built their positioning through economic exploitation of the rest of the world, particularly through imperial rule, and subsequently continued to maintain this unequal positioning.

Numerous political theorists in the early twentieth century contributed to this tradition, including J. A. Hobson, Vladimir Lenin, Antonio Gramsci, and W. E. B. Du Bois. In his magnum opus Imperialism, the British socialist Hobson identified what he called the “taproot of imperialism”: the relentless search by capitalist oligarchs for market profits no longer available in their home countries. Building on Hobson’s thesis, Marxist theorists like Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg depicted imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, one that created a global class division between countries that had accumulated capital and countries that they had exploited. In his 1926 essay “The Southern Question,” Gramsci applied the same analysis to his own country, arguing that capitalists from northern Italy had effectively colonized its south, creating an unequal relationship of dependency. (Indeed, some political theorists argue that the idea of the Global South is an extension of Gramsci’s analysis of Italy.) Meanwhile the African American intellectual Du Bois, writing in 1925, added a racial dimension to this argument, maintaining that European states used political coercion and economic compulsion to create a racialized global hierarchy that resulted in an international “colour line.”

Later, anticolonial nationalists built on these ideas, arguing that the end of formal colonial rule was not enough to erase the hierarchies that empire had embedded in the world system. Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of an independent Ghana, maintained that decolonization had done nothing to alter the structural subordination of former colonies to former metropoles, much less to return stolen wealth and resources. Newly independent states remained vulnerable to political and economic coercion by wealthy states and former colonial powers. For African states to overcome this vulnerability, Nkrumah advocated pan-Africanism, including the pooling of economic resources and political might. One of Nkrumah’s contemporaries, the Martinican doctor Frantz Fanon, similarly argued in his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth that the dehumanizing process of colonialism had created a world that naturalized the superiority of the colonizer and the inferiority of the colonized into an enduring “Manichaean” divide. In the eyes of such thinkers, the postcolonial era continued colonization by other means, resulting in an era of neo-colonialism.

Finally, Oglesby’s writing built on (and referenced) dependency theory. This school of thought, pioneered in the 1950s and 1960s by economists Raúl Prebisch and Hans Singer, among others, attributed the lack of industrialization and the persistence of poverty in developing countries to the unequal structure of the world economy. According to this theory, countries on the “periphery” are locked in a state of dependency because they primarily export raw resources to wealthy countries of the global “core,” which then export value-added manufactured goods back to the periphery. Wealthy nations thus control the terms of trade, perpetuating this dependence. As Oglesby explained, poorer countries inevitably confront “higher import prices, lower export earnings,” and “rising debt, shrinking ability to finance the debt.” Dependency theory stood in contrast to modernization theory, which posited that all societies move through similar stages of development and that “underdeveloped” post-colonial states could “catch up” to developed countries if they pursued the right policies. According to dependency theory, undoing global poverty required substantially restructuring the global economy and reducing the power of core countries.

See, A Closer Look at the Global South

Photo. SOUDAN, Narus. Distribution à 15 000 personnes déplacées. Ils sont encouragés à rentrer chez eux et à semer avant la saison des pluies. 19/03/87. © CICR / MULLER, Yannick