The “Global South” is making a linguistic comeback.
The renewed currency of the catchall term—one of many that have been used colloquially to describe the world’s political and economic divisions—is unsurprising. Escalating geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China has revived bipolar dynamics reminiscent of the Cold War, when much of the world became pawns in a superpower competition. Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine has only intensified pressure on developing nations to pick a side between the democratic West and authoritarian China and Russia—a choice that many resist. Meanwhile, a succession of systemic shocks—including the coronavirus pandemic, economic fallout from Ukraine, and the deepening climate emergency—have underscored the gross inequities at the core of the world economy and the vulnerability of lower- and middle-income nations to political, economic, and ecological crises not of their own making.
Academic use of the term has exploded, and leaders of international organizations and major democracies are deploying the phrase with notable frequency. “Many countries of the Global South face huge debts, increasing poverty and hunger, and the growing impacts of the climate crisis,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres lamented last November, as the world’s population topped 8 billion. World Bank President Ajay Banga has used the term, as has U.S. President Joe Biden and his senior administration officials, including the national security adviser and the secretary of commerce. More significantly, some leaders of the very nations the label purports to describe have embraced it. Standing beside Biden at a June 22 White House press conference, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that “lending a voice to the priorities of the Global South” is a central objective of India’s G20 chairmanship.
The phrase has once again become a convenient shorthand for a broad swath of nations seeking to overhaul the unjust structures of the global economy, hedge their strategic bets, and promote the emergence of a more multipolar system. But analysts and policymakers would be wise to invoke the term with greater restraint, both to avoid unwarranted generalizations and to steer clear of past mistakes.
The Origins of “Global South”
Carl Ogelsby, an American writer and activist of the New Left, apparently coined the term “Global South” in 1969. Writing in the Catholic journal Commonweal at the height of the Vietnam War, he observed that “the North’s dominance over the global South . . . [has] converged . . . to produce an intolerable social order.” At the time, most Western analysts conceived of the globe as broken into three worlds, as first depicted by the French demographer Alfred Sauvy in 1952. These included a “First World” comprising the United States and its Western allies; a “Second World” composed of the Soviet Union and its satellites in the Eastern bloc; and a “Third World” consisting of “developing” and often nonaligned nations, many only recently emancipated from their colonial masters.
The concept of the Global South as a synonym for the Third World began to gain traction in the 1970s, with the call for a New International Economic Order. But it really rose to prominence with the 1980 Brandt report. Written by an international commission led by former West German chancellor Willy Brandt, the landmark document distinguished between those countries with comparatively higher GDP per capita—which were overwhelmingly concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere—and poorer ones. The majority of the latter group fell south of what became known as the Brandt line, an imaginary boundary running from the Rio Grande into the Gulf of Mexico, across the Atlantic Ocean, through the Mediterranean Sea, and over the vast expanses of Central Asia to the Pacific Ocean. (From a purely geographic perspective, the map left much to be desired, since many nations designated as “southern,” India among them, lie entirely in the Northern Hemisphere, while others such as “northern” Australia and New Zealand are located below the equator.)
Following the end of the Cold War, the term “Third World” fell gradually out of favor, both because the Second World itself had ceased to exist and because it seemed pejorative, connoting a group of backward and unstable nations mired in poverty. By comparison, the “Global South” offered a more neutral and appealing label.
Increasingly, the Global South became synonymous with the Group of 77, a collection of postcolonial and developing countries that united in 1964 to jointly advocate for their collective economic interests and to enhance their negotiating capacity at the UN. Today the members of the G77, now 134 countries strong, regularly refer to themselves as the Global South, and the UN has launched multiple bodies and initiatives to respond to their needs and aspirations, including a UN Office for South-South Cooperation.
Renewed Use
The question today is whether the Global South label, whatever its past relevance, still makes any sense. Its most obvious limitation lies in its conceptual incoherence. In common usage, the label amalgamates a remarkably heterogeneous group of 130-odd countries, representing perhaps two-thirds of the world’s population and spreading across vast expanses of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Oceania, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Its ostensible members range from Barbados to Bhutan, Malawi to Malaysia, Pakistan to Peru, and Senegal to Syria. The category encompasses both major emerging powers, including aspirants to UN Security Council seats such as Brazil, India, and Nigeria, as well as small states like Benin, Fiji, and Oman.
Some members of the Global South may share overlapping interests, but how much analytical purchase or policy relevance this broad meta-category offers is not obvious, given the sheer economic, political, and cultural diversity it encompasses and the unique national circumstances and preferences of each nation in this cohort. Indeed, the term risks reinforcing inaccurate and outdated dichotomies and stereotypes, at the expense of seeing the world in all of its economic, political, and geopolitical variety.
Among other limitations, the category fails to account for the impressive growth that many of its ostensible members have enjoyed in recent decades. From an economic perspective, it seems unwarranted to lump Malaysia, which has a per capita income of $28,150 (measured in purchasing power parity, or PPP), with Zambia, which has a per capita income of $3,250 (PPP). Nor is there much economic logic in grouping a nation such as Costa Rica, which has been at the forefront of environmental conservation and the clean energy transition, with a committed petrostate such as Nigeria.
The catchall label also ignores the diversity of political regimes and the quality of governance among its purported members. Consider the most recent annual Freedom in the World survey, produced by the NGO Freedom House. On the criteria of “people’s access to political rights and civil liberties,” the scores of Global South countries range wildly, from a low of 1 (“not free”) in the case of South Sudan and Syria to 96 (“free”) for Uruguay.
Nor does the Global South tag provide much insight into the geopolitical orientation of its members. The war in Ukraine is a case in point. When the UN General Assembly voted in February 2022 on a resolution demanding Russia’s immediate withdrawal from that country, the Global South was split, with more than 60 percent siding with Ukraine and approximately a third abstaining. The cohort is also sharply divided on the question of UN Security Council reform, with some favoring additional permanent members (including from the developing world) and others adamantly opposed. In sum, membership in this category seems a poor predictor of a nation’s strategic alignment.
Political labels are not static, of course, but evolve in response to changing realities, insights, and sensibilities. The long-standing distinction between so-called developed and developing countries, for instance, has been critiqued for relying both implicitly and explicitly on a teleological standard of linear progress that classifies nations along a spectrum, according to how closely they approximate a Western model. For these reasons, the World Bank announced in 2015 that it would start phasing out its use of the term “developing world,” noting that the Sustainable Development Goals—intended to guide global efforts at improving the human condition through 2030—were meant to apply to all countries, regardless of income status.
Appreciating the World’s Diversity
The term “Global South” appears to have more staying power, at least for now. Still, analysts and policymakers alike would be wise to employ it with greater self-awareness, discrimination, and restraint to avoid unwarranted and antiquated generalizations. One of the many tragedies of the Cold War was the tendency of the United States, especially, to treat the Third World as an undifferentiated terrain for zero-sum superpower competition, rather than to engage individual nations on their own terms, as actors in their own right possessing distinctive identities, interests, and motivations. As Sino-American global rivalry heats up, similar dynamics are once more at play.
To avoid repeating past mistakes, Western policymakers should beware reifying the Global South, as if it were a single entity, and instead tailor strategies of engagement to specific countries, not least when it comes to so-called pivotal (or swing) states such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa, or Türkiye.
More generally, Western governments and outside analysts should probe more deeply the ties that do bind many low- and middle-income nations that self-identify with the Global South, while recognizing that the degree of solidarity that such countries feel—as well as its impact for actual policy preferences—may well vary widely across issue areas. In addition, nations may proclaim their membership in this grouping for instrumental, situational, or purely rhetorical reasons.
Finally, policymakers and academics alike might fruitfully ask whether the attraction of the Global South brand, to its adherents, lies primarily in its vision of a more equitable and inclusive global economy or in its promise of a more multipolar international system. These ambitions are not mutually exclusive. Still, for many members of this cohort, the imperatives of sustained development and economic growth may well carry more importance than geopolitical questions of world order.