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Global South

Can The Global South Get Out Of The US-Dominated Financial System?

April 13, 2025 Zoe Alexandra, People's Dispatch. , , , , , , ,
Is it possible to create systems of trade, finance, and funding outside the US-dominated system? Is the BRICS bloc able to build the necessary alternatives to challenge this system? Economists, academics, and political leaders participating in the IV Dilemmas of Humanity Conference in São Paulo tackled this pressing question that today the nations of the Global South confront. Nations, who find that their plans for poverty alleviation, economic sovereignty, and trade with their neighbors, are held back by restrictions imposed by the United States and their debt commitments, for which they need a reserve of dollars.

Our Future Is Not Determined By The US Or Europe

April 11, 2025 Erika Gimenez, People's Dispatch. , , , , , ,
“Debating the resources of the Global South is becoming urgent, but it is even more urgent to discuss how it is that most of the resources for the production of technology and goods are from the Global South and yet it is the North that takes all the wealth,” Cassia Bechara began her presentation, adding: ”in 2024 the wealth of the world’s richest millionaires was the greatest in history.” Although the speakers focused on the Global South in their presentations, they expressed different views on the same topic, as in the case of Márcio Pochmann, President of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).

Can We Exit From A World Of Debt?

March 27, 2025 Vijay Prashad, People's Dispatch. , , ,
In the past two decades, the external debt of developing countries has quadrupled to USD 11.4 trillion (2023). It is important to understand that this money owed to foreign creditors is equivalent to 99% of the export earnings of the developing countries. This means that almost every dollar earned by the export of goods and services is a dollar owed to a foreign bank or bond holder. Countries of the Global South, therefore, are merely selling their goods and services to pay off debts incurred for development projects, collapsed commodity prices, public deficits, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the inflation due to the Ukraine war.

JD Vance: West Wants Global South Trapped At Bottom Of Value Chain

March 27, 2025 Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy. , , , , , , , , ,
US Vice President JD Vance gave a speech about globalization that made it clear that Washington’s goal is to keep formerly colonized countries in the Global South trapped at the bottom of the global value chain. Vance acknowledged that the US-led West wants to maintain a strict international division of labor, in which poor countries in the periphery produce low value-added goods (with lots of competition and therefore low profits), whereas the rich nations in the core extract exorbitant monopoly rents through their control over high value-added technologies (with little to no competition, reinforced by strict intellectual property rights).

What Comes After Globalization?

March 26, 2025 Branko Milanovic, Portside. , , , ,
Donald Trump is back in power, and, to put it mildly, he’s no fan of globalization. The president has publicly “rejected globalism and embraced patriotism” and said that “it’s left millions and millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache.” To better understand the current era of globalization that he’s trying to bring to an end and its track record, it’s useful to compare it with the globalization that took place between 1870 and the outbreak of World War I. Both globalizations represent pivotal periods — watershed years that shaped today’s world. And both saw the largest expansions of global economic output to date.

What The World Can Learn From Radical Queer Aid Collectives

March 25, 2025 Soita Khatondi Wepukhulu, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , , , , ,
One of the 26 executive orders Donald Trump signed on the first day of his presidency was a 90-day pause on foreign aid, which he said is often “not aligned with American interests”. The subsequent suspension of overseas aid programmes has hit vulnerable communities around the world, with LGBTIQ+ organisations in the Global South among the worst affected. But three East African queer mutual aid groups were well-prepared for this scenario, and have a model that could help organisations reeling from Trump’s actions. Since their inception, The Trans and Queer Fund and UmaUma Buy Nothing group, both based in Kenya, and an untitled queer collective in Uganda have organised themselves to be independent from foreign donors, which they say do not understand the realities of the communities they serve.

25 Days Of Debt-Service Payments Could Emancipate African Women From 40 Billion Hours Of Water Harvesting

March 14, 2025 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , , , ,
March is the month of International Working Women’s Day, a day deeply rooted in the socialist movement. Most of the world now only calls 8 March ‘International Women’s Day’, excluding the word ‘working’ from its title. But work is a fundamental part of women’s daily lives. According to UN Women’s annual report Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The Gender Snapshot 2024, 63.3% of women worldwide participated in the labour force in 2022. However, due to the appalling state of social protections and labour regimes, by 2024 nearly 10% of women were living in extreme poverty.

Sahel Alliance Unveils New Flag; Moves Toward Greater Integration

March 8, 2025 Nicholas Mwangi, Orinoco Tribune. , , , , , ,
The Alliance of Sahel States (AES), that includes Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, has taken another decisive step toward regional integration following its recent withdrawal from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). On February 22, the new flag was unveiled and symbolizes the bloc’s growing autonomy as it seeks to redefine its political, economic, and security structures outside the influence of French imperialism and Western neoliberal frameworks. The new flag showcases the AES logo: an orange sun radiating over a sturdy baobab tree. Beneath the tree, a group of silhouetted figures gathers, symbolizing unity.

Global North Has Nine Times More Voting Power At The International Monetary Fund Than Global South

March 7, 2025 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , , , , , , , ,
As far as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is concerned, each person in the Global North is worth nine people in the Global South. We get that calculation from IMF data on voting power in the organisation relative to the population of the Global North and Global South states. Each country, based on its ‘relative economic position’, as the IMF suggests, is given voting rights to elect delegates to the IMF’s executive board, which makes all of the organisation’s important decisions. A brief glance at the board shows that the Global North is vastly overrepresented in this crucial multilateral institution for indebted countries.

The Chris Hedges Report: The World After Gaza

February 27, 2025 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. , , , , , , , , ,
The Holocaust is the quintessential example of human evil for people in the West. In the rest of the world, especially in the Global South, the atrocity of the Holocaust — genocide — has had a closer proximity both in time and place. Colonialism in Africa, destructive wars in Asia and most recently, genocide in the Middle East, have shaped the lives of billions of people. On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra joins host Chris Hedges to discuss his latest book, “The World After Gaza.” Mishra argues that the shifting power dynamics in the world means the Global South’s narrative on atrocity can no longer be ignored and the genocide in Gaza is the current crux of the issue.

Clean Waters And Green Mountains As Valuable As Gold And Silver Mountains

February 14, 2025 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , , ,
Lost in a colonial fog of inferiority, writers across Asia imagined a world that was beyond the reach of colonialism’s devastation. In 1835, Kylas Chunder Dutt (1817–1859) wrote a remarkable story called ‘A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945’; the story, published in The Calcutta Literary Gazette, came out when the great French science fiction novelist Jules Verne (1828–1905) was only seven years old. Dutt’s account is not strictly science fiction, but largely futuristic. The eighteen-year-old opened his story with this line: ‘The people of India and particularly those of the metropolis had been subject for the last fifty years to every species of subaltern oppression. … With the rapidity of lightning the spirit of Rebellion spread through this once pacific people’.

Garment Workers Are Uniting Like Never Before To Take On Nike

February 12, 2025 Abiramy Sivalogananthan, Inequality.org. , , ,
Absent in the raging debate over trade policy, tariffs, and foreign aid is a truth about the economy that those of us in the Global South know all too well: American corporations and their billionaire owners have built and profit from massive supply chains exploiting low-wage workers in the Global South. For decades these unregulated supply chains have been praised as “development” while in reality, they entrench low pay and disastrous working conditions. Perhaps no company is a more influential innovator or offender in the outsourcing “race to the bottom” than Nike.

The Promethean Aspirations Of The Darker Nations

January 24, 2025 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , ,
For decades now, there has been a clear understanding that the models of development proposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Washington Consensus – debt, austerity, structural adjustment – simply have not worked. The long history of adversity experienced by the former colonial countries remains intact. A glance at the numbers from the Maddison Project Database 2023 shows that global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms has risen by 689.9% between 1980 and 2022 (from $18.8 trillion to $148.5 trillion).

Hyperimperialism, The Fall Of Syria And Capitalist Gangsters

January 21, 2025 Mnar Adley, MintPress News. , , , , , , , , , , ,
As 2025 begins, California is on fire. And it feels like much of the rest of the world is burning, too. From the slaughter in the Middle East to a new Cold War brewing in Asia, everywhere we look is filled with uncertainty. At home, the California wildfires have exposed much of the true face of capitalism. From prison laborers risking their lives for pennies by fighting the blazes to massive price hikes for rents in Southern California, the U.S. is crumbling. Yet externally, America is as aggressive as ever. Only last month, it helped force through a coup against the Assad government in Syria, and Trump has made noises about using force against Panama, Greenland, and has threatened Canada, Cuba, Venezuela and other nations in the Global South.

International Anti-Fascist Festival In Venezuela Ends With Resolution

January 13, 2025 Ultimas Noticias, Orinoco Tribune. , , , , , , , , ,
The International Anti-Fascist World Festival For a New World, held in Caracas, Venezuela, in which more than 2,000 delegates from 125 countries participated, came to an end. At the closing ceremony of the festival, on Saturday, January 11, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro thanked the participants for attending the festival and pointed out that the proposals that have emerged demonstrate the vitality that this movement is gaining. “On behalf of all Venezuela, I thank you for coming to this unprecedented event,” said President Maduro, adding that “we are at peace, in democracy, in full exercise of our national sovereignty, and the people are moving forward in this new stage.”
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