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Global South

Rich Countries At COP30 Are Robbing The Global South

UN climate conferences are primarily announcement summits. For 30 years, industrialized countries, which are primarily responsible for the climate crisis, have been promising that they will reduce greenhouse gas emissions consistent with the climate science, promote the energy transition, and combat the effects of climate change. Additional promises have also been made regarding climate financing at the UN Conference of the Parties (COP) climate summits in Copenhagen (2009) and Paris (2015). At COP30 in Brazil, governments have once again declared their intention to support developing countries with climate funding, repeating their promise at the COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, to increase climate financing to $300 billion annually from 2035. But promises are not yet actions.

How Exxon Exported Climate Denial To The Global South

In early September, the Danish climate crisis denier Bjørn Lomborg travelled to São Paulo to deliver a stark warning. On the sidelines of a conference called the Forum Caminhos da Liberdade, happening just as Brazil was gearing up to host annual global climate talks (known as “COP30”) in November, Lomborg claimed that if implemented poorly, government efforts to address climate change could “destroy economic growth.” Lomborg had some behind-the-scenes assistance to help his message land, because one of the top 2025 sponsors of the conference (whose speakers in previous years have included Silicon Valley billionaire and Donald Trump ally Peter Thiel), was Atlas Network, a United States-based worldwide coalition of more than 500 free-market think tanks and allied partners.

Global South Cooperation Needed To Counter Hegemonic Disinformation

Systematic disinformation is employed by the hegemonic powers to destabilise, divide, and weaken independent peoples and nations. It serves to disempower entire populations, justify suffocating sieges, proxy wars, invasions, and occupations, and to disqualify resistance. The problem: hegemonic propaganda is broad, deep, and well integrated. The Anglo-American enemy has lost its advantages in technology, industry and commerce, but maintains them in finance and propaganda. The dollar/SWIFT dictatorship still rules, and media, communicational, and ideological Anglo-American hegemony remains firmly in place, through well-developed networks.

Seven Theses On The Gen Z Uprisings In The Global South

The walls of Santiago, Chile – the city where I live – are marked with faded graffiti from the estallido social (social uprising) of 2019. Years later, these slogans continue to spill onto the sidewalks, from Nos quitaron tanto que nos quitaron hasta el miedo (they took so much from us that they even took away our fear) to No son 30 pesos, son 30 años (it’s not 30 pesos; it’s 30 years). Both slogans refer to the 30 years of neoliberal austerity imposed on the Chilean people, including a 30-peso hike on the price of metro tickets and deep cuts to the country’s social wage system. The uprising was led by high school students born between 2001 (age 18) and 2005 (age 14), who are part of Generation Z or ‘Gen Z’.

China’s Material Squeeze Exposes US Industrial Fragility

When Washington declared an economic war on China’s technology ascent, it assumed it held the upper hand. Tariffs, export bans, entity lists and chip sanctions were meant to isolate Beijing, choke its access to critical inputs, strangle its technological development and protect American primacy. Yet with remarkable precision, Beijing has now demonstrated that the United States is the one more deeply entangled in – and dependent upon – China’s command of critical material supply chains. China’s latest round of export controls on lithium batteries, graphite anode materials, and rare earth technologies amounts to the most significant intensification yet in the global race for material sovereignty.

China Is Greening The Global South

According to an extensive study by Bloomberg NEF, it requires a staggering $7 trillion a year in renewable investments to achieve net zero by 2050, totaling $175 trillion by 2050. Hmm. Accordingly, in 2024 the world invested a record amount, or roughly $2 trillion, which was $5 trillion short of what is necessary per annum for net zero/2050. That $5 trillion shortfall increases the bogey next year and the years after for every year below $7 trillion, until it’ll take $8 trillion in one year, then $9T, then more. For comparison purposes: The Marshall Plan, or European Recovery Program, cost approximately $13.3 billion between 1948 and 1952. Adjusted for inflation, it would be roughly $130 billion in today’s dollars, looking very peaked next to Net Zero.

Momentum Builds For Sweeping United Nations Reforms

In March of this year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres launched the UN80 Initiative, a system-wide reform effort. UN80 proposals center around reshaping how the United Nations works, including goals which are intended to make the body more efficient and cost-effective. There are more ambitious proposals, including plans to move major UN agencies including UNICEF, UNFPA, and UN Women from western cities such as New York to Nairobi, Kenya.  But some are calling for an even more transformative agenda of reform, which could shift long-standing power imbalances in the UN from the West and towards other regions. “The agenda set by the UN is focused on its own organisational weaknesses and does not address the largely political questions that scuttle the UN’s work,” writes Vijay Prashad.

Elephant And Dragon Choose Dialogue

At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Tianjin on September 1, 2025, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping met and publicly framed the relationship as “partners, not rivals.” Their readouts stressed dialogue on differences and cooperation on development – language that marks the clearest thaw since the 2020 Ladakh crisis. Two moves gave the reset substance, not just optics. First, India and China re-activated the Special Representatives (SR) dialogue on the boundary question in New Delhi on August 19, 2025, and second, they agreed to restart direct flights and expand people-to-people and business links, after a five-year freeze. These are communications channels that reduce miscalculation and restore some weight to a battered relationship.

United Nations Turns Eighty

There is only one treaty in the world that, despite its limitations, binds nations together: the United Nations Charter. Representatives of fifty nations wrote and ratified the UN Charter in 1945, with others joining in the years that followed. The charter itself only sets the terms for the behaviour of nations. It does not and cannot create a new world. It depends on individual nations to either live by the charter or die without it. The charter remains incomplete. It needed a Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and even that was contested as political and civil rights had to eventually be separated from the social and economic rights. Deep rifts in political visions created fissures in the UN system that have kept it from effectively addressing problems in the world.

African Union Joins Calls To End Use Of Mercator Map That Shrinks It’s Size

The African Union has backed a campaign to end the use by governments and international organisations of the 16th-century Mercator map of the world in favour of one that more accurately displays Africa’s size. Created by the cartographer Gerardus Mercator for navigation, the projection distorts continent sizes, enlarging areas near the poles like North America and Greenland while shrinking Africa and South America. “It might seem to be just a map, but in reality, it is not,” the African Union Commission deputy chair, Selma Malika Haddadi, told Reuters, saying the Mercator fostered a false impression that Africa was “marginal”, despite being the world’s second-largest continent by area, with more than 1 billion people. The union has 55 member states.

Global Day Of Solidarity With Venezuela Against US Interventionism

The Global Day of Solidarity with Venezuela and for Peace in Latin America and the Caribbean was held in locations around the world. On Saturday, August 30, mass organizations, political parties, and social movements from various countries united under the slogan “Venezuela is not a threat, Venezuela is a hope” to express their support for Venezuela and peace in Latin America. The solidarity event comes in response to the recent interventionist actions and threats by the United States Government against the Venezuelan people and government, which include the deployment of military vessels in the Caribbean Sea as an excuse for intervention and destabilization, as well as the increase of a bounty on President Nicolás Maduro’s head, whom the US falsely accuses of association with drug trafficking.

When The Empire Chokes, The South Breathes

The story they sell is that “order” was built by reasoned men in sensible suits. The story we live is different. Multipolarity did not grow out of seminars or summits; it is the aftershock of five centuries of plunder, the recoil from wars and sanctions, and the refusal of the colonized to keep paying for someone else’s civilization. Its genealogy runs from the Bandung Communiqué (1955)—the first great gathering where the majority of humanity spoke in its own name—through the long detour of debt, structural adjustment, and counter-insurgency masquerading as “development.” Bandung’s promise was simple and subversive: sovereignty, peaceful coexistence, cooperation, and a say in the world economy for those who actually make the world economy run.

Could Poor Countries Hold The US Accountable For Climate Chaos?

The verdict is in: Rich countries can be held responsible for their contributions to climate change. And that decision could leave the United States more isolated than ever. In late July, the UN’s highest court — the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—unanimously ruled that countries have an obligation to prevent catastrophic climate change by transitioning from fossil fuels and cutting greenhouse gas emissions. The ruling specifically condemned governments that subsidize fossil fuels and license their expansion — and said that these actions may make states liable for harmful climate impacts. In the last year, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) and International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) have made similar rulings. The overarching conclusion: mainstream global institutions are calling for an end to fossil fuels.

Can The Poorer Nations Build A New Architecture For Development And Sovereignty?

A horrifying statistic hovers over the poorer nations: 3.4 billion people now live in countries that spend more on interest payments for public debt than on education or health. In 2024, according to a new report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), global public debt reached $102 trillion – a third of which is held by developing countries. The impact on these countries is especially severe: credit markets charge poorer nations far higher interest rates than they do richer nations, making debt servicing payments proportionately higher for the Global South.

Revolutionary Third World Leaders Praise China’s World Role

China is a modern superpower, as is the US, but a qualitatively different superpower. The US uses military aggression, coups, and sanctions to impose US corporate interests worldwide. China is a peaceful power that respects national sovereignty, mutual development, and non-interference. Despite opposing imperialism, a tendency in the Western left is to recycle Western anti-China narratives that liken Chinese trade relations to Western imperial conduct, as in Sri Lanka and the Congo. Others have written of Chinese investments in the Occupied West Bank, and even criticize China for lack of aid to Cuba - clearly not issues the Western powers have problems with. 
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