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Global South

What The 17th BRICS Summit Declaration Says And Omits

At the 17th BRICS Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro from July 6 to 7, 2025, the bloc’s leaders issued a declaration reaffirming the bloc’s central role as a representative voice of the Global South. However, the declaration does not mention the word “genocide” when referring to the Israeli massacre of the Palestinian population, and despite condemning unilateral sanctions, it fails to mention one of the countries that has suffered the greatest impact from them: Venezuela, a strategic ally of China and Russia, two of the founding countries of the BRICS. In this regard, the final declaration condemns “the imposition of unilateral coercive measures contrary to international law” and denounces that such measures “have far-reaching negative implications for human rights, including the rights to development, health and food security of the general population of the affected states.”

America Builds To Resist Disasters; The Global South Builds To Recover

In the last few weeks, as the United States suffered through a record-breaking heatwave, people were instructed to take refuge in buildings with indoor air conditioning. This reliance on a system that runs on fossil fuels and contributes to nearly 20% of our greenhouse gas emissions also inevitably set us up for another, more severe heatwave. Even as the U.S. faces increasingly frequent – and deadly – climate change-related disasters, we continue to be caught off guard, treating them as short-term inconveniences and not the new normal. Science has proved that we are actively contributing to future climate devastation, and yet we continue to design buildings with an assumption that climate resilience means waiting out disasters, wasting significant energy fighting the symptoms while contributing to the illness.

Can We Build Robust Public Administration Institutions In The Global South?

A decade ago, I was a fly on the wall during a trade negotiation between the United States and a small country in Southeast Asia. What interested me was not the substance of the negotiation, the deliberations around an issue of minor concern to world affairs but of great concern to this one country, but the disproportionality between the personnel at the negotiating table. The delegation from the United States that arrived at this nondescript office in Geneva, Switzerland, was considerable in two respects: first, it had an overabundance of lawyers and associates, and second, they came armed with a large number of binders that had all the paperwork for their case, replete with labelled page-holders so that they could dive directly into the points they needed to make in the discussion.

BRICS Expands To 56% Of World Population, 44% Of Global GDP

The Global South-led organization BRICS continues to expand. While the United States and Israel were busy waging war on Iran in June, BRICS quietly announced that Vietnam had accepted the group’s invitation to join as a partner country. With the addition of Vietnam, the extended BRICS+ has 20 members and partners, as of July 2025. The 10 BRICS members are Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. The 10 BRICS partners are Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

The Global North Lives Off Intellectual Rents

The number in the graph above, based on data from the International Monetary Fund, is not an exaggeration. Despite the growing technological and industrial capacity of countries in the Global South, countries and corporations in the Global North continue to own intellectual property patents on key products, locking the South into indefinite patent payment regimes. These include patent payments for pharmaceuticals, digital technologies (such as licensing fees for software and telecommunications infrastructure), and agricultural goods (such as genetically modified seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, and equipment).

Despite The Pain In The World, Socialism Is Not A Distant Utopia

Every morning, I open the newspapers (now on apps rather than print) and read about atrocities taking place across the world. There is an inflation of pain, from the genocide in Gaza to the war in Sudan and the unreported chaotic violence in and around Myanmar. These conflicts seem interminable and might even confuse the casual observer who does not follow them closely. The current phase of Sudan’s war began in April 2023, with the Sudanese Armed Forces (led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan) arrayed against the Rapid Support Forces (led by Commander Mohamed ‘Hemedti’ Hamdan Dagalo).

Iran Now First Line Of Defense Of BRICS And The Global South

Israel’s shock’n awe on Iran—straight from the trademark US playbook—essentially failed, despite the initial combination of speed, meticulous military planning and the element of surprise, including hacking the Iranian electronic communications within the military grid; decapitation of the vertical IRGC nomenklatura; the spiderweb drone attack playbook; and bombing—ultimately ineffectual—of key nodes of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure. It took hours for top Iranian technicians to get their grid back. And once that happened, the tide began to turn, to the point that after surgical missile volleys deep in the night on Sunday, the IRGC announced its capability to seriously disrupt Israel’s command and control systems using “enhanced intelligence,” thus breaching Iron—or Paper—Dome.

China-Central Asia Summit Concludes With Call For Multipolar World Order

The second China-Central Asian summit concluded in Astana, Kazakhstan on Tuesday with countries signing a treaty on eternal good neighborliness, friendship, and cooperation as well as a joint Astana declaration. The summit was attended by Chinese President Xi Jinping and the five Cental Asian presidents, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev of Kazakhstan (the host country, Sadyr Japarov of Kyrgyzstan, Emomali Rahmon of Tajikistan, Serdar Berdimuhamedov of Turkmenistan, and Shavkat Mirziyoyev of Uzbekistan. The Astana declaration, signed by all the participants, talks about enhancing cooperation in agriculture, energy, technology and transport sectors apart from intensifying cooperation on the global platforms with a common objective of upholding the basic principles of the UN charter and developing a joint stand against hegemonic politics.

Communities From Global South Know What Democracy Is

The contrast could not be starker. In 2024, with over 60 countries covering half the world’s population going to the polls, there was a clear tendency to vote in right-wing political parties with thin democratic pretensions. In many countries including India, USA, Argentina, and Russia, and in the European Parliament, the trend was clear. A powerful counterpoint to this was provided by a modest but inspirational gathering of Indigenous peoples and local communities from over 20 countries, in South Africa, in February 2025. They spoke about how their foundations were not hegemonic power and profits, but justice, equity, and respect not only amongst peoples but also with the rest of nature.

A New Asian Triad: ASEAN, China, And The Persian Gulf Align

On 26–27 May, the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, hosted the first-ever Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)–Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)–China summit, bringing together three of the Global South’s most economically dynamic regions for a trilateral meeting of immense strategic consequence. While not formalized as a binding alliance, the summit marks the beginning of a bold realignment – one that unites East and West Asia via economic interdependence, shared development visions, and a collective desire to escape western economic coercion. The summit is historic not only because of its trilateral format, but because it signals the emergence of a flexible Global South bloc capable of recalibrating regional and global power balances.

Terrorism We Are Witnessing Today Comes From Imperialism

The “terrorism we are witnessing today comes from imperialism, and we are fighting it,” Burkina Faso’s charismatic president, 37-year-old Capt. Ibrahim Traoré told Vladimir Putin on May 10. The Russian president in turn assured him, “We are united by a common goal of fighting terrorism and extremism. We will continue to help the Republic in… suppressing the radical (Jihadist) groups that are still active in certain parts of Burkina Faso.” The leaders met in Moscow a day after attending the Victory Day Parade on May 9, commemorating the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany by the Soviet Union in 1945.

It’s Possible To End Global Poverty Without Compromising Climate Goals

As the world works to stop global heating by ending the use of fossil fuels in accordance with climate objectives, ensuring that everyone on Earth has a decent standard of living is possible if the world quickly and decisively implements emissions reductions, new research has found. The study, led by research scholar Jarmo Kikstra with the Energy, Climate and Environment Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), looked at energy scenarios that line up with both the Paris Agreement and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). “With climate change intensifying and billions of people still lacking basic necessities, addressing both challenges simultaneously is not only possible but essential,” a press release from IIASA said.

MST Promotes Solidarity Between Global South Nations At Reform Fair

In an Internationalist Act held on Sunday, May 11, during the 5th National Agrarian Reform Fair, the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) reinforced its role in fostering solidarity between countries facing massacres imposed by imperialism. At the Fair at Parque da Água Branca in São Paulo (SP), representatives from Cuba, Palestine, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, and Venezuela highlighted the trajectory of resistance in their territories against external oppression and reaffirmed their partnership with the MST in the fight for sovereignty.

Imagine You Are A Poor Nation, Trapped By Debt And Strangled By Climate Change

Imagine you are a low-income country. You suffer from a heavy debt burden. You’ve been trying to catch up to the more affluent countries for decades, but you’ve been unsuccessful, mainly because of that debt hanging around your neck like a giant millstone. And you are spending more and more of your precious resources dealing with the effects of climate change, from rising waters to superstorms, a crisis that you played only a small part in creating in the first place. You face a terrestrial version of the three-body problem. These three “bodies”—debt, development, and climate change—impact your country in difficult-to-predict ways.

Workers In South Asia Celebrated May Day

Thousands of workers took to the streets in different parts of South Asia to celebrate International Workers’ Day on Thursday, May 1. A sea of red flags and chants of “workers of the world unite” and “long live the martyrs of Chicago” reverberated in the atmosphere. Workers in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and elsewhere marched in discipline and raised the demands for fair wages, better working conditions, and employment rights for everyone. They reiterated their resolve to fight against capitalist exploitation and to create an alternative socialist world, extending their solidarity to the anti-imperialist movements across the world.

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Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! 

Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

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