Global South Needs Bold Strategies As India And China Redefine Power Balance In A Shifting World Order |
The journey of the Global South from the 1955 Bandung Conference to the 1966 Tri-Continental Conference in Havana onwards has been as much ideological and epistemic as political and aspirational.
Despite decolonisation, countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America fell into what leading theorist of globalisation studies Arjun Appadorai calls “the European epistemological traps of modernisation and development”. The agenda of the Global South also became part of the post-colonial epistemic discourse, which challenged the hegemonic ontologies of the West.
The Global South brought together scores of organisations from social and global justice movements and embraced the struggles of many indigenous peoples and exploited workers and poor communities around the world.
Is Global South just a buzzword?
Has the term ‘Global South’ become a fashionable buzzword? The buzzwords tend to become fuzzwords, but words also make worlds. As German polymath Goethe says, “When ideas fail, words come in very handy.”
Sceptics like Alan Beattie, former international economy editor of The Economist magazine, dismiss the Global South as a “pernicious term that needs to be retired”. Kwame Nkrumah admonished the Western pundits when he proclaimed after Ghana’s independence, “We face neither East nor West; we face forward.”
Nietzsche has famously said that “all things are subject to interpretation: whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” Global South, howsoever terminologically inaccurate, offers us a sanctuary, a home and a sense of togetherness. It is the most credible platform that is making efforts to shape, contest and........