The Global South 

About: The Global South is an academic journal published by Indiana University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Globalization & Politics. It has an ISSN identifier of 1932-8648. Over the lifetime, 257 publications have been published receiving 2035 citations.

Global South: Predicament and Promise

Abstract: This essay explores possibilities for the establishment of a new global order, in which the Global South may play a central part. It traces the emergence of the concept historically, with special attention to its antecedents in the popular term of the 1960s and 1970s, "Third World." It suggests that white the "Third World" is no longer a viable concept geopolitically or as political project, it may still provide an inspiration for similar projects presently that may render the global South into a force in the reconfiguration of global relations. A number of powerful societies that have reason to align with the global South—China, India, Brazil and South Africa—may be particularly important in forging a global South. The essay examines in some depth the relationship to the Global South of one such society, the People's Republic of China.

Everywhere But Always Somewhere: Critical Geographies of the Global South

Abstract: Tracing multiple geographies of the Global South, this essay makes the case that it is a concept-metaphor that reterritorializes global space in the interests of repossession by the dispossessed. As such the global South is everywhere, but always also somewhere: accountable, embodied, and highly heterogeneous. It interrupts the flat earth, borderless world, and smooth space conceits of globalists, highlighting asymmetry and inequality amidst intensifying global interdependency. At the same time, it displaces the divide and dispossess discourses of both liberals and neoliberals alike, articulating earlier critical geographies of a non-aligned Third World with new struggles against dispossession on a global scale.

Introduction: The Global South and World Dis/Order

Abstract: This special issue introduction explores the institutional, disciplinary, and geopolitical possibilities of “global south” as an emergent conceptual apparatus. More particularly, it explores how tensions between ordering and disordering implicit in “global south” might provide a useful heuristic for those engaged in a wide range of intellectual, aesthetic, and political work. By exploring “global south and world dis/order” we want to avoid the modern assumption that “change” is good in and of itself, even as we want to revisit long-standing assumptions about how the world has been ordered.

Introduction: The (Post)global South

Abstract: This essay introduces the journal The Global South by proposing that its object of study comprises three areas: globalization, its aftermath, and how those on the bottom survive it. As the aftermath of each of the global cataclysms of the last decade—the Asian, Russian, and Brazilian economic crises of 1997-8; the end of the U.S. market boom in 2000; the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11,2001; the exposed multibillion-dollar scams of Enron and other major corporations, culminating in their collapse; the Argentine fiscal crisis; and the current crises and infrastructural meltdowns in Iraq and New Orleans—have amply demonstrated, it is the poor, the disenfranchised and marginalized who bear the brunt of the suffering. Thus the essay argues that what defines the global South is the recognition by peoples across the planet that globalization's promised bounties have not materialized, that it has failed as a global master narrative. The global South also marks the mutual recognition among the world's subalterns of their shared condition at the margins of the brave new neoliberal world of globalization. The global South diverges from the postcolonial, and emerges as a post global discourse, in that it is best glimpsed at those moments where globalization as a hegemonic discourse stumbles, where the latter experiences a crisis or setback.

Beyond Normative Dewesternization: Examining Media Culture from the Vantage Point of the Global South

Abstract: This article examines five dominant conceptualizations of “the Global South” in the field of media and communication studies, and more specifically in the subfields of (1) comparative media studies, (2) international communication or global media studies, and (3) development communication. Engaging with the broader calls made by a number of scholars since the early 2000s to “dewesternize,” “decolonize,” or “internationalize” the field, I argue that the Global South continues to be theorized from the vantage point of the Global North. Instead of understanding the Global South on its own terms, scholarship frequently appreciates the role of media and communication only insofar as it emerges from, represents the negative imprint of, or features the active intervention of the Global North. Such accounts have failed to acknowledge the agency of the Global South in the production, consumption, and circulation of a much richer spectrum of media culture that is not a priori defined in opposition to or in conjunction with media from the Global North. In advocating for a shift from media systems to media cultures, I hope to contribute to an approach that practices media and communication studies from the Global South, grounded in the everyday life experiences of ordinary people but always situated against the background of crucial processes such as neoliberalization, which have not only had drastic implications for the division of labor between the state and market in the area of media and communication but have also produced radical changes in the lives of the majority of people living in the Global South.