In October 2024, at the most recent BRICS summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin urged the countries of the “global South” to build an alternative to the existing global order. Chinese President Xi Jinping, in his speech, called for “strengthening solidarity and cooperation among global South nations,” positioning BRICS—the grouping that was founded by Brazil, Russia, India, and China in 2009 but has grown considerably in the last decade—“as a vanguard for advancing global governance reform.” This was not the first time both leaders have hailed the global South. A joint statement issued in May 2024 repeated the phrase multiple times, claiming that the global South’s rise would “promote the democratization of international relations and international fairness and justice.”
Such invocations of the global South cause considerable angst. Joseph Nye, the American political scientist, for example, cautioned against using such a “misleading term,” due to its incoherence. Writing in _Foreign Affairs_, Comfort Ero, the head of the International Crisis Group, called the phrase “conceptually unwieldy,” warning that it should only be used with “particular care.” Others, including Sarang Shidore and Bilahari Kausikan, recognize its limitations but are not ready to abandon it. Shidore has argued for recognizing the global South as a “geopolitical fact,” although one defined negatively by the exclusion of its constituent countries from the institutions that underpin the international order. A former Singaporean diplomat, Kausikan suggests that “global South” “represents a mood that should be taken seriously”; whatever its conceptual coherence, it exercises an undeniable force in international relations, with China, Russia, and others seeking to harness it to advance their own agendas.
For a term that many have tried to cast as a common sense marker for the majority of the world, the global South remains remarkably ill defined. Taken literally, it refers to those countries located below the equator dividing the Northern Hemisphere from its southern counterpart. Such an approach would exclude much of Africa, the Caribbean, parts of South America, and all of South and Southeast Asia, even as it encompasses countries such as Australia and New Zealand that are considered part of the global North.
Despite those infelicities, the desire to capture the presumed shared experience of these countries remains. Looking at the origins of the term can help explain both its recent rise, as well as the discomfort with it. “Global South” is simply the latest iteration of the long-standing need to divide the world between white and nonwhite peoples. Projected onto these categories are a whole set of assumptions about what whiteness, and hence nonwhiteness, means when applied to the global order. Consider its predecessors: the civilized versus the barbarian (or savage), the modern versus the primitive (or traditional), the Occident versus the Orient, the West versus the East (or non-West), the colonizer versus the indigenous, settlers versus natives, the white world versus the darker nations, the developed versus the developing (or underdeveloped), and, of course, the First World versus the Third World.
These terms are often deployed literally. But they are also evocative, carrying with them a set of assumptions that revolve around three dimensions: race, values, and wealth. Take your pick. First Worlders are commonly imagined as wealthy, white liberals; so are global Northerners or Westerners, or indeed, settlers and even the “civilized.” But these dimensions are not equal. Race remains the fulcrum around which the others rotate. Put simply, “global South” is a euphemism, a seemingly innocuous substitute that allows those in polite society to avoid using the phrase they really mean: the nonwhite world.
### FROZEN IN TIME
The persistence of “global South” and its predecessor terms owes much to the original desire to divide the world into digestible blocks. During the high point of European imperialism, toward the second half of the nineteenth century, colonial administrators faced a dilemma. Although the apex of European control of global territory was still several decades away, increased resistance from colonized peoples was becoming a threat to continued expansion. The 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, in India—where the uprising is called the Indian Rebellion—marked a turning point. A revolt led by Indian soldiers in the service of the ruling British East India Company, it threatened the stability of the European imperial project. In response, the British government, along with its French counterparts, began to reimagine the nature of colonial power. In India, the British government took direct control of the colony away from the East India Company and began experimenting with “indirect rule” to govern the subcontinent’s welter of so-called princely states.
Direct rule entailed European control over the legislative, executive, and administrative functions of a colony. Indirect rule, by contrast, involved the governing of colonies through the manipulation of existing authorities, or the appointment of “traditional rulers” where none previously existed. As Europe raced to secure control over the African continent at the close of the nineteenth century, indirect rule rapidly displaced direct rule as the preferred mode of colonial governance.
Frederick Lugard, the British high commissioner of northern Nigeria from 1900 to 1906, is known as the “father of indirect rule” for implementing the system in the lands once controlled by the Sokoto Caliphate, but its philosophical justification was drawn from the thinking of Henry Maine. As the Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Cambridge, Maine published his most famous work, _Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas_, in 1861, four years after the Sepoy Mutiny.
At a wholesale flower market in Kolkata, India, January 2025 Sahiba Chawdhary / Reuters
For Maine, the United Kingdom’s inability to grasp the cultural sources of social order led to the Mutiny. Influenced by Charles Darwin’s work on evolution, Maine differentiated between a dynamic West that embraced the rights of individuals and a frozen non-West forever caught in the throes of kinship obligations. The former, in Maine’s view, was the exception to the rule. “Maine created a conceptual binary in which he distinguished between the West and non-West,” wrote the political scientist Mahmood Mamdani. “The former was progressive and was to represent universal civilization and the latter was stationary and was the custodian of custom.” Put simply, the non-West was always a vast category used to describe all the non-European populations of the world, whatever their differences.
Maine suggested that the United Kingdom had been blinded by the universal logic of direct rule, which presumed a singular route to modernization—the so-called “civilizing mission.” The United Kingdom mistakenly imposed foreign institutions, ideas, and values onto people for whom they could only stir resentment, and, ultimately, revolt. Instead, Maine championed a system of rule that would embrace and repurpose “primitive institutions” as the most stable route for sustained European rule. This shift from direct to indirect rule was most visible in the structure of colonial legal systems. While direct rule required a single legal order that governed both natives and settlers, indirect rule necessitated a dual legal system in which different systems of customary law applied to different groups. Issues such as marriage, inheritance, and even who could till the land were the domain of customary law and subject to the whims of traditional authorities, creating a legal apparatus that institutionalized the racial divide between the colonizer and the colonized.
The effect was to view non-European peoples as constitutionally bound by custom, impervious to progress, and inscrutable to the Western mind. Maine’s ideas would prove influential and were taught to a generation of budding colonial administrators at Oxbridge, where they prepared to embark on their service in far-flung colonies. His legacy was to shift the colonial project away from a universal civilizing mission that presumed all peoples could be transformed into Europeans, or “moderns,” toward one that, as Karuna Mantena, a political theorist who has written extensively on Maine, describes it, viewed non-Europeans “as naturally at home in his/her custom and thus resistant to reform, conversion, assimilation—in short, civilization.”
### WHAT’S IN A NAME?
Maine struck upon a deeply resonant divide that retains its power today. While colonial administrators imagined the West to be home to progress, order, and economic development, all of which were imagined as coterminous with whiteness, the East was imagined as its opposite. Maine’s racial division of the world created a hierarchy with whiteness on top and the “darker races” on bottom. This binary, racial division of the world, and the assumptions that gave it life, gained strength throughout the colonial period, bolstering the emerging global order and generating a broad intellectual consensus within the emerging field of international, or, as it could accurately be described, interracial relations. Yet, even as humanity has (mostly) moved beyond the crude and cruel racial logics that underpinned the European imperial enterprise, Maine’s racial sorting of the world continues to undergird, and confound, our attempts to divide the planet into intuitive categories.
As with most categories grafted onto a people without their consent, this hierarchical division of the world produced its own reaction. Colonized peoples subversively embraced and repurposed the division, fostering anticolonial and antiracist solidarity across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and even with minority populations in the imperial capitals. As early as 1881, Frederick Douglass condemned the naturalization of a “color-line” that divided the white world from the rest. W. E. B. DuBois popularized the term “color line” to describe post-slavery life in the United States. But like Douglass, his use of the term was meant to describe the global order. As he defined it in his most famous work, _The Souls of Black Folk_, published in 1903: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America, and the islands of the sea.”
The emergence of the Soviet Union upended Maine’s binary vision by introducing the possibility that some “backward” countries could embrace progress. This transformation undergirded Alfred Sauvy’s famous tripartite division of humanity into First, Second, and Third Worlds. Sauvy, a French scholar of Catalonian descent, drew inspiration from “Third Estate,” the term used to describe the majority of the French population from peasant farmers to the bourgeoisie as opposed to the clergy (First Estate) and aristocracy (Second Estate). Writing at the dawn of the Cold War, Sauvy repeatedly refers to the Third World as “underdeveloped countries,” arguing that they could be the swing states that ultimately determine whether communism or capitalism would triumph.
> Put simply, “global South” is a euphemism for the nonwhite world.
Despite nodding to ideological competition and economic development, like Maine, Sauvy’s division of the world was still fundamentally racial. The ideological war between capitalism (First World) and communism (Second World) was explicitly connected to the East/West civilizational divide: capitalism was inherently Western, in Sauvy’s conception, just as communism was Eastern. In other words, despite its seeming departure from Maine’s binary logic, the Second World was really a slice of the non-West that, contrary to expectations, embraced an explicitly secular and modernizing agenda: socialism.
Unlike “Third World,” which was eventually embraced by the people to whom it was ascribed, “Second World” never resonated politically or even culturally as a label. Instead, countries such as Cuba, Yugoslavia, and, most prominently, China—all firmly within the Second World, based on Sauvy’s criteria—sought to align with the Third World throughout the Cold War, much as Russia attempts to rally the global South today. China sent its premier, Zhou Enlai, to attend the Bandung Conference in 1955, which gave birth to the Non-Aligned Movement—the Third World’s most famous political formation—while Yugoslavia hosted the NAM summit twice.
Inevitably, some countries always fit awkwardly, or not at all, into these schemes. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, with their centrality to American objectives in the Pacific Rim, were granted an honorary “white” status. The same was true for Israel and apartheid South Africa during the Cold War, despite their geographic location and racial makeup.
The tripartite division of the world could not withstand the fall of the Soviet Union. Combined with the decline of the secular modernizing statism of figures such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, the post–Cold War order reverted back to the colonial-era binary logic—albeit now with a newly discovered distaste for deploying racial terms to describe it.
### BUILDING BLOCS
Despite its recent rise to prominence, the idea of a global South is not new. The term was first used in 1969 by Carl Oglesby, an American writer and activist. His short essay appeared in a special forum on the Vietnam War organized by the Catholic magazine _The Commonweal_. Oglesby served as President of the Students for a Democratic Society, one of the largest and most radical voices in the anti-Vietnam War movement. Under his direction, SDS overtly aligned itself with groups around the world fighting what they perceived as American imperialism.
Oglesby deployed the term interchangeably with better-known phrases such as “underdeveloped world” and “Third World.” His essay attempted to describe what he called “the world structure of power” and how to upend it. Oglesby concluded that Western activists had a “responsibility . . . to make the revolution more possible,” by seeking common cause with anti-imperialist movements around the world.
Although Maine, Sauvy, and Oglesby had very different politics, they were all interested in describing the vast majority of the world’s population in a way that could make it legible to the white world, and importantly, would support their own very different political projects in their home countries. Rather than organically sprouting from among the people these terms were meant to describe, all were coined by white men based in the West.
This is not a coincidence. It’s hard to imagine someone in Brazil, China, or Nigeria coming up with such an amorphous phrase to describe an imaginary unity among them. It also helps explain the enduring tension between “global South” and other supranational formations, such as Pan-Africanism and Pan-Islamism, that emerged from within the population described and more closely reflect the beliefs of the people involved.
Workers ahead of the Lunar New Year celebrations in Hanoi, Vietnam, January 2025 Athit Perawongmetha / Reuters
This is not to say that Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans have no use for the term. Indeed, many heads of state from countries in these regions jockey for the unofficial title of “leader of the global South.” Much like other racial slurs that have been turned back against the people who deploy them, there is power in embracing a label applied to you by the more powerful, even if it was originally derogatory. China, always an ambiguous member of this group, has staked its claim by hosting numerous summits for its global South counterparts. Not to be outdone, its longtime rival India plays the same game. Brazil and South Africa, and even Russia, have also sought the throne.
Each has levied a variety of strategies to buttress its claims, encompassing infrastructure deals, loan packages, humanitarian initiatives, and diplomatic and cultural overtures. Yet none has been able to consistently harness a global South bloc to advance its objectives on the international stage. During the Cold War, the Group of 77, a grouping of countries within the United Nations (originally 77 but now 134) that emerged out of NAM, did achieve limited success, particularly around mobilizing global action against apartheid South Africa. But the sheer size of the bloc, and the tendency of countries to pursue their own individual interests, undermined its ability to promote collective action on global issues. This is structural, suggesting that the real threat to global South relevance is the long-standing patterns of bilateral alliances and historical relationships that continue to shape the behavior of individual states on the international stage.
So where does that leave “global South”? Efforts to banish the phrase or limit its use are unlikely to work. Replacements are plentiful, but have done little to stunt the term’s rise. Neologisms, such as “W.E.I.R.D.” (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic), offer little advantage over older terms such as “the West” beyond articulating the assumptions embedded within. “Global majority” may better capture the demographic divide between the two halves, but has limited appeal outside of activist circles and nongovernmental organizations. BRICS has the advantage of naming a budding political entity that may play a role in shaping the future global order. Despite only recently growing to ten member states, it represents almost half the human population and 40 percent of global trade. But like its politically oriented predecessors in the twentieth century—most prominently NAM and the G-77—it is unlikely to overcome the substantial divisions between member states, inhibiting its ability to offer a cohesive alternative to the existing liberal order.
### UNPLEASANT TRUTHS
The challenge of replacing “global South,” as well as its still more popular predecessor, “Third World,” is that people are loath to acknowledge how a racial logic continues to structure the modern world. As with any euphemism, replacing or abandoning “global South” will not erase the ugly racial history of the current global order. “Darker nations” may more accurately describe the grouping of countries that analysts seek to name, but with its invocation of skin color, it can feel retrograde.
Euphemisms are designed to obfuscate unpleasant truths. They can be useful to maintain a veneer of civility allowing those who use them to avoid the paralysis that can accompany any effort to acknowledge the trauma and violence that gave birth to the existing global order. But in their effort to offer a polite alternative, they sacrifice precision and ultimately can never escape the taint of their prior meaning.
But there is another reason to limit the use of “global South.” The twenty-first century has witnessed an extraordinary transformation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century-era racial thinking. Where once non-Western countries were viewed as stuck, it is increasingly common to think of countries in East and West Asia as representing the future. With gleaming new infrastructure and a zeal for technological progress lacking in the United States, these regions show that the West is no longer exceptional in its embrace of progress, contrary to what Maine once posited. The deracialization of the term can be seen as progress away from the racialized stereotypes that “global South” and its predecessors once invoked, but it also renders the term vacant, an empty cipher upon which political actors can project any meaning they prefer. Indeed, this may be the key reason for its ascendance.
The term “global South” does not appear to be diminishing in popularity any time soon, but analysts should still recognize the core historical logic that gave it birth, and qualify their usage accordingly. Racial hierarchies may be scrambling, but the reality that the existing global order was birthed to entrench racist beliefs cannot be erased. “Political language,” as George Orwell once wrote, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” But the reader should not despair. As Orwell concluded in his essay, “One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits.” If and when a new order emerges, humanity may finally be able to shed the legacy of white supremacy and the distaste that can accompany the simple act of calling things as they are.