Introduction: The Starbucks and the Shanty

- Those who observe and study the phenomenon can visibly see the globalization
- Global interconnectedness and global modernity, cultural homogenization
- Example: Starbuck – can be found in different places in the world
- Globalization creates undersides
- The underdevelopment of the global south, it would seem, prevents it from being globalized,
revealing the inherent unevenness of the process. Poverty is backward. It is not modern. It is not
cosmopolitan. It is not global.
- Neo-liberalism
- International Financial Institutions (IFIs) like the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary
Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO)
- This form of globalization is likewise uneven, as the economic norms the developed world
applies to itself are never the same as those it imposes on the developing world.
- the WB and the IMF, dominated by economists from the global north, to demand that
developing economies cut government spending and raise interest rates to reduce inflation.
- shrinking of the public sector ultimately means a reduction in services like healthcare and the
increase in interest rates reduces domestic consumption. The results are often catastrophic, and
in many cases the cure is worse than the illness.
- Despite its dogmatic adherence to belt-tightening and austerity, however, the developed world
does not apply the same standards to itself.
- From the perspective of ‘anti-globalization’ critics, the contradictions at the heart of
neoliberalism cause and reinforce the endemic poverty of the global south. Structural
adjustment ; the enforcement of the neo-liberal consensus #x2013; deepens inequality in the
world's poorest countries. It is thus that the shanty is as much a symbol of globalization as the
Starbucks. Poverty is also being globalized.
- above diptych reveals that globalization creates both affluence and poverty; it pushes peoples
and groups into a modernity associated with Western culture and capital, while simultaneously
leaving behind others
- the development/underdevelopment paradox of globalization as a means to shed light on the
term ‘global south’ a concept, which as I show below, operates under various logics and is
articulated by multiple subjectivities.
- Although globalization challenges the dominance of the state, it nevertheless produces changes
on the structure of states, and, therefore, requires responses from states #x2013; a crucial
observation that I will continue returning to.
- the chapter situates the historical emergence of the term ‘global south’ and its antecedent
forms like the ‘Third World’ by looking at how inequalities have been produced through political
projects like colonization and present day neo-liberal globalization. It also examines the various
ways in which people have responded to these projects, and, in the process, reshaped the terms
of global political engagement.
- The chapter ends with a discussion on the contemporary global south, examining how
contemporary globalization has reshaped some of its contours and partially prefigured its
 future. It makes an argument concerning the importance of the global south relative to other
notions of collectivity such as nations or regions

Conceptualizing without Defining

- Conceiving of the global south is of primary import to those engaged in social and political action
against global inequality. Drawing lines between the global south and the global north, the
developed and the developing first, the first and the Third World, has a powerful political
function: It allows critics and activists to make distinctions between the beneficiaries of uneven
systems of global power.
- Contemporary critics1 of neo-liberal globalization use the global south as a banner to rally
countries victimized by the violent economic ‘cures’ of institutions like the International
Monetary Fund.
- the term ‘global south’ and similar categories are relevant to the study of globalization. And
though the terminology may evolve, the effects of large-scale political projects #x2013; from
imperialism, to cold war-era containment, to neo-liberal globalization #x2013; make it necessary
for scholars and activists to use terms like ‘global south’, which serve as rhetorical anchors in a
grammar that represents global difference. As Levander and Mignolo (2011: 3) explain, the
important question may not be ‘what the global south is’ but ‘for whom and under what
conditions the global south becomes relevant’.
- Sparke (2007: 117), ‘The Global South is everywhere, but it is also somewhere, and that
somewhere, located at the intersection of entangled political geographies of dispossession and
repossession
- global south is thus both a reality and a provisional work-in-progress. It is crucial, therefore, to
examine how actors on the ground, particularly those from the global south itself, mobilize the
concept. not be defined a priori, but rather articulated in the context of provisional and mutable
processes of political praxis. This allows us to historicize it and remain mindful of its evolution.
- global south can be located in between the objective realities of global inequality and the
various subjective responses to these. There is no uniform global south, and academic analysis is
in a better position to document its articulation rather than set its ontological limits
- Grovogui (2011: 176) contends that: The Global South is not a directional designation or a point
due south from a fixed north. It is a symbolic designation meant to capture the semblance of
cohesion that emerged when former colonial entities engaged in political projects of
decolonization and moved toward the realization of a postcolonial international order.
- ‘former colonial entities’ are almost all categorizable as states in an international system of
governance. The terms ‘Third World’, ‘developing world’, and ‘global south’ are all ways to
represent interstate inequalities .
- the focus on the state and interstate dynamics creates a methodological narrowing, which
ignores the richness of nonstate politics
- occluded when we emphasize the state
 o First, there are forms of power inequality that cannot be reduced to discussions of state
politics.
 Jonathan Rigg (2007), for instance, emphasizes the everyday nature of politics
in the global south, where local practices subtend, transcend, and overwhelm
statecraft
 in a study of Middle Eastern social change, Bayat (2010: 14) has theorized the
notion of ‘nonmovements’ or the ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary’
encapsulated in the ‘discreet and prolonged ways in which the poor struggle to
survive and to better their lives by quietly impinging on the propertied and
powerful, and on society at large”’.
 For as long, therefore, as one studies the global south from the ground up, one
cannot avoid mention of movements that explicitly or implicitly negate state-
centric notions of political praxis.
o Second, not all of the formal colonial entities are states.
 Raewyn Connell (2007: 71#x2013;86), for instance, conceives of aboriginal
Australia as integral to the imaginary universe of the global south, despite it
being formally part of a wealthy developed state. In the sense that aboriginal
Australia exists in a postcolonial temporality, solidarities can be drawn between
it and other postcolonial entities that now define themselves as states
o Finally #x2013; and perhaps most germane to this present volume #x2013; the process
of globalization places into question geographically-bound conceptions of poverty and
inequality.
 The increase and intensification of global flows spread both poverty and
affluence. Spaces of underdevelopment in developed countries may mirror the
poverty of the global south, and spaces of affluence in the developing world
mirror those of the global north.
 The concentration of power and wealth in the one per cent to the detriment of
the other 99 in the global north illustrates that viewing inequality through a
simple interstate lens is inadequate. Various forms of inequality cut across
national boundaries, and Marx was correct to claim, ‘the proletariat has no
country’. There is a global south in the global north, and vice versa. There are, as
well, interstitial spaces like the US#x2013;Mexico borderlands where ‘the Third
World grates with the First and bleeds’ (Levander and Mignolo, 2011: 8
- why must we insist on analyzing states and interstate inequalities?
o First, as will be explained in depth below, the decolonization process produced states,
now recognized as sovereign under the system of international law promoted by the
United Nations.
 The likelihood of being poor is higher for people who live in states now
considered associated with the global south, in regions like Asia, Africa, the
Middle East, and South America.
  the resistance to global trading regimes is also largely organized through states,
as evidenced by the emergence of the Group of 33 in the WTO.
o Second, solutions to problems produced by globalization are largely forwarded and
articulated on a state level.
 As Eric Hobsbawm (1996: 277) notes, although states may not be ‘ideal for the
purpose of a much more globalized world’, global institutions have yet to prove
that ‘they can diminish international inequalities’, while ‘nation-states
(supplemented in Europe by the European Union (EU)) are in a position to
diminish regional or group inequalities to some extent’. The state remains ‘the
main mechanism for social transfers’, making it the strongest vehicle for social
redistribution (ibid.)
 Walden Bello (2006: 113), one the leading critics of neo-liberalism, contends
that development in the global south must begin by ‘drawing most of a
country’s financial resources for development from within rather than becoming
dependent on foreign investments and foreign financial markets'.3Such
solutions require a continued reaffirmation of the unequal position of states in
the global south.
- the power of the state to regulate the economy, we should add its related ability to protect the
environment. Certainly, responding to issues such as global warming requires global
approaches. Nonetheless, states are empowered to regulate firms working within their borders.
The global environmental crisis is, in fact, a reflection of interstate inequality.
- a more robust climate policy can only emerge if northern states acknowledge their
disproportionate capacity to damage the environment.
- A last defense of analyzing states is that, even phenomena largely considered ‘transnational’ are
the results of state policies. Acts of deterritorialization such as labor migration need to be placed
in the context of the state.
o A last defense of analyzing states is that, even phenomena largely considered
‘transnational’ are the results of state policies. Acts of deterritorialization such as labor
migration need to be placed in the context of the state.
- In sum, the state will continue to be an important unit of analysis despite the deterritorializing
effects of globalization. This is more pronounced in the context of the global south, where an
economically activist state is a necessary response to forces such as international business,
international financial institutions, and foreign state power #x2013; none of which citizens in the
global south can easily influence. In the global south, the struggle for autonomous governance is
largely waged as a struggle to democratize the state in order to make it responsive to the needs
of people on the ground rather than the demands of external power.

Colonialism, Modernity, and the Creation of Global Inequality

- Our task should be instead to locate the concept in a wider history of world politics. In many
respects, the global south is a product of Western imagination. The Spanish conquest of Latin
America in the sixteenth century produced what we now recognize as Latin America.
- the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel believed that a universal ‘Spirit’ propelled world
history, leading humankind to higher levels of consciousness. His conception of this Spirit had a
geographical imaginary embedded in it: world history begins in Asia and finds its apotheosis in
European civilization.
o Hegel did not believe the African continent was part of history (Bernasconi, 2000: 185).
The explicitly racist underpinnings of this are revealed when Hegel (1975: 138)
contends: It is characteristic of the blacks that their consciousness has not yet even
arrived at the intuition of any objectivity, as for example, of God or the law, in which
humanity relates to the world and intuits its essence.
- similar thinkers like Immanuel Kant informed European legal and military policy towards non-
European entities. The French mission civilisatrice #x2013; which held that colonization was a
necessary tool for the spread of ‘civilization’ #x2013; allowed for the subjugation of vast parts of
Africa and Southeast Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
o The Filipino-American war began when US President William McKinley declared a policy
of ‘benevolent assimilation’ for the Philippines #x2013; colonialism with a smile.4 In
both the French and American cases, colonialism was represented in paternalistic terms,
glossing over the violence of the colonial project in the process. Within this logic, the
subjugation of whole peoples was not inherently problematic, and its violences could be
passed off as excesses of benevolent civilizing endeavors.
- Civilizational discourse was not only the dominant ideology of colonialism. Its logic also shaped
the birth of the international order.
o prominent European international lawyers founded the Institute of International Law in
1873, they differed on whom they considered civilized, but generally agreed that
‘barbaric’ races were outside the ambit of international law (Mazower, 2012: Chapter
3). It was only in 1944, during the creation of the United Nations, that Western powers
officially abandoned this racialist discourse, accepting that independence for colonies
should not be denied because of a perceived lack of civilization (Mazower, 2006: 565).
- Colonial logic, however, continued/continues to seep into the grammar of world politics through
theories that either homogenize the global south or present its development in linear terms.
American economist Walt W. Rostow's modernization theory, which outlined historical progress
in terms of a society's capacity to produce and consume material goods, became a key foreign
policy precept of the Kennedy administration.
-