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(noun) a vague, geographically inept and yet emotionally resonant term for what was once known as the developing world
To appreciate the rise to prominence of the term “global south” this year, the best analogy may be one of those late 1960s rock bands that played doggedly for decades before hitting the big time with their first world tour.
The two words were apparently first coupled by a leftwing American activist, Carl Oglesby, in 1969 in an article decrying the “north’s dominance over the global south”.
For the next 50 years, the phrase was broadly confined in the west to the policy papers of development agencies, university debates and literary journals.
But all the while it was taking root and flowering in postcolonial states, not least because it was seen as less loaded than the “third world”, western experts’ moniker of choice in the 1970s and 1980s for less-developed regions.
And this year its hour has come. It is now the catch-all term at summits and in policy papers for the swaths of the world that are neutral over the war in Ukraine, and tend to see western powers as hypocritical and purblind. Headline writers deploy it at will — sometimes even without quotes.
For literalists in the “global commentariat”, this is infuriating. They rightly see it as geographically illiterate: India and China, for example, are both in the northern hemisphere.
They also highlight the inconsistencies of the supposed bloc: it is a mishmash of rich and poor, of democracies and dictatorships and systems in-between. But it has an emotional force and embodies an identity that trump linguistic logic.
So decoupling the two words will not be easy. They have history. And note that it took more than half a century — long after Oglesby’s death in 2011 — for his coinage to catch on.