Global South rises as a strategic force in a divided world

The Global South has re-emerged as one of the most consequential forces in world politics, and a new collection of studies argues that its rise no longer follows the script written during the Cold War. The special issue, published in the Asian Review of Political Economy, examines how countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America are navigating intensifying great-power competition while pursuing their own development agendas. Its central conclusion is blunt: the Global South is not a monolithic bloc but a diverse constellation of states that both collaborate and compete, and that now possesses a heightened capacity for strategic agency.

The conceptual groundwork for the collection traces the term Global South to Carl Oglesby, who popularized it in 1969 as a critique of Northern hegemony culminating in the Vietnam War. During the Cold War, the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union compelled many nations to align with one superpower or the other, yet it simultaneously prompted a diverse array of states, including communist regimes, liberal democracies and conservative monarchies across three continents, to attempt to transcend that bipolarity. Milestones such as the Bandung Conference, the Non-Aligned Movement and the emergence of the Group of 77 fostered the possibility of a collective identity, but that identity was systematically eroded by weak internal cohesion and by elites co-opted by global capital during postcolonial nation-building.

With the conclusion of the Cold War, the ideational coherence of the Global South diminished as the shared impetus to transcend geopolitical rivalry eroded. Recent decades have reversed that trajectory through sheer economic weight. According to the World Bank, emerging and developing economies accounted for approximately 45 percent of global GDP in 2024, a substantial increase from 25 percent in 2000. Key BRICS nations, most notably China, India and Brazil, have consistently ranked among the world’s top ten economies since 2010. The editors argue that the current resurgence is inextricably linked to the intensifying U.S.-China competition, while the grouping is further fragmented by internal political and economic disparities more pronounced than those of the Cold War era.

At the systemic level, the collection highlights how the rivalry between Washington and Beijing sets the context for strategic choices across the developing world. Achmad Rifa’i uses economic modeling to demonstrate the disruptive impact of heightened tariffs between the two powers, finding that an escalated trade war creates economic distortions and undermines global trade stability. Such systemic shocks radiate outward, prompting countries to seek diversified trading partnerships and more stable multilateral arrangements to buffer against uncertainty. Rifa’i’s analysis underscores a paradox: aggressive great-power protectionism tends to be counterproductive, incentivizing the very globalization alternatives that reduce reliance on the hegemonic powers.

Regional dynamics filter these global pressures. In Sri Lanka, Letian Xie examines how the Belt and Road Initiative generates both strategic suspicion and potential constructive collaboration. China’s extensive infrastructure investments in the island nation have provoked strategic anxiety in New Delhi, and India has acted to hedge against growing Chinese influence in its immediate neighborhood, driven by an ambition to maintain a sphere of influence in the Indian Ocean region. Intriguingly, while the two Asian giants vie for regional influence, they concurrently find common ground as leading members of the BRICS coalition, working side by side on initiatives aligned with Global South interests. Geopolitical relationships, the issue stresses, are not static: countries can be rivals in one context and partners in another.

Africa’s experience complicates any assumption that the continent is a passive arena of external rivalry. Salum Mussa Haruna describes a geopolitical awakening in which African nations push back against narratives of passivity to seize greater strategic autonomy, central to which is the pursuit of developmental sovereignty, the ability to align external deals with internal priorities. Haruna argues that in an era of multipolar competition, Africa is expanding its bargaining power through the African Continental Free Trade Area and diversified engagements with partners such as India, Turkey and the Gulf states, diluting the dominance of any single external actor. Messay Mulugeta Tefera analyzes the partnership with China as a transformative force that allows Africa to act as a co-architect of the global development order, noting that Chinese investment in infrastructure, trade and public health has helped close critical gaps previously neglected by Western powers, with the partnership’s value depending on alignment with indigenous frameworks like Agenda 2063.

The transition from theoretical autonomy to practical economic benefit, however, is often complicated by systemic asymmetries and domestic instability. Bhaso Ndzendze’s examination of South Africa within BRICS reveals that the country’s trade performance within the bloc has been underwhelming due to imbalanced trade openness and persistent tariff barriers, suggesting that geopolitical alignment alone is insufficient to ensure economic equity. Ndzendze also highlights how domestic political shifts, specifically the rise of coalition governments with varying views on Western versus BRICS alignments, can undermine strategic consistency, and proposes a BRICS Plus Treaty to codify trade commitments and protect economic interests from the volatility of domestic politics. As Haruna cautions, without transparent governance and regional unity, African states may simply swap old patrons for new ones.

In South Asia, Rubel Hossen’s analysis of Bangladesh from 2009 to 2024 provides a critical lens into state-led neoliberalism, in which development is driven as much by internal state logic as by external alignment. The Awami League government utilized strong centralized state power to steer market-oriented growth, aggressively pursuing privatization and massive infrastructure projects to integrate the country into the global economy. Hossen argues that this model presents a profound paradox: while it achieves impressive economic growth and creates a competitive market state, it simultaneously produces significant social and environmental costs, with widening inequality and narrowing political space challenging the long-term sustainability of the authoritarian-liberalization mix. Sri Lanka, meanwhile, exercises agency through nuanced diplomacy, leveraging the competition between China and India to secure better development deals without becoming a proxy battleground.

Latin America illustrates both the promise and the fragility of South-South cooperation. Ting Cao and Yuyun Li, studying transportation infrastructure from 2009 to 2023, find that Chinese engagement in railways, ports and highways, particularly in Brazil, Argentina and Peru, aligns with the region’s urgent need to fill an investment gap totaling hundreds of billions of dollars, offering a flexible alternative to traditional Western aid and multilateral lending characterized by stringent conditions and slow implementation. Yet foreign capital cannot substitute for domestic institutional stability. Frequent government turnovers lead new administrations to revise or cancel the initiatives of their predecessors, bureaucratic red tape causes years of delay, and infrastructure projects often ignite conflicts with indigenous groups and local communities over land rights and environmental protection. The aborted airport project near Cusco, Peru, exemplifies how the neglect of indigenous consultation can neutralize the advantages of significant financial backing.

The BRICS mechanism emerges as the collection’s representative vehicle for Global South multilateralism, diversifying cooperation beyond Western-led institutions into finance, trade, digital transformation and climate action. Yang Lyu identifies innovation pathways ranging from local currency settlements to blockchain-based cross-border digital payments, arguing that the relative decline of U.S. dollar hegemony has created a historic window for renovating global payment systems, even as a common BRICS currency remains challenging. Yang Lu and Tingting Zhang observe that the digital economy has become a strategic priority in global competition, with complementary national strengths, from China’s artificial intelligence infrastructure to Russia’s cybersecurity and India’s software development, capable of elevating the voice of the Global South, though a dual digital divide and divergent philosophies on cyber sovereignty hamper unified standards. On climate governance, Xisheng Wang demonstrates through an analysis of the UN’s request for a Consultation Opinion on climate obligations how BRICS countries use their collective platform to advocate for development rights and historical justice, despite Russia’s outlier status on historical responsibility. Collectively, the studies depict a Global South that is dynamic and heterogeneous, yet increasingly capable of employing strategic navigation to reshape the global governance architecture, with the success of BRICS hinging on its capacity to transition from a coalition of convergent interests into a structured organization capable of managing internal power asymmetries and sustaining policy continuity across its diversifying membership.

Subject of Research: Geopolitical dynamics and development cooperation across the Global South, including Africa, Asia, Latin America and BRICS multilateralism.

Article Title: Global South in transition: Geopolitical dynamics and development cooperation

Article References: Zheng, Y., & Ye, W. (2026). Global South in transition: Geopolitical dynamics and development cooperation. Asian Review of Political Economy, 5(1), Article 18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44216-026-00089-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44216-026-00089-5

Keywords: Global South, geopolitics, development cooperation, BRICS, U.S.-China rivalry, South-South cooperation, Africa, South Asia, Latin America, infrastructure, digital economy, climate governance