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What is the Global South

Jonathan Stephen Harry Riley
4 min readJan 17, 2024

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The definition of the global South also has no firm characteristics.

The terminology itself started to be used in the 1960s and 1970s. The term global South was also originally used to be less controversial than the terminology of global East.

This is because, during the Cold War, between 1945 and 1989, there was a division between capitalist and communist nations, particularly the Chinese Communist Party, which won the Chinese Civil War in 1949, and the Soviet Union dominated most of central and eastern Europe.

This is why the terminology global East would have made more sense; however, to reduce tensions and improve diplomatic relations, the global South became widely adopted.

The term Global South appears to have been first used in 1969 by political activist Carl Oglesby.

Writing in the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal, Oglesby argued that the war in Vietnam was the culmination of a history of northern “dominance over the global south.”

North Global and Global South

First-World, Second World and the Third-World

The global South also originates from the political and economic divides of the mid-to-late 20th century; the First World was seen as the political and economic alliance built by the United States of America to defeat the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

These first-world nations were also, particularly, nations that industrialised in the 18th and 19th centuries but also followed cultural and economic norms that were predominant in Western Europe and the northern hemisphere, particularly the British and American views of economic liberalism.

It is essential to state that this attitude is not uniform throughout Western European nations and other nations allied with the United States of America because France, Australia, Britain, and others have their interpretations of liberalism, democracy, and economics.

Now we come to the second world. The Second World existed from 1945 to 1991; this was perceived as the world’s parallel economy to the United States economy due to the Soviet Union and Communist China being influenced by Marxist political thought.

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Jonathan Stephen Harry Riley
Jonathan Stephen Harry Riley

Written by Jonathan Stephen Harry Riley

I have been writing from 2014 to the present day; my writing is focused on history, politics, culture, geopolitics and other related topics.

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