Member-only story
What is the Global South
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.”
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…