Last September, the G20 meeting was held, an interstate forum bringing together the economies considered to be the most “developed”, and, recently, the big fair organized by Xi Jinping to mark ten years of the new Silk Roads project brought together more than 130 countries. In light of these meetings, we quickly see that the notion of the “global South” is on the decline. If this idea had been able to replace the older one of the “third world”, initially proposed by the economist and demographer Alfred Sauvy in 1952, it appears today that that of a global South has also become anachronistic. Not only with regard to the economic disparities and political contradictions that exist between the so-called countries of the Global South, but also on an analytical level and even in the way in which solidarity and transnational activism are conceived today.
In view of the new geopolitics currently revealed by the diversity of positions of the so-called Southern States in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the emergence of China as an economic superpower, increasingly influential beyond its borders, or the economic and political growth of the other BRICS states (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), it is relevant to imagine or design a more heuristic way of grasping both the diversity and the complexity of this vast collection of States.
In parallel with these geopolitical, socio-economic and demographic changes, there is a post-positivist turn within theories of international relations with the contribution of critical approaches to the international order. In this movement, we see the emergence of new ways of theoretically understanding the debates and challenges which mark the so-called societies of the South. This knowledge, already present, but which remained on the margins of institutionalized and dominant knowledge, is today a source of exploration and original reflections. In this reflective space, decolonial, postcolonial, intersectional and ecological perspectives occupy an important place. Associated with the work of, among others, Arturo Escobar (Encountering Development1995) and other Latin American colleagues, including Walter Mignolo, to the writings associated with subaltern studies initially developed by the Indian historian Ranajit Guha, or to postcolonial studies dating back to the writings of Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, a form of intellectual and activist renewal enriches studies of the South.
To grasp and name this new theoretical proliferation and the multiple realities of this new geopolitics of the South, we propose the idea of “PluriSouth”. This neologism echoes the efforts and writings of authors grouped under another neologism, the “Pluriverse”, among others presented in the work of the same name published in 2019 with the subtitle A Post-Development Dictionary. PluriSud here means placing as much emphasis on the plural realities that were hidden or ignored in the idea of a global South as on the current effervescent theory, which highlights the plurality of knowledge, cosmologies and lived experiences. in the margins of Western academia. These critical approaches raise questions not only about knowledge, what is considered legitimate knowledge, or research methodologies, but also about cooperation and international solidarity between States or civil societies. Finally, PluriSud includes a plurality of emerging activist practices, which, in return, generate questions and critical theoretical reflections, and contribute to them.
The objective of this issue of Possible is to explore, make intelligible and concretize the idea of PluriSud in terms of critical reflections and also new practices. The ambition remains circumscribed and not exhaustive; it is more about illustrating and proposing a project to be built rather than a research program or a completed conceptualization.
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