Routledge Handbook of South-South Relations

Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Patricia Daley, Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Patricia Daley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317229148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Desarrollo sostenible

South-South cooperation is becoming ever more important to states, policy-makers and academics. Many Northern states, international agencies and NGOs are promoting South-South partnerships as a means of 'sharing the burden' in funding and undertaking development, assistance and protection activities, often in response to increased political and financial pressures on their own aid budgets. However, the mainstreaming of Southern-led initiatives by UN agencies and Northern states is paradoxical in many ways, especially because the development of a South-South cooperation paradigm was originally conceptualised as a necessary way to overcome the exploitative nature of North-South relations in the era of decolonisation.

This handbook critically explores diverse ways of defining 'the South' and of conceptualising and engaging with 'South-South relations.' Through 30 state-of-the-art reviews of key academic and policy debates, the handbook evaluates past, present and future opportunities and challenges of South-South cooperation, and lays out research agendas for the next 5-10 years. The book covers key models of cooperation (including internationalism, Pan-Arabism and Pan-Africanism), diverse modes of South-South connection, exchange and support (including South-South aid, transnational activism, and migration), and responses to displacement, violence and conflict (including Southern-led humanitarianism, peace-building and conflict resolution). In so doing, the handbook reflects on decolonial, postcolonial and anticolonial theories and methodologies, exploring urgent questions regarding the nature and implications of conducting research in and about the global South, and of applying a 'Southern lens' to a wide range of encounters, processes and dynamics across the global South and global North alike.

This handbook will be of great interest to scholars and post-graduate students in anthropology, area studies, cultural studies, development studies, history, geography, international relations, politics, postcolonial studies and sociology.

1

Introduction

Conceptualising the global South and South–South encounters

Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Patricia Daley

The study of ‘South–South relations’ is of increasing interest to states, policy-makers and academics,¹ often due to a professed desire to identify ways to maximise the potential benefits of the policies and practices developed by states across the global South. Especially since the 2010s, European and North American states and diverse international agencies have recognised (arguably especially in light of the financial crises which have led to pressures on their own aid allocations) the extent to which Southern states can ‘share the burden’ in funding and undertaking development, assistance and protection activities. As such, United Nations (UN) agencies, International Non-Governmental Organisations (INGOs) and powerful donor states are actively promoting both the ‘localisation of aid’ and South–South partnerships more broadly as a means of promoting sustainable forms of human development. Following the expansion and reconfiguration in 2004 of the ‘Special Unit for South–South Cooperation of the United Nations Development Programme’, the UN Development Programme’s 2013 Human Development Report ‘call[ed] for new institutions which can facilitate regional integration and South–South cooperation’. The Report, entitled The Rise of the South, noted that ‘[e]merging powers in the developing world are already sources of innovative social and economic policies and are major trade, investment, and increasingly development cooperation partners for other developing countries’ (UNDP 2013, p. iv), before concluding, ‘The South needs the North, and increasingly the North needs the South’ (2013, p. 2).

Such assertions demonstrate the extent to which South–South relations cannot be viewed in isolation from historic and contemporary modes of South–North and North–South relations. Indeed, South–South relations, including different forms of South–South cooperation (SSC), are by no means new phenomena, and yet the mainstreaming of Southern-led initiatives by UN agencies and states from across Europe and North America is paradoxical in many ways. This is especially the case since SSC and its underlying principles are historically associated with the Non-Aligned Movement, and anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles around the world. The purposeful development of a SSC paradigm was, in essence, originally conceptualised as a necessary means of overcoming the exploitative nature of North–South relations in the era of decolonisation, with diverse models of transnational cooperation and solidarity developed since the 1950s and 1960s; these include internationalist and socialist approaches and regional initiatives such as pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism.

Importantly, in Chapter 27 in this volume, Thomas Muhr and Mário Luiz Neves de Azevedo make the distinction between SSC – dating back to the 1950s and representing solidarity against imperialism – and forms of ‘triangular cooperation’ and ‘triangular collaboration’ that have been actively promoted by Northern actors since the 1990s under neoliberalism. Indeed, neoliberal globalisation and technological innovations have helped usher in transformations in the nature of political mobilisation and the intensification of population mobility in the global South. Commonalities of experience across the global South have led to diverse forms of regional and transnational activism, a trend toward new social movements (including between women, feminists, LGBTQI and youth) and individual mobility across wide geographical areas, including for employment, education and health. There is a need to understand these forms of cooperation to unpack whether they represent the continuation of older forms of SSC that sought to break with the dominance of the global North, or a reconfiguration of North–South interactions based on links with members of diasporas situated in the North, or are being used to promote Northern ‘best practice transfer’ between global South countries as debated in Chapter 27. These new forms of cooperation have become targets for Northern development interventions, as multilateral development agencies and aid donor countries in the global North attempt to guide the nature of the interactions through what they term ‘triangular cooperation’. In this context, ‘triangular cooperation/collaboration’ – a development policy intervention – is viewed by critics as instrumentalising and co-opting SSC and hence depoliticising potential sources of resistance to the North’s neoliberal hegemony.

Against this backdrop, it is clear that the paradoxes of contemporary attempts to promote the mobilisation of Southern states to fulfil goals delineated by Northern and Northern-led actors are indeed manifold. This is because such efforts are antithetical to the history and foundations of SSC, and also inconsistent with the longstanding determination to develop ways of understanding and responding to the world that challenge, rather than reify, global structures of inequality, ‘domination, exploitation, subalternisation and peripherisation’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Tafira, this volume).

Indeed, long before the institutional interest in ‘engaging with’, and ostensibly mobilising and co-opting actors from across the global South, rich, critical literatures have been published in diverse languages around the world, demonstrating the urgency of developing and applying theoretical and methodological frameworks that can be posited as Southern, anti-colonial, postcolonial and/or decolonial in nature (e.g. Anzaldúa 1987; Chakrabarty 2007; Connell 2007; de Sousa Santos 2014; Dussell 1977; Grosfoguel 2011; Kwoba et al. 2018; Mignolo 2000; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013; Quijano 1991, 2007; Said 1978; Spivak 1988; Sundberg 2014; Trinh T. Minh-ha 1989; Tuhiwai Smith 1999; wa Thiong’o 1986; Wynter 2003). These and other approaches have traced and advocated for diverse ways of knowing and being in a pluriversal world characterised (and constituted) by complex relationalities and unequal power relations, and equally diverse ways of resisting these inequalities – including through historical and contemporary forms of transnational solidarities.

Of course, the very term ‘South’ which is included not once but twice in the title of this volume, is itself a debated and diversely mobilised term, as exemplified in the different usages and definitions proposed (and critiqued) across the following chapters. For instance, a number of official, institutional taxonomies exist, including those which classify (and in turn interpellate) different political entities as ‘being’ from and of ‘the South’ or ‘the North’. Such classifications have variously been developed on the basis of particular readings of a state’s geographical location, of its relative position as a (formerly) colonised territory or colonising power, and/or of a state’s current economic capacity on national and global scales.² In turn, Medie and Kang define ‘countries of the global South’ as ‘countries that have been marginalised in the international political and economic system’ (2018, pp. 37–38). Indeed, Connell (2007) builds upon a long tradition of critical thinking to conceptualise the South and the North, respectively, through the lens of the periphery and the metropole, as categories that transcend fixed physical geographies. And of course, as stressed by Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Kenneth Tafira in Chapter 9, such geographies have never been either static or defined purely through reference to physical territories and demarcations: ‘imperial reason and scientific racism were actively deployed in the invention of the geographical imaginaries of the global South and the global North.’

Through conceptualising the South and North through the lenses of the periphery and metropole, Connell argues that there are multiple souths in the world, including ‘souths’ (and southern voices) within powerful metropoles, as well as multiple souths within multiple peripheries. As Sujata Patel notes, it is through this conceptualisation that Connell subsequently posits that ‘the category of the south allows us to evaluate the processes that permeate the non-recognition of its theories and practices in the constitution of knowledge systems and disciplines’ (Patel, this volume). It enables, and requires us, to examine how, why and with what effect certain forms of knowledge and being in the world come to be interpellated and protected as ‘universal’ while others are excluded, derided and suppressed ‘as’ knowledge or recognisable modes of being (also see Mignolo 2000; Dabashi 2015). Indeed, in her chapter in this volume Patel follows both Connell (2007) and de Sousa Santos (2014) in conceptualising ‘the South’ as ‘a metaphor’ that ‘represents the embeddedness of knowledge in relations of power’.

In turn, in Chapter 3, Dominic Davies and Elleke Boehmer centralise the constitutive relationality of the South by drawing on Grovogui (2011, p. 177), who defines ‘the term “Global South” not as an exact geographical designation, but as “an idea and a set of practices, attitudes, and relations” that are mobilised precisely as “a disavowal of institutional and cultural practices associated with colonialism and imperialism”’ (cited in Davies and Boehmer, this volume – emphasis added). Viewing the South, or souths, as being constituted by and mobilising purposeful resistance to diverse exploitative systems, demonstrates the necessity of a contrapuntal reading of, and through, the South.

As such, as Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Tafira powerfully argue in Chapter 9, ‘the global South was not only invented from outside by European imperial forces but it also invented itself through resistance and solidarity-building.’ In this mode of analysis, the South has been constituted through a long history of unequal encounters with, and diverse forms of resistance to, different structures and entities across what can be variously designated the North, West or specific imperial and colonial powers. An analysis of the South therefore necessitates a simultaneous interrogation of the contours and nature of ‘the North’ or ‘West’, with Mignolo arguing that ‘what constitutes the West more than geography is a linguistic family, a belief system and an epistemology’ (2015, p. xxv, cited in Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Tafira, this volume).

Indeed, the acknowledgement of the importance of relationality and such mutually constitutive dynamics provides a useful bridge between these rich theoretical and conceptual engagements of, with and from ‘the South’ on the one hand, and empirically founded studies of the institutional interest in ‘South–South cooperation’ as a mode of technical and political exchange for ‘international development’ on the other. In effect, as noted by Urvashi Aneja in this volume, diverse policies, modes of political interaction and ‘responses’ led by political entities across the South and the North alike ‘can thus be said to exist and evolve in a mutually constitutive relationship’, rather than in isolation from one another.

An important point to make at this stage is that it is not our aim to propose a definitive definition of the South or to propose how the South should be analysed or mobilised for diverse purposes – indeed, we would argue that such an exercise would be antithetical to the very foundations of the debates we and our contributors build upon in our respective modes of research and action. Nonetheless, a common starting point for most, if not all, of the contributions in this handbook is a rejection of conceptualisations of the South as that which is ‘non-Western’ or ‘non-Northern’. As noted by Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (2015 and this volume), it is essential to continue actively resisting negative framings of the South as that which is not of or from ‘the West’ or ‘the North’ – indeed, this is partly why the (still problematic) South/North binary is often preferred over typologies such as Western and non-Western, First and Third World, or developed and un(der)developed countries, all of which ‘suggest both a hierarchy and a value judgment’ (Mawdsley 2012, p. 12).

In effect, as Fiddian-Qasmiyeh argues in this volume (drawing on Brigg 2002), such modes of negative framing risk ‘maintaining rather than disrupting the notion that power originates from and operates through a unidirectional and intentional historical entity’. She – like other contributors to this volume addressing the relationships between theoretical, conceptual and empirical dynamics and modes of analysis, response and action – advocates for us to ‘resist the tendency to reconstitute the power of “the North” in determining the contours of the analysis’, while simultaneously acknowledging the extent to which ‘many Southern-led responses are purposefully positioned as alternatives and challenges to hegemonic, Northern-led systems’. This is, in many ways, a ‘double bind’ that persists in many of our studies of the world, including those of and from the South: our aim not to re-inscribe the epistemic power of the North, while simultaneously acknowledging that diverse forms of knowledge and action are precisely developed as counterpoints to the North.

As noted above, in tracing this brief reflection on conceptualisations of the South it is not our intention to offer a comprehensive definition of ‘the South’ or to posit a definitive account of Southern approaches and theories. Rather, the handbook aims to trace the debates that have emerged about, around, through and from the South, in all its heterogeneity (and not infrequent internal contradictions), in such a way that acknowledges the ways that the South has been constructed in relation to, with, through but also against other spaces, places, times, peoples, modes of knowledge and action. Such processes are, precisely, modes of construction that resist dependence upon hegemonic frames of reference; indeed, this handbook in many ways exemplifies the collective power that emerges when people come together to cooperate and trace diverse ‘roots and routes’ (following Gilroy 1993) to knowing, being and responding to the world – all with a view to better understanding and finding more nuanced ways of responding to diverse encounters within and across the South and the North.

At the same time as we recognise internal heterogeneity within and across the South/souths, and advocate for more nuanced ways of understanding the South and the North that challenge hegemonic epistemologies and methodologies, Ama Biney’s chapter in this volume reminds us of another important dynamic that underpins the work of most, perhaps all, of our contributors. While Biney is writing specifically about pan-Africanism, we would argue that the approach she delineates is essential to the critical theoretical perspectives and analyses presented throughout this handbook:

Pan-Africanism does not aim at the external domination of other people, and, although it is a movement operating around the notion of being a race conscious movement, it is not a racialist one . . . In short, pan-Africanism is not anti-white but is profoundly against all forms of oppression and the domination of African people.

While it is not our aim to unequivocally idealise or romanticise decolonial, postcolonial, anti-colonial, or Southern theories, or diverse historical or contemporary modes of SSC and transnational solidarity – such processes are complex, contradictory, and at times are replete of their own forms of discrimination and violence – we would nonetheless posit that this commitment to challenging and resisting all forms of oppression and domination, of all peoples, is at the core of our collective endeavours.

Aims and structure of the handbook

With such diverse approaches to conceptualising ‘the South’ (and its counterpoint, ‘the North’ or ‘the West’), precisely how we can explore ‘South–South relations’ thus becomes, first, a matter of how and...