The primary aim of this Working Group is to offer a platform for EADI members and beyond to enhance the collective understanding of changing role of the global South in global development. 

The next decade and beyond belong to the New South. As the Northern-dominated world order implodes, the balance of power will continue its shift away from Euro-America towards the once-colonised states and societies of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The political orders and economic structures that have framed social life for over two centuries are crumbling as new actors in the global South appropriate and reinvent the ideas, institutions and political economies once associated with the global North. As understandings of capitalism, democracy and development are reshaped by these new actors in the global South, the New South demands greater conceptual, methodological and empirical attention. 

The New South Working Group will retain the empirical focus on the established category of the “global South” but with three analytic distinctions. 

1. Acknowledging the legacy of colonialism on the global South, the WG’s focus on the New South highlights the agency of states and societies in the global South to overcome those legacies.
2. Against formulations that describe the global North and global South as hierarchical binaries, the WG’s emphasis on the New South recognises the South-North connections being forged by states and societies of the global South through the diffusion of investments, institutions and ideas in the global North.
3. Wary of the tendency to categorise the global South as a monolith, the WG pinpoints attention to the growing divergence within the New South between the poor South and the power South: indeed, the WG will be sure to interrogate the cohesion assumed in other similar formulations as the West and East.

Core Topics

• BRICS+
• South-South Cooperation
• Multilateralism from the global South
• Development cooperation after the dismantling of northern aid
• BRI and similar investments initiated by China, India and other countries of the global South
• Southern agency in global development