Cracks in the liberal international order (LIO) have been occurring since its very formation. Yet, some international relations scholarship frames the narrative about imminent threats to the LIO as if such threats were new. From a postcolonial vantage point, this essay contends that mainstream theorizing about international order is problematically Eurocentric and develops a three-pronged argument. In the first place, the essay argues for understanding order as a command or as an imposition. Order as a command renders visible power disparities, injustices, and inequalities of the international order as seen by actors from below. Second, the essay leans on Edward Said's contrapuntal reading method to show that experiences of order are plural rather than singular or universal. Third, the essay argues that from a postcolonial perspective, the opposite of order is not chaos or volatility but rather agency or the authorship to be a rule maker. A full picture of order as imposition requires understanding how togetherness and sameness are modes for Global South actors to find collective unity to resist the injustices and inequalities of the LIO.

This paper analyzes inequities in the distribution of air pollution in Mexico at the detailed scale of localities. We find that air pollution increases in areas that experience a decline in socioeconomic status. We utilize 15 years of remote sensing data on fine particulate matter (smaller than 2.5 microns) for more than 116,500 localities across Mexico. Our panel data models show that localities that face a decline in socioeconomic status experience a 0.24–0.83 per cent increase in annual mean pollution concentrations. Our results hold up to controlling for changes within each municipality and instrumenting with broader municipality level socioeconomic status to test for ecological fallacy. We find that local air pollution inequities are reduced by political participation channels, but not as much by increased share of manufacturing activities due to polluters locating in poorer neighborhoods. Highly dense, urban municipalities witness higher inequities most likely due to traffic, construction, and agricultural fires.

In the mid-20th century, The Cold War structured possibilities for politics across the Global South. These strategies were articulated through three competing means to realize the justice and equality promised by newly won independence from colonialism. Global South states could choose from among the following three options, which had many overlaps and intersections: alignment with the United States, alignment with the Soviet Union, and non-alignment. By the 1970s and into the 1980s, left- and right-wing alternatives developed to oppose the limitations of these three perspectives. On the left, Maoism inspired anti-imperialists of the Global South and also sympathizers in the North who stood in solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles. On the right, newly oil-wealthy Saudi Arabia developed a puritanical Islamic alternative to Maoist anti-imperialism and promoted these ideas across Africa and Asia. These ideas did not fall from public consciousness with the formal collapse of the Soviet Union and live on today. My article assesses the different templates for political and economic development that the Cold War engendered, focusing on the legacy of left and right alternatives developed in reaction to their failures. I conclude that these ideological contestations from the Global South reveal that the Cold War was not a mere rivalry between the United States and Soviet Union, it was a global ideological contestation over liberalism; the constituting ideology of capitalism.

This essay critically engages with the concept of asset-manager society (AMS) proposed by Brett Christophers. We begin by drawing out its five key elements through a contrast with the related but distinct concept of asset-manager capitalism. We then ask to what extent AMS can be observed in the countries of the Global South, which are characterised by a subordinate position in international money and financial markets. We conclude by highlighting some potential implications of the rise of AMS in these economies and offering some broader thoughts on the future.

Family Planning (1968), a short, animated film featuring Donald Duck, was translated into at least twenty-four languages and viewed in the span of two years by nearly 1.4 million people around the world. Commissioned by the Rockefeller’s Population Council and expensively produced by Disney, the movie represents the international family planning industry’s single largest investment in a media object. It has since been perceived as largely effective in achieving its goal of promoting contraception to culturally diverse audiences. Using an unusually rich collection of archival records and other previously neglected sources, we demonstrate how Family Planning failed to connect with local viewerships. Our historical analysis recovers the Population Council’s homogenizing and infantilizing view of the global poor and critiques of this view that emanated from the Global South – not just with the benefit of hindsight but at the time. We conclude that the Rockefeller–Disney collaboration was ill-suited for communicating to a heterogeneous, global audience, and that a misplaced optimism in animation as a universal language all but guaranteed failure.

This article explores how the International Labour Organization (ILO) introduced management development programs in Argentina as a pilot project in developing countries in the late 1950s. By studying how the ILO worked together with actors at the national level, the article reveals how the ILO’s original idea to focus on top management development was reshaped through a dialogue with local actors within the context of tripartite cooperation between the government, business organizations, and unions. While the initiative was successful during the project period, it collapsed when Argentina’s government closed down the national productivity center with which the ILO was cooperating. While the tripartite principle was valuable for the first achievements, it was extremely vulnerable without the support of all partners.

On the IUCN Red List the saltwater crocodile Crocodylus porosus is categorized globally as Least Concern, with national populations ranging from fully recovered to extinct. The saltwater crocodile population of the Southeast Asian island nation of Timor-Leste was severely depleted by colonial hunting but has recovered since independence in 2002. During 2007–2014 there was a 23-fold increase in reported crocodile attacks (104 documented attacks), concomitant with a 2% annual increase in the human population. Public tolerance to attacks and the reluctance to harm crocodiles are entwined with reverence of crocodiles as sacred beings by most but not all Timorese people. In 2022, 7–8 years after our previous assessment, we visited five sites on the south coast of Timor-Leste in Lautém, Viqueque, Manufahí and Cova Lima municipalities. High rates of crocodile attacks continue. We obtained 35 records of attacks for 2015–2022 (34% fatal). In the municipalities where crocodile attacks occurred (Lautém, Viqueque, Cova Lima), the sacred status of crocodiles prevented inhabitants from harming them in retribution. In Manufahí, where no attacks were reported, such traditional values never existed and crocodiles were hunted for subsistence and to improve safety. The design of a context-specific crocodile management programme that respects the reverence attributed to crocodiles by most people but reduces the risk of people being attacked by crocodiles is a conservation management challenge for the government of Timor-Leste. The developing tourism industry, which relies on coastal beaches and reefs, is jeopardized by the risk of crocodile attacks.

This article conducts an analytical review of the works of three prominent Thai comparative law professors: Professor Preedee Kasemsup, Professor Phijaisakdi Horayangkura and Professor Sanunkorn Sotthibandhu. Although influential in Thailand, their works are mostly in Thai and therefore have received little academic attention outside the kingdom. The authors argue that the works of these scholars have the potential to shine new light on comparative law theory and bring voices from the Global South to add fresh perspectives and contexts to a discipline dominated by scholars from the Global North. Moreover, this examination highlights the challenges that comparative law faces in freeing itself from this hegemony when using internally developed concepts and modes of questioning.

Degrowth literature predominantly states that degrowth strategies are meant from and for the Global North. While economic mainstream discourse suggests that the Global South still has to grow in terms of achieving development, degrowth proponents expect a reduction of material and energy throughput in the Global North to make ecological and conceptual space for the Global South to find its own paths toward ecosocial transformation. Based on a Latin American post-development and post-extractivist perspective and drawing on dependency theory, this article suggests another approach: first, it argues that the growth imperative, which in the peripheral world translates into the imperative to develop, also causes harm in societies of the Global South. Throughout Latin America, in the last decades, economic growth has mainly been achieved through extractivism with negative impacts, which are now being pushed further by green growth strategies. Second, I explore some possibilities for a cross-fertilisation between degrowth and International Relations scholarship, calling into question the assumption that degrowth in high-income countries would automatically ‘make space’ for the Global South to engage in self-determined paths of ecosocial transformation, as long as the structures, institutions, and rules of global governance and trade which secure profoundly asymmetric, colonial relations are not challenged.

This article examines the encounter of activists from the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (LADLA) with African, African American, and Asian anticolonial intellectuals through the League Against Imperialism (LAI), founded at the 1927 Brussels Congress. Drawing from LADLA’s newspaper El Libertador, letters from LADLA leaders, and speeches and resolutions in the LAI archive, it studies how exchanges begun in Brussels influenced debates in radical circles in the Americas. The article builds on extant scholarship and makes two primary interventions. First, it argues that a closer look at LADLA’s participation in the LAI shifts the traditional understanding of interwar Latin American regionalist ideologies, which LADLA rejected in favor of drawing connections to anti-imperialist movements around the world. Second, it argues that the exchange in Brussels influenced LADLA to eventually expand its initial focus on Indigenous struggles to think more critically about Black communities, including Black migrant labor, in political organizing.

This article contributes to an understanding of how real estate financialisation unfolds within a city in the global South, Johannesburg. It firstly shows that compared to what has been witnessed in the global North, real estate financialisation in South Africa is characteristically conservative: market actors do not engage in high-risk, low-income neighbourhoods. Indeed, in Johannesburg, financialisation has displayed minimal interest in residential markets. Instead, financialisation in the city has been driven by commercial property investments, typically in the form of urban enclaves such as securitised office parks, malls, mixed-use developments, and increasingly ‘satellite cities’ built from scratch. This article considers how the selective character of financialisation in the country is mediated by power relations in the global political economy. In particular, it highlights how South Africa’s status as an ‘emerging market’ encourages a prudent lending regime for domestic financial institutions and real estate actors.