Legacies and futures for Global South research

As Third World Quarterly (TWQ) enters its 45^th year of publication, it is an opportune moment to revisit the central aims of the journal and to acquaint our readers with the journal’s expanded editorial team. It is also an occasion to reappraise the journal’s legacy, highlighting many notable achievements, but also key challenges.

The editorial team now comprises 10 members (in alphabetical order): Shahram Akbarzadeh, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia; Morten Bøås, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Oslo, Norway (Special Issues); Matt Davies, Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK; Jing Gu, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK; Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, King’s College, London, UK; Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa; Marianne H. Marchand, Universidad de las Américas Puebla, Puebla, Mexico (Special Issues); Sam Okoth Opondo, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, USA; Mustapha Kamal Pasha, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK; and Heloise Weber, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. We also acknowledge with thanks the contributions of former editors Randolph Persaud, American University, Washington, DC, USA (April 2021–April 2022) and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, University of California, Irvine, USA (April 2021–September 2023).

TWQ nears its 45th year of publication with confidence in its commitment to greater diversity and intellectual plurality. Both are in line with the journal’s strong connections to anti-colonial struggles and justice, which inspired its origins and are reflected in its original and revised vision statements. This editorial is both a reminder of TWQ’s progressive values and its commitment to ensure that these are upheld going forward.

A global context different from the journal’s origins in the 1970s has nevertheless brought to the fore once again anti-colonial struggles for justice and rights aimed at repairing relations. The new editorial team seeks to offer greater efficacy to support the journal to renew itself as a dependable forum for debate, deliberation, and discussion on crucial and timely matters concerning the Global South. Having paddled through some rough waters over its four and a half decades, TWQ is now better placed to reaffirm its living legacy of striving towards global justice.

The birth of the journal in 1978 coincided with the political and epistemological challenge of the Third World as an ideal of postcolonial promise. TWQ was a key forum for expressing the Third World as a political project, especially in the context of its inhospitable reception by the international status quo. Inspired by the tumultuous events of the 1970s that culminated in the historic project for the New International Economic Order (NIEO), TWQ captured the Zeitgeist of both hope and reckoning for the former colonial world.

The aspiration to restructure the global political economy and to challenge the dominant way that global relations were narrativised provoked not only resistance from hegemonic powers but also dismissal. The desire for a more just and equitable reclaiming of the world’s wealth, power and intellectual provenance appeared too radical for a world order long habituated to the protocols of hierarchy and trusteeship. Mind-bending political events also paralleled the journal’s beginnings: the Islamic Revolution in Iran; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; and independence for Zimbabwe and the anti-apartheid struggle. Old verities appeared questionable, and it was the unmasking of an unjust world order that brought the journal to life.

In the mid-2020s, the unequal matrix of North–South relations retains its defining force. The promise of development for the many remains elusive. Inequality persists, with a growing precarity of populations in the Global South. Globalisation has been neither flat nor fair. For those with scant access to opportunity, grinding poverty and injustice show few signs of attenuation. Yet the world has also witnessed transformative events with deep effects on the lives and lifeworlds of postcolonials. The rise of China stands out, as does the emergence of new centres of economic and political power in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.

Never a monolithic bloc, the Third World is now more differentiated, more diverse, more multivocal. New challenges have been superimposed on durable structures of unevenness, both within postcolonial states and between more and less prosperous regions. Climate change presents, perhaps, the greatest peril to the most vulnerable sectors of global society. For those deprived of either wealth or power, climate change compounds the quest for environmental justice. As we witness a new order of nuclearism, waste, and extractivism, we also encounter concerted efforts to contest them.

TWQ has indexed the great transformation within the Global South and its relations with the North. Aspirations and struggles for decolonisation persist, but within fresh vectors of entrapment and opening. The Third World has, indeed, changed, as has the journal. Not exactly a mirror of or for the Third World, TWQ has refracted global change and its imprint on polity, society and culture in the decolonised zones.

In retrospect, a key strength of the journal has been the melding of scholarship from established scholars, postcolonial leaders and development practitioners. Hence, the journal brought to its readers original articles by Haleh Afshar, Samir Amin, André Gunder Frank, Celso Furtado, John Kenneth Galbraith, Sandra Halperin, Deniz Kandiyoti, Arthur Lewis, Philip McMichael, Gunnar Myrdal, James Petras, Cristina Rojas, Dudley Seers, Christine Sylvester, Caroline Thomas, Immanuel Wallerstein and Peter Worsley. The scope of the journal was not restricted to development, but covered political, legal and cultural domains. Articles by Neera Chandoke, Fred Halliday, Mahmood Mamdani and Claudia Wright on politics, and Richard Falk’s meditations on law, opened the journal to a wider audience. The cultural sphere was also given noticeable coverage with articles by Nuruddin Farah and Mario Vargas Llosa. Equally salient was the inclusion of political voices: Allan Boesak, Michael Manley, Ali Mazrui, Mahathir Mohamed, Julius Nyerere and Olof Palme.

More recent issues of the journal show increased attentiveness to early career scholars as well as a more diverse amalgam of authorship. With the growing demand for greater variety and foci, the journal steadily expanded from its original format of four issues per volume to 12 issues in 2015. This increase allowed greater flexibility and representativeness, but the task clearly remains unfinished.

The original aim of the journal, to speak with the Third World – ‘indeed, speak with its voice’ – retains its essential proclivity. Basic changes in the repertoire of concerns afflicting a divided world, however, warrant new registers of capture. Hence, the journal’s original focus on ‘political science and sociology, applied science and technology, medicine and social work, education, social aspects of geography, problems in such fields as seabed mining and mineral exploration, and public and international law’ must also countenance new avenues of engagement. These include a differentiated apparatus of governmentality, marginalisation and extraction; the emotional and affective expressions of power and powerlessness characteristic of our algorithmic present; novel modalities of exclusions attending human migratory flows with limited barriers accompanying the largely unrestrained movement of capital, commodities or information; and the emergent peril of climate change, with its associated risks and uncertainties. On the question of methodology as well, development presents a highly diverse agenda that no longer obeys disciplinary conventions. As such, inter-, multi- and trans-disciplinary approaches and perspectives are warranted to explore and explain an increasingly intricate and complex world.

Despite regular efforts over its long history to encourage and support scholarship from the Global South, the journal has found it a challenge to enhance the diversity of its authors and editorial team. The last decade, though, has witnessed a change as the composition of both authorship and editorial membership has moved towards approximating the world TWQ seeks to represent. The journal is committed to representing Global South-centred scholarship originating from all corners of the globe, which is still unfinished business. The changing make-up of the current editorial team reflects the distance separating the journal’s initial years and the present.

As with any organisation that depends upon financial viability and self-scrutiny, TWQ has not been without its turbulent phases. Notably, in 1990, with the abrupt drying up of funding from charitable donations, the journal was exposed to a stormy financial crisis, which was almost existential in nature. With the courage and resilience of its founding staff, and a determination to overcome the budgetary problems threatening to put the journal out of business, TWQ persevered to grow into a thriving and influential entity. The publication of a Viewpoint piece in 2017 (later withdrawn by the author) that violated the spirit of TWQ also propelled the journal into introspection and self-critique. The decision-making procedures regarding peer review were changed to ensure that such a crisis would not happen again. This entailed the establishment of a new editorial team, the adoption of a code of publishing integrity and ethics, and the development of better guidelines for the peer review process itself. We have installed safeguards to honour the vision and legacy of the journal. Clearly, this unfortunate episode left its mark, but the new editorial team is fully cognisant of the need for constant vigilance, reflectivity, and responsibility, and we face the future with confidence in our editorial direction and processes.

Several past initiatives associated with the journal failed to withstand the strictures of resource constraints, or the changing landscape of publishing. Hence, the Third World Prize started in 1981 (first awarded in 1982) was discontinued. The recipients included notable figures such as Raúl Prebisch (1982), Julius Nyerere (1983), and Nelson Mandela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela (1985). Similarly, the North–South Monitor, a section devoted to taking the pulse of crucial events facing the Third World also expired.

Yet, new initiatives have thrived, including the Edward Said Award, awarded to the best paper by the Global Development Section (GDS) of the International Studies Association (ISA). The prize was instituted in 2016 and continues to garner innovative scholarship by early career scholars. The inaugural winner of this award is Timothy Seidel for his paper ‘Occupied Territory Is Occupied Territory’: James Baldwin, Palestine and the Possibilities of Transnational Solidarity’. This award has been accompanied by the journal’s sponsorship of the yearly reception in honour of the GDS Eminent Scholar for nearly two decades. A key feature of this event is the continued support for building a thriving community of scholars working on the Global South.

With the expansion of the repertoire of TWQ, special issues have also grown in range and significance. Once an irregular feature, the journal now has a dedicated Special Issues team addressing a rich variety of new themes. Several issues have been planned that allow sustained examination of a broad agenda. Already published special issues include ‘The Everyday Lives of Drugs’ (Ghiabi 2022); ‘Emancipatory Movements of the Global South in a Changing World Order’ (Artner and Yin 2023); ‘Designing and Negotiating Industrial Policy’ (Nem Singh 2023); ‘Migration Politics across the World’ (Natter and Thiollet 2022) and ‘Emotions, Affect and Power’ (Jakimow 2022). Special issues published in the journal extend historical and contemporary topics: colonial legacies; revolutions; migration politics; Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL); South–South cooperation; human rights; and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The interface of regular and special issues offers readers a wider range of exploration and understanding.

As the opening editorial of the journal in 1979 noted, the principal aim of TWQ was to become ‘a forum for informed and reasoned debate’ with its ‘open-minded and sympathetic search for establishing an international order based on justice’. The editorial team is hopeful that in 2024 and beyond the journal can continue to honour that pledge. The journal’s aims and scope were refreshed in 2023 to reflect the changing context of research about the Global South, renewing the journal’s commitment to ‘shape academic and policy agendas across political and development discourses, as well as the postcolonial trajectories of Global South nations and peoples’. From 2024, TWQ will publish 18 issues a year to ‘showcase the agency and rising power of the Global South in setting the agenda and providing alternatives to Western ideologies, global inequities, and responses to the global permacrisis’. This will require reflexivity and watchfulness and a deep appreciation of responsibility. The new, collegial editorial team of Academic Editors of TWQ stands committed to these goals.

Mustapha Kamal Pasha
Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK
[email protected] Shahram Akbarzadeh
Deakin University, Geelong, Australia http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8829-9147
Morten Bøås
Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Oslo, Norway
Matt Davies
Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Jing Gu
Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven
King’s College, London, UK http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8606-1717 Rirhandu Mageza-BarthelUniversity of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa Marianne H. Marchand Universidad de las Américas Puebla, Puebla, Mexico http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5717-9182 Sam Okoth OpondoVassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, USA Heloise WeberUniversity of Queensland, St Lucia QLD, Australia Tiffany Willoughby-HerardUniversity of California, Irvine, CA, USA

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.