What is the Global South?

It came up earlier in this conversation because BRICS, and the New Development Bank that comes with it, were built specifically to give this grouping more power and more financing options outside Western-led institutions like the IMF and World Bank.

What the term actually means

The Global South covers roughly 130 countries across Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, most of Asia, and Oceania outside Australia and New Zealand, that were shaped by colonialism and sit lower in the global economic order. The Global North is the other side of the line: Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Israel, Australia and New Zealand, and the split is political and economic, not geographical.

That last part trips people up. Australia sits deep in the southern hemisphere and belongs to the North America; India is north of the equator and belongs to the South. "South" here is shorthand for a shared historical position, not a compass direction.

What it groups by, and why that matters

The term does a specific job: it groups countries by what happened to them, extraction, colonial rule, unequal trade terms, debt dependence, rather than by how poor they are today. That is why Qatar, with a per-capita income above most of Europe, is still usually counted as Global South, and why the phrase survives even as economies inside it diverge wildly.

These nations often seek greater representation in global institutions, influencing international policy frameworks and fostering a multipolar world order. That agenda is precisely what ties the Global South to BRICS: the bloc exists to give these countries a seat at a table they did not design and have long felt excluded from.

Where the name came from

The term emerged in the 1950s, but Carl Oglesby became the first person to give it a contemporary political use when he commented on the United States's dominance over the Global South. The founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement also used the term politically. It has since replaced older labels like "Third World" and "developing world" in most serious policy writing, partly because those earlier terms carried more stigma and less political clarity.

Why it is not a clean category

A common misconception is that the Global South is a homogeneous entity. In reality, it comprises diverse nations with unique cultural, economic, and political contexts, challenging simplistic narratives and requiring nuanced policy approaches. Ghana and China are technically both Global South. So are Brazil and a small island state in the Pacific. What they share is history and structural position, not income level or political system.

The term is dynamic and does not consider geographic locations, meaning that members of this grouping who reach a certain development threshold may cross over to the Global North. South Korea is arguably already there.