On a Genealogy of the Concept of “South–South Cooperation”

1 Introduction

This article presents some suggestions for a genealogy of the concept of “South–South Cooperation”, so fashionable in international debates in recent decades. Much is said about “cooperation” in the international arena, with “North–South” cooperation predominating in this issue – through the actions of international institutions such as United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), of states at the center of the World System, or of transnational NGOs. From this tendence, either as a complement or as an alternative, proposals of cooperation between agents of the so-called “Global South” have emerged as an element of narrowing the euphemistically called international “asymmetries”.

The first objective of this article is to investigate the history of a concept, hence “South–South Cooperation”. In this exercise I give a special attention to the “pre-history” of the concept: other concepts that in this time were useful to nominate approximately the same geopolitical space, to question at what point the mentioned concept became more useful than other alternatives and to propose some suggestions to understand this turn. The second objective is to emphasize the political (not descriptive or “technical”) creation or emergence of the concept, so to stress its element of “invention”, “creation”. I seek to demonstrate this point by drawing on the reflections of a political philosopher from the Global South, V. Y. Mudimbe, because I consider his contribution central to understand the relational and polarized invention of supranational identities like “Africa”, “Latin America”, “Global South” and so on. Recurring to these reflections is useful to understand that in some moment “Global South” became an interesting concept, and it became possible to think about “cooperation” between actors from the “South”.

Hence this article does not seek to discuss the South–South Cooperation empirically, or even to review the very long literature on the subject. The author of this article is not a specialist in this issue, or even an “internationalist” by profession: he is a historian cum political analyst curious to understand the origin of this concept – and to question it a little bit.

It is important to take note since the beginning of theses reflections that we are dealing mainly and more strictly with the development of the concept of “South–South Cooperation” – specially in written versions and at the political international arena. Meanwhile, the idea of a “South” (under other nomenclatures) is older, and we will not ignore this in our reflections. Ideas like colonial peoples, underdeveloped countries, dependency, and so on are the basis for the more recent notions of “South” and “South–South relations”.

The article is structured as follows. It begins with a brief definition of the concept. There are several possible understandings of what South–South Cooperation means, which makes it important to make explicit which notion of international cooperation we start from. Next, we propose an epistemological debate based mainly on the reflections of the Congolese philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe, with the intention of relativize and historicize the very notion of “South”. Subsequently, a review of the origins and paths taken by the concept is presented. The article ends with some final remarks.

2 South–South Cooperation: What We are Talking About?

South–South Cooperation can be defined as the cooperative association of countries from the called “Global South”, aiming at developing and obtaining greater political space in the international system and greater autonomy in relation to the “Global North” (Lechini & Giaccaglia, 2009). Who can be considered an agent of cooperation is a question of debate. Some authors exclude from these relations private investments and commercial relations, restricting the concept to the political sphere, considering that market agents cannot be considered cooperative (Leite, 2012). On the other hand, others include the participation of “civil society” agents, such as NGOs and transnational networks of social movements and associations, as well as local state agents.

In any case, as occurs in every debate on international relations, most of the literature shows a predilection for the actions of national state agents, an emphasis on bilateral or trilateral relations between states, and on regional integration instruments as the privileged and established spaces for international cooperation. In this hegemonic understanding, South–South Cooperation would be built notably after the 1955 Asian–African Conference (which went down in history as the Bandung Conference), launching new candidates to become actors and even protagonists in the international arena. But all with the same nature: states and institutions of regional integration.

From a counter-hegemonic perspective of this field, Enara Echart emphasizes that for a relationship to be characterized as “South–South Cooperation”, one of the parties must not obtain greater advantages. That is, there should not be the asymmetry between the parties in this case, such as that existing in North–South relations: “solidarity, the absence of conditionalities, horizontality, and respect for sovereignty are some of the principles claimed by this new form of cooperation”^[1] (Echart, 2016, p. 9). This evidently does not occur in part of the practices classified among the specialized literature as “South–South Cooperation”, to the extent that there are considerably diverse economic and geopolitical levels among agents participating in it, as well as contradictory interests.

Among the motivations for South–South Cooperation, it can be included “to support development, to create or strengthen political, economic or cultural ties, to negotiate for a greater international role, and even as a source of soft power and credibility on the global stage” (id.). Additionally, it should be recognized that the intellectual field, companies, social movements, and several other agents effectively construct the field, participate in it, and dispute its meanings (Milani et al., 2015). The practices characterized from this idea of a “cooperation” between the Souths derive “from a wide range of modalities in sectorial (technical, economic, political) and geometric (bilateral, trilateral, regional, multilateral) terms. Nevertheless, the concepts used to define South–South Cooperation are still vague, while the frameworks used to interpret it suffer from excessive normativism (…) and reductionism” (Leite, 2012, p. 34).

In this sense, we can understand the concept as something under construction, and in dispute. It is a collective construction of intellectuals, policymakers, and diplomatic bodies from the Global South to the extent that it is difficult to pinpoint a precise authorship and origin of the term. As Echart (2016) suggests, and even though much of the specialized literature does not recognize it, South–South Cooperation takes place not only between states, but also from business agents, social movement networks, subnational state agents, international agencies. The concept is also built – we may add – from networks of intellectuals from the South, notably those dedicated to the debates on the international arena, on the concept of “development” and on the epistemic dependence that crosses the production of science and technology and the international circulation of knowledge.

To understand the emergence of the concept, it is necessary to address other notions from which it derives, such as “International Development Cooperation” (and “International Development Assistance”). But before that, I think that it is important to discuss the very idea that there is a “Global South” opposed to a “Global North”.

3 The “South” as an Invention of the “North”

The Congolese academic Valentin-Yves Mudimbe is one of the main critics of the “essentialism” present in the construction of the notions of “black” and “Africa”. He highlights that they are inventions, and they are produced mainly from outside. “Black” is an invention of the “White”, the “European”, the “Western” – like “Africa” or “Orient”, built negatively for the self-assertion of a superior identity. In some sense, they are reproductions of a “Philosophy of the Otherness”. At the same time, he produces some of the more interesting reflections about the ways for an epistemic decolonialization of Africa (Ngoie Tshibambe, 2017).

The search for identity clearly marks the intellectuality of the called Africa, Latin America and Caribbean, Asia (the “global periphery”, today the “Global South”) from the beginning. It is our intellectual dilemma, the intellectual dilemma of the peripheries between being as the center or being as ourselves, as Devés (2017) observes. In this way, the uses and disputes around these concepts are crossed by scientific-philosophical reflections and by ideology. So, the notion of “gnosis” used by Mudimbe assumes a greater relevance and applicability than the author suggested in his classical book The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (1988). Just as one can speak of an “African gnosis, that is, both the scientific and ideological discourse on Africa” (Mudimbe, 1988, p. 187), we can refer to, for example, a Latin American or a Global South gnosis.

This African gnosis “is sometimes African by virtue of its authors and promoters, but which extends to a Western epistemological territory” (Mudimbe, 1988, p. 186). It is more Western because it is thought from Western categories (philosophical, anthropological), and in non-African languages. Would this have to be overcome by an epistemological shift? Mudimbe wonders: “Is it possible to consider this shift outside of the very epistemological field which makes my question both possible and thinkable?” In short, a classic problem of intellectual production in the periphery. Mudimbe notes that

we are dealing with ideology. Modern African thought seems somehow to be basically a product of the West. What is more, since most African leaders and thinkers have received a Western education, their thought is at the crossroads of Western epistemological filiation and African ethnocentrism. Moreover, many concepts and categories underpinning this ethnocentrism are inventions of the West. When prominent leaders such as [Léopold] Senghor or [Julius] Nyerere propose to synthetize liberalism and socialism, idealism, and materialism, they know that they are transplanting Western intellectual manicheism (Mudimbe, 1988, p. 185).

Then, Mudimbe suggests that the only way to approach the problem is as a challenge, but at the same time as a promise. This African gnosis, and the very anthropology that is at its core, must be understood from its conditions of existence. To this end, Mudimbe proposes a permanent reassessment of the frontiers of anthropology so that it effectively contributes to some knowledge about the human being – and to a historicizing approach.

Such a strategy could approximate us carefully and progressively from a greater knowledge of (in Mudimbe’s words) “la chose du texte” [the thing of the text], the African gnosis itself. It is a rich, complex, and creative strategy, for the plurality of approaches the author appropriates, recreating them. For example, it is more interesting than the Hegelian dialectical proposition present in Jean-Paul Sartre’s approach to Négritude in Orphée Noir (Sartre, 1948) and in Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre (Fanon, 1966 [1961]), who understood the Negritude Movement as the antithesis, the “anti-racist racism” that would give rise to a superior synthesis. By the other hand, Mudimbe’s approach is a safe scientific strategy, but one that does not solve the following problem for the analyst: these political and cultural identities, these scientific and ideological discourses that are intended to be understood and overcome, are still alive, strongly alive. And in certain contexts, they assume clearly progressive, egalitarian, even revolutionary meanings. This is not the problem of our author, we cannot wait that Mudimbe solve this problem, his preoccupation is not to solve the question if the African gnosis is “true” or if is a “falsification”: his mainly question is to show the meanings of this production.

We can always hope to overcome ideas like Negritude, Pan-Africanism, Latin-Americanism, Pan-Arabism, Pan-Asianism or Global South by “universal”, “cosmopolitical” or “humanistic” approaches. I agree with Mudimbe when he says in the conference “En nombre de la similitude” [“In the name of the similitude”] that “With competitive orders of difference in the interdependent political economies, which we still inhabit today, a basic common sense is still the most decent and reasonable bet, despite its precariousness” (Mudimbe, 2013, loc 2332); and that “alterity” and “difference”, as well as the theories they inspire, in some sense have become a “business”. But in despite of this, the Pan-Africanisms, Latin-Americanisms, Négritudes, Latinités and Indigenismos go on and on, like words and things, like myths and realities. We continue to think in binarisms as autochthonous/cosmopolitan, East/West, black/white, South/North, because they refer to things, very concrete things, like oppressions, dominations, colonialities, racisms.

So, identities produced as a reaction to that domination are very concrete too – like “Global South”. There is a “South” (in singular), if there is a “North”. But there are also different “Souths” (in plural), very different between then, and they are basically disconnected. The problems and relations of the Souths are mainly with the North. But the Souths have one very important thing in common. They are seen historically as the same thing: they are the barbarians, the inferiors, the colonials, the underdeveloped, the Third Word, the Non-Aligned, the peripherical. This is a huge basis to develop and reinforce the other side of this “identity coin”. And this deals with a very real international dependency: economic, geopolitical, epistemic. Therefore, we must work as a unity at the global arena because we are seen as a unity (an inferior otherness), and because we occupy a particular place at the World-System (Wallerstein, 2004).

4 Paths to a Concept: A First Approximation

The beginning of the so-called “International Development Cooperation” can be found in the inauguration speech of the American president Harry Truman in 1949, in which he assumed as one of the goals of his government the resolution of the problems of “underdeveloped areas” of the globe. The notion of “underdevelopment” was thus introduced in the international arena, largely based on the reflections of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). It is important to note that implicit in that notion was also the thesis that “underdeveloped” countries could become “developed”. In this way, they could be understood as “developing” countries, following a so-called “development process”, in an evolutionist and even teleological understanding of development – in that context increasingly intertwined with the “modernization theories” then in evidence (like Rostow, 1960).

Therefore, International Development Cooperation can be understood as a policy of the “developed” capitalist countries to keep the “underdeveloped” in the capitalist orbit, in a context of advancing capitalism/socialism polarization of the Cold War. Initially this set of relationships was called “assistance”. It was not until the late 1950s that the notion of “cooperation” began to impose itself to name them. As from the deepening of the realization that there was an “asymmetry” in the international system, initiatives originating from the “developed countries” to help the underdeveloped ones became more recurrent. Finally, an initiative such as the Alliance for Progress (1961), designed by John F. Kennedy’s administration for cooperation with Latin America in counterpoint to Soviet aid to Cuba (then recently declared a socialist country), can be understood as paradigmatic in this sense.

However, much less collaboration and mutual support can be observed among the “underdeveloped” themselves. Evidently, there were (and are) comparatively few resources available to them, less state capacity, and relative lack of international autonomy for certain “rebellions”. But besides this, we should also consider a symbolic disinterest of the South for the South, the inferiorization of the South from the perspective of the other Souths. This reason is clearly articulated with the previous ones and is possibly the most difficult to overcome. Peripheral societies, political leaders and intellectualities are under the impact of what is produced in the center. To a large extent they ignore each other, “are isolated from each other and look at each other under the watchful eyes of the central countries” (Guimarães, 1999, p. 17). This is evident “when it is verified the scarcity and even the inexistence of national studies of a peripheral country on aspects of another, even of its neighbors (…) On the other hand, it is notorious the permanent effort of the central countries to study the periphery and to formulate their own visions about it” (id.) – which are absorbed by the periphery itself. We can see clearly here that the South is an invention of the North, in the same way that Mudimbe observed that Africa is an invention of Europe. It is an epistemological invention, and a very concrete one – as observed in the classical formulation of Walter Rodney’s on How Europe underdeveloped Africa (Rodney, 2011 [1972]). Before South, we had “Orient”, “underdevelopment”, Third World, “dependence” and so on.

In any case, we can identify some years after World War II the first formulations around a cooperation between “developing” countries themselves, as a counterpoint or complementarity to the cooperation between “developed” and “developing” countries. The Bandung Conference introduced the notion in its final declaration by advocating the “stimulation of mutual interests and cooperation” among its signatories (Amin, 2015; Santos, 2017). One can consider the Conference as foundational of the rapprochement and cooperation between actors from the periphery of the international system:

The central issue discussed in Bandung aimed to influence the mentalities of the ruling elites in Third World countries, many of them recently emancipated, to put aside their differences in favor of a common platform to denounce the calamities of colonialism. These are the first steps of political cooperation between countries with similar characteristics, inserted in the periphery of the international system. Moreover, some diplomatic and geopolitical postures of balanced distance in relation to the two superpowers also resulted from these first steps (Milani, 2012, p. 226).

The foundation of the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries in 1961, at the Belgrade Conference, contributed to the expansion of the debate among the “developing” countries – now defined as “non-aligned” to the two superpowers USA and USSR. In the search for alternative theoretical formulations, the Third Conference of the Movement, held in Lusaka in 1970, took up the concept of “collective self-reliance” as a goal for the countries of the bloc, transposing into the international arena the notion of “self-reliance” (self-sufficiency and self-development, in economical, symbolical, and cultural terms) formulated by then Tanzanian president Nyerere (1973 [1968]).

Likewise, the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries (later converted into the G-77) was nourished by the formulations of the ECLAC and Dependency Theory schools, adopting the notions of “center” and “periphery”, and “dependency” – a thesis that would continue to inform part of the formulations around South–South Cooperation until today. The assumption that justifies this cooperation modality continues to be “that developing countries can and should cooperate to solve their own political, economic and social problems based on shared identities (former colonies, economic status, historical experience, etc.), common efforts, interdependence and reciprocity” (Milani, 2012, p. 227).

This process constituted a new identity: of a “Third World”, gathering countries that had in common their colonial past, their characterization as “underdeveloped” or “developing”, and their pretension of autonomy in relation to a capitalist “First World” and a “real” or “actually existing socialism” “Second World”. Pressure from this numerically majority bloc in the United Nations General Assembly led to several initiatives to foster cooperation among “developing” countries within the United Nations throughout the 1970s. This effort culminated in the creation of the Special Unit for Technical Cooperation among Developing Countries, and the organization of the United Nations Conference on Technical Cooperation among Developing Countries (occurred in Buenos Aires in 1978), which elaborated the Buenos Aires Plan of Action to define and guide those activities pretended to be based on reciprocity and horizontality.

It is in this context that the term “South–South Cooperation” began to be elaborated and to enter in circulation at the epistemic community of International Politics and between international agents and staffs. In principle, it is possible to locate precisely in 1978 the first written reference to the concept, by the Argentine economist Graciela Chichilnisky (see Chichilnisky, 1978). In the following years, the term slowly gained prominence, progressively replacing the notion of “cooperation among developing countries”. Fundamental to this was obviously the adoption of the idea of a “Global South” as a concept to encompass or overcome the notions of “underdevelopment”, “Third World”, “non-alignment”, or “periphery”. The strengthening of its conceptual counterpart (the other pole of the dichotomy), the idea of a “Global North”, was dialectically central to its expansion.

One can point two important moments in this process. For the assumption of the notion of a “North”, one can mention the foundation in 1977 of the Independent Commission for International Development Affairs (the so-called “Brandt Commission” because of its president Willy Brandt), and the publication of its first report in 1980 – which advocated overcoming North-South inequalities. In turn, as to the idea of the “South”, and as a response to the reinforcement of the notion of North, one can highlight later the constitution of the South Commission (significantly chaired by Nyerere) in 1987, and the publication of its report in 1990 (Comissão Sul, 1990) with the collaboration of the most relevant critical intellectuals of the South (explicitly adopting the concept of “South–South Cooperation”).

It is curious to note that, while the notion was progressively being imposed, its practice was considerably restricted, in a context of advancing neoliberalism and overcoming the socialism/capitalism bipolarity. It was only between the late 1990s and early 2000s that a significant revival of the concept and its practices occurred (Kabunda, 2011). This was guided by the resumption of intellectual debate in the now called South around new development strategies, the democratization of the international system, and “progressive” projects and their governments, in particular those of the so-called Latin American Left Turn or “pink tide” (Pereira da Silva, 2019) – with one example of these moves being Brazil’s rapprochement with South American, African, and “BRICS” countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) during the first terms of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–2010).

Efforts made in the 2000s and first years of the 2010s by several “pink tide” governments also advanced towards greater integration in Latin America and particularly in South America, by deepening the institutions of the Common Market of the South (Mercosur) and creating spaces such as the Union of South American Nations (Unasur) and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America [Nuestra América] (Alba, an initiative of “chavista” Venezuela). These institutions have sought to foster some cooperation projects among their members, such as the exchange of Venezuelan oil for human resources, particularly health care by Cuba. But there is considerable criticism among experts about the effectiveness of these initiatives, the regional hegemonic interests involved, as well as their reproduction over time (Benzi, 2017).

Thus, “the denomination has gained strength in the epistemic community of international development cooperation in recent years” (Pino, 2014, p. 57). However, the notion seems to have lost part of its original content (of autonomy, self-sufficiency, search for alternative projects to capitalism), focusing in recent years on the increase of South–South trade flows and the power strategies of the so-called “emerging countries”. This has occurred notably from China, about which one could question to what extent or in what sense it could still be understood as a peripheral country or part of the South. But also, at some point, from the other “BRICS” – in their respective areas of influence (Lechini & Giaccaglia, 2016).

5 Final Remarks

It can be observed that, at some level, the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist energy present at the Bandung Conference is still alive in South–South Cooperation initiatives – but at a low profile. One can also notice a certain ebb in South–South Cooperation and integration initiatives since the global economic crisis that started at the end of the 2000s, the “Arab Spring” at North Africa and Middle East, the decline of the Latin American “pink tide” during the 2010s, the disorganization of the international system aggravated by the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian-Ukraine War, among other factors. But it is hoped that, from the successive crises, new alternative initiatives may emerge that will evoke the “Spirit of Bandung”, ever available in a global system crossed by structural inequalities.

We have seen that the concept of the Global South (derived from the North/South polarity), and consequently the notion of alternative South–South relations, is clearly one possibility among others. Global South seems to be the most widely accepted concept today, having been imposed since the 1990s (and mainly the 2000s) over notions such as “peripheral world”, “Third World” or “non-aligned”, “underdeveloped” or “developing”, among others. In some sense, the notion can be seen as a “meta-category” (Haug et al., 2021), integrating several analytical dimensions, not being restricted to the economic or geopolitical – but also as a highly polysemic and (maybe) exhausted concept. Of course, its use should not be taken without reflection, and should not imply a homogenization of the regions that can fit into the concept. Possibly, it would be better to think in “Souths” (Sures) and consider the dimension of conflict in your interior – a dimension always in tension with the idea of “cooperation”.

Finally, in this article I have presented arguments that support the idea of historicity of the concepts of “North–South” at the international arena, of a “Global South” and hence of “South–South Cooperation”. The idea of a South – and before that of an Orient, underdeveloped countries, a Third World, or a dependent region, or the colonized, or the “wretched of the Earth” – as an identity is central, because it is this that allows the argument of a possible cooperation between the weakest links in the system. And we see with the support of Mudimbe that supranational identities like that are floating, and partially depends on the initiatives of the “North”. They are creations (no matter if truths or fakes, this is not the point), basically creations of scholars, politicians, officers. In short, they are historical and under dispute – never given, obvious, essential. Hence, “cooperation” between the different “Souths” is possible, but not evident or automatic, and its terms and actors (even the name of these supranational identity) are always under discussion.