Rising Powers and South-South Cooperation
This book examines the extent to which a space has opened up in recent years for the so-called "rising powers" of the global South to offer an alternative to contemporary global economic and political governance through emergent forms of South-South cooperation. In contrast to the Third Worldism of the past, the contemporary rising powers share in common the fact that their recent growth owes much to their extensive and increasingly international engagement, rather than partial withdrawal from the global economy. However, they are nonetheless openly critical of the perceived bias towards the global North in the dominant institutions of global governance, and seek to alter the global status quo to enhance the influence of the global South. Contributions to this volume address the question of whether such engagement, particularly on a "South-South" basis, can be categorised as a "win-win" relationship, or whether we are already seeing the emergence of new forms of competitive rivalry and neo-dependency in action. What kind of theoretical approaches and conceptual tools do we need to best answer such questions? To what extent do new groupings such as BRICS suggest a real alternative to the dominance of the West and of the neoliberal economic globalization paradigm? What possible alternatives exist within contemporary forms of South-South cooperation? This book was originally published as a special edition of Third World Quarterly.
Barry K. Gills is Professor of Development Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is the founding Editor of Globalizations journal and the book series Rethinking Globalizations, and is a member of the editorial board of Third World Quarterly.
Kevin Gray is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. He is the author of numerous books on global governance and labour, published with Routledge.