ABSTRACT
With the disappearance of socialist states, the structural conditions that endowed the Third World with meaning also have disappeared. This chapter argues that while existing critiques of the concept have revealed fundamental problems in its formulation, they themselves have not offered viable substitutes for it, and have side-stepped important changes in the global situation that have recast the implications of the concept. It also argues is enabling of a more radical critique of the concept, that takes into account both recent transformations in global relations, and the way we think about them. Carl Pletsch's was the most thoroughgoing critique of the Third World concept, which had come under increasing criticism in the seventies. The awareness of a new structuring of the world has become increasingly apparent over the last decade in the interest in questions of Global Capitalism and in the redirection of attention to problems of the relationship between the local and the global.
