ABSTRACT
The term 'Third World' was introduced into the language of global development in 1952, in a short article by Alfred Sauvy titled 'Trois mondes, une planete' ('Three Worlds, One Planet') published in the French weekly L'Observateur. The Big Bang of spatial development terminology took place over roughly a forty-year period following the outbreak of the Second World War. This period witnessed the rise and proliferation of a number of hugely influential terms for 'the world's worlds' distinguished by differences in levels of development achieved. These included: 'Third World', 'developing countries', 'least developed countries', 'South' and 'North'. Attempts to establish the boundary between the global North and South lead to precisely such answers—complicated, ambiguous, multivariant and very subjective. North–South seems to be the successor to East–West as the world's primary structural axis, and, therefore, the question of its boundaries is one of the most important issues in contemporary international relations and human geography.
