ABSTRACT
This essay sets out to rethink internationalism and international relations considering the postcolonial formation of political subjectivities. It argues that the concept ‘Global South’ belongs to the historical moment when colonialism merged into internationalism and interprets this latter as a neoliberal project that came into its own after the First World War. The ‘Global South’ formed as a block under the banner of ‘developing nations’ from the 1955 Bandung Conference onwards, in the hope of becoming heard on the international stage. As these states were considered to have no cultural identity or legal authority of their own, they were paradoxically not recognised on the international stage until they had accepted the legal and political structures of modern internationalism such as the nation state, international law, transnational markets and global finance. Drawing on a variegated group of theorists (Carl Schmitt, Quinn Slobodian, Pankaj Mishra) During further makes the case that the ‘Global South’ paradigm has to be supplemented by analysis that does not divide the world geographically or politically but takes account of generalised capitalist precarity as well as local emancipation movements disconnected from internationalism.
