ABSTRACT
Emerging with the era of decolonization and the rise in East-West tensions that followed the conclusion of World War II, the Third World represented those nations, new and old alike, which rested between the First World of the industrial West and the Second World of the Communist “bloc”. From the perspective of bipolarity, Third World nations were the uncommitted of the world’s regions. The view of the Third World as the nonaligned retains a certain validity in the context of global affairs, but time and the flow of events have directed us to a somewhat different perspective on the nature of the Third World. Third World states are affected by and react to numerous sequences of behavior that originate in the “developed” world. By referring to the Third World as a generic category, cognizance is given both to the common threads that run across Third World states and to the distinctive groupings existent within the category.
