Global South

Where or what is the Global South? Is the Global South synonymous with the "Southern Hemisphere"? On the one hand, the term offers an urgently needed alternative to traditional categories such as "developing or emerging countries," but goes beyond a purely spatial definition. Global migratory movements, changes in economic structures and the unravelling of traditional social formations show that a territorial localization would be too short-sighted to analyse the interdependencies of global entanglements.

Within the framework of the Excellence Initiative of the German Federal Government and the Federal States, the University of Cologne defined the Global South as a focal point of research in 2014. The researchers of the Global South Studies Center (GSSC) at the University of Cologne have set themselves the goal, together with colleagues from Africa, Asia and Latin America, of researching the often rapid social, economic, political and cultural changes and their historical roots in the Global South.

This supplement to the daily newspaper TAZ aims to provide an insight into the center's diverse research topics. The articles show that the Global South can also be explored, for example, on Mallorca or on construction sites in the rich oil state of Qatar. The reports on Samsung's mobile phone plant in Vietnam or soybean cultivation in Argentina illustrate the rapid structural change whose local dynamics have a worldwide impact. While Urban Gardening reveals surprising parallels between the Global South and the North, literature can be used to explore the processes that lead to texts from the Global South becoming global bestsellers – or not.

Unfortunaltely the contributions are only available in German.