Emerging Powers and the Political Economy of the Southern Interregnum

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How do we best conceptualize the global South and its role in the rapidly changing world system of the early twenty-first century? This article approaches this question through a critical engagement with narratives centred on the idea of a rising South, and especially of claims that emerging powers across Asia, Latin America and Africa are spearheading progressive transformations across the contemporary world system. Against such claims, the article argues that whereas emerging powers have been instrumental in driving a reconfiguration of global wealth hierarchies, governing elites in the global South confront deep disjunctures between accumulation and legitimation. These disjunctures, I argue, originate in processes of neoliberalization that have deepened inequality and precarity and manifest in widespread political unrest. Rather than a simple story of a rising South, I argue that the current conjuncture is best understood as a Southern interregnum – that is, as a protracted moment of crisis in which governing elites in emerging powers mobilize new hegemonic projects to achieve legitimacy. I then discuss what the character and trajectory of these hegemonic projects – and the wider political economy of the southern interregnum – entail for the future of fracturing and turbulent world order and popular classes in the global South. Specifically, I focus on southern authoritarian populism as a distinctive type of right-wing hegemonic project, and how such projects attempt to reconcile accumulation and legitimation.