South–South cooperation: building productive bridges between Latin America and Africa

Abstract

The twenty-first century has been shaped by the emergence of powers from the developing world, with the growing weight of the Global South within the international system. The alliances achieved by these countries gave a new impetus to multilateralism, placing development at the centre of the global agenda. As a result, since the early 2000s, South–South cooperation (SSC) has been gaining increasing prominence, constituting an essential part of the cooperation strategy of many Global South countries. Focusing on its economic, political and technical dimensions, and considering their similar development challenges, this article tries to map Latin America–Africa bilateral SSC initiatives and subsequently reflect on these data. Furthermore, a closer look into those SSC initiatives is provided by considering Africa’s two main partners in Latin America: Argentina and Brazil during the period 2003–2015. The study concludes by providing an analysis of their productive bilateral SSC initiatives in order to derive conclusions on the (medium- or long-run) economic potential of such experiences. This would indicate that such SSC potential can help alleviate Global South countries’ so-called external constraint through the improvement of their productive structure and trade diversification.