In a response to a question following a speech at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., in 2019, Indian external affairs minister S. Jaishankar described his country as a ‘Southwestern’ power. He said that, 70 years after independence, it was now clear that India was a democracy and in that sense was a ‘Western’ rather than an ‘Eastern’ power – in other words, he took completely at face value the equation of democracy with the West.Yet, he said, India was also a ‘Southern’ power in the sense that it was part of the developing world and would continue to maintain a strong bond with it.Taking Jaishankar’s striking but problematic formulation as a starting point, this short essay thinks the ideas of the Global South and the West together. The two concepts have both been discussed extensively – but mostly separately. By juxtaposing the two concepts, we consider whether they are commensurable.Although the Global South emerged much later than the idea of the West, it is similarly ambiguous in terms of scope and meaning. But as a normative project, the Global South seems to have largely disappeared during the last several decades as the sense of solidarity between the countries it once included has eroded and the term has increasingly been instrumentalised, especially by the four BRIC countries.What and when was the South?As Giorgios Varouxakis has recently shown, the idea of the West as a “political entity based on civilisational commonality” emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century, though the term had of course been used in many different ways at earlier historical moments.The idea of the Global South emerged much later – the first documented use of the term was by the American political activist in 1968. It was popularised by the report of the Independent Commission on International Developmental Issues, chaired by Willy Brandt, which introduced the wavy horizontal line separating the rich north from the poor south that became known as the “Brandt line”.The idea of the Global South clearly also drew on, and is related to, a series of adjacent and precedent concepts that refer to formal as well as informal collectivities in world politics: the non-white world, Afro-Asia (the grouping of countries that met at the Bandung conference in 1955), the Non-Aligned Movement (created in 1961), the G77 bloc (created in 1964) and, perhaps most importantly, the Third World.Each of these groupings of countries overlapped partially, but not completely, with what would be imagined as the Global South. Thus, just as the scope and boundaries of the concept of the West depend on how we define the concept (is Japan, for example, part of the West?), so too do the scope and boundaries of the Global South.In particular, just as we can differentiate between geographic, strategic, developmental/technological, normative and civilisational versions of the West, there are also different versions of the South. Most straightforward is what Nikita Sud and Diego Sánchez-Ancochea call the “territorial” (i.e. geographic) South, which “comprises the continents of Asia, Africa and Central and South America.”But the South can also be understood in historical terms as consisting of formerly colonised countries or in developmental terms as a collection of countries that are counterposed to the “northern” advanced economies of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).The high-water mark of the Global South idea was in the 1980s, when the term first gained currency in the context of the late Cold War. In the early phase of the Cold War (1950s-1970s), the world had been conceptualised as consisting of two halves: a democratic West and a communist East. Some also saw other fault lines – for instance, in his dispatch from Bandung, Richard Wright built on earlier ideas of a global colour line and proposed the idea of a “colour curtain” hanging perpendicular to the Iron Curtain.But it was really with the idea of the Brandt line in 1980 – an economic fault line rather than a political one – that the world was divided into four quadrants, though whereas the northwest (the First World) and the northeast (the Second World) were thought of as distinct, the southwest and southeast (the Third World) were fused into a single/singular South.With the end of the Cold War, the “second world” disappeared and the world was once again conceptualised as consisting of two halves. However, instead of a world that was divided into east and west (that is on the basis of differences of political and economic ideology) as in the early phase of the Cold War, the post-Cold war world was divided into north and south (that is, on the basis of economic development). Yet far from further focusing attention on the problem of global inequality and solidifying a sense of solidarity between Global South countries, the grouping seemed increasingly incoherent as the countries imagined as belonging to this category diverged quite sharply in developmental terms.During the period of the US-led “war on terror” in the early decades of the 21st century, there seemed to be a new fault line based on religion. But since the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there has been a growing sense within the West that it is fighting a new Cold War – that is, a global struggle between democracies against authoritarian states. This has led to a revival not just of the idea of the West, which until then had been in decline, but even of the idea of the “free world” in contrast to an “unfree world”.Meanwhile, some on the left have hoped that this new Cold War-like situation might lead to a new iteration of the non-aligned movement that would bring together neutral countries in the same way as during the Cold War.In the second decade of the 21st century, we seem to be reverting once again to a world that is imagined as consisting of four quadrants – though in a new context of strategic competition between a rising China and a declining United States. This is the context for Jaishankar’s description of India as a “southwestern” power. According to his logic, if democracies in Global South are southwestern powers, authoritarian states in the Global South would presumably be “southeastern” powers. But the application of these geographical categories from the Cold War makes little sense in a post-Cold War world in which the boundaries between authoritarianism and democracy and between developed and developing economies have become blurred.The South as a normative project?The South seems to have resonated most as a developmental concept. As the China example suggests, it may be precisely because the boundaries between developed and developing countries have now blurred so much that group has lost whatever coherence it might have had during the latter phase of the Cold War. Despite attempts like the NAM and the G77, the Global South never really cohered into a strategic project in the way that the West did, with its institutional/strategic embodiment in NATO. It is also clear that the South was never a unified civilisational project in the way that the West was. But can we speak of the South as ever having been a normative project reflecting universal values in the way that the West is imagined to be?It is tempting to think that in contrast to the West, the South was always a purely negative project – that is, one which was defined in opposition to the West (or the North), whether that is understood in racial terms (i.e., the non-white world), economic or developmental terms (i.e., developing economies). In other words, whereas the West was active, the South was reactive. However, the concept of the West also emerged as a response to a sense of threat – in particular from Russia, as Varouxakis reminds us – and its more recent return clearly takes place in a context of anxiety about relative decline.However, that itself may illustrate an important difference between the two concepts: whereas the West resonates in a context of decline, the South resonates in a context of emergence. As a result, the South may also have a different sense of moral purpose than the West.In particular, in so far as we can speak of a set of “southern values” that informed a normative project – that is, the equivalent of purported Western values – they might include anti-racism and a sense of solidarity. It is easy to point out that Global South countries have rarely lived up to these values. But neither have the countries of the West, however it is defined, lived up to what are claimed to be Western values.Over the course of the last several decades, this normative project of the South, such as it was, seems to have largely disappeared. The four so-called BRIC states – that is, Brazil, Russia, India and China – now instrumentalise the concept of the South to make leadership claims and project power. The concept of the BRICs is sometimes imagined as a kind of successor to earlier concepts like the Global South, but it is in reality quite different from them – the concept was coined by Jim O’Neill, the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, simply to designate the four largest “emerging markets”.Thus although, like the developmental idea of the Global South, it was based on economic criteria, it was a term that was meant merely to guide investment decisions rather than inspire political action of any kind and has subsequently been instrumentalised for economic and strategic purposes by the countries themselves.If anything has demonstrated the disappearance of anything resembling a normative project of the South, it is the response to Israel’s destruction of Gaza since October 7, 2023. It has often been said since then that the West’s complicity in the genocide has destroyed its credibility and in particular its claim to stand for a set of positive Western values.But there has also been little sense of Global South solidarity with, or support for, the Palestinians. Perhaps most striking of all is the lack of support from India, which during the Cold War, was especially forceful and vocal in condemning Israel along with apartheid South Africa.The Global Sumud Flotilla, at OR Tambo International Airport, in Johannesburg, South Africa, October 8, 2025. Photo: AP/Themba HadebePerhaps the closest thing there is now to what the Global South was once imagined to be is the Hague Group, a grouping of ten or so smaller countries committed to “coordinated legal and diplomatic measures in defence of international law and solidarity with the people of Palestine” that was established in January 2025.None of the original four BRIC states are members of the group. Meanwhile, South Africa has moved into something of the role that India once played – not least through its case against Israel in the International Court of Justice. Ironically, if anyone can claim to lead something like the Global South today, it is a state against whose apartheid system much of the Global South’s collective action was aimed during its heyday.Given the ambiguous and evolving meaning of the concept of the Global South, it is tempting to reject it altogether. But as Ravinder Kaur also points out, the concept of the West is similarly ambiguous. Moreover, it is this ambiguity that allows the concept of the Global South to be instrumentalised for various purposes. Thus while being sceptical about the conceptual utility of the concept, we need to recognise its practical reality. Whatever its limits as a category of analysis, it is likely to continue to be used as a category of practice – but one that is increasingly linked to competitive claims of national primacy rather than universal visions of collective futures.§This article is an edited extract from an essay in the “Global South Redux” Special Forum (ed. Ravinder Kaur, published in Global Governance 32(2), 2026.§This essay is inspired by discussions at a workshop that was held at Copenhagen University in November 2025. The authors would like to thank Zeynep Gambetti, Peo Hansen, Thomas Hansen, Elena Meyer-Clement, Ravinder Kaur, Christopher Sabatini, Nikita Sud, Mikhail Suslov, Vineet Thakur and Giorgios Varouxakis for their contributions.Hans Kundnani is at the European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science and the author of Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (Hurst, 2023). Srirupa Roy is at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Goettingen and the author of The Political Outsider: Indian Democracy and the Lineages of Populism (Stanford University Press, 2024).