From colonial to solidarity: why Ukraine should speak the language of the Global South

The Global South is not just a term that appears in UN reports or diplomats' speeches. It is a philosophical territory where history, injustice, and the desire for dignity are intertwined in a new political language. For Ukraine, which is used to thinking of itself in terms of East and West, the South is an unexpected mirror. And perhaps a new route .

The concept of the Global South was born not on a map but in the imagination. Its origins lie in the Maoist and Marxist concepts of the "world city" and the "world village," where center and periphery are not just spatial but moral categories. In the 1950s, the French demographer Alfred Sauvé coined the term "Third World," comparing it to the third estate before the French Revolution, the one that "exists but is silent." This image is not about poverty, but about invisibility. And that is why it resonates with the Ukrainian experience .

Subsequently, the terms "first," "second," "third," and even "fourth" world appeared as attempts to categorize global inequalities. But today these categories are increasingly giving way to symbolic coordinates: The South is not a geography, but a common experience of colonialism, the struggle for subjectivity and the right to one's own memory.