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At the recent meeting of BRICS-the global economic group consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa-held in Beijing in September , Chinese President Xi Jinping declared that a "historical opportunity" had presented itself as a result of adjustments in "the world economic structure." He urged enhanced "solidarity and cooperation among emerging market and developing countries" to work against the protectionism that had recently gained traction in Western countries, as evidenced in the ascendancy of Donald Trump in the United States and Great Britain's imminent departure from the European Union. Xi's promotion of South-South cooperation as an "irreversible trend" built upon the political positions of earlier periods. The Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, the founding conference of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in , and the establishment of the South Commission at the NAM summit in Harare, Zimbabwe, in September all exhibited a similar rhetoric of solidarity. 1 The Global South of our political present consequently has a long and complicated history, yet distinctions between the past and present must also be drawn. As Vijay Prashad has written in The Darker Nations (), the "Third World" captured not a geography as such, but rather a political project that sought to work against the neocolonial in uences of the United States and its allies (the so-called "First World") and the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc partners (the "Second World"). 2 The expression "Third World" drew from an earlier genealogy connected to the French Revolution and the notion of a "third estate" representing the common people. 3

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