The article has the main aim of utilizing the literature on “fragment urbanism” and case studies in infrastructure from the global South to question the notion—dear to the World Bank and the IMF—that the global South ought to follow the North’s lead in aiming at “the modern infrastructure ideal,” that is, a series of integrated nation-wide networks. That model suits certain needs—electricity, phone service, perhaps Internet—but it doesn’t always work, even if funding can be found, for many other infrastructure needs. What is often thought of as “informal” solutions may in fact deploy more site-specific and community-specific techniques and tools.

The article also shows that even in the global North’s most advanced capitalist countries, the lack of overall planning and the absence of needs assessments done before choosing which projects will go ahead mean that infrastructure provision and governance is far more fragmented than the “modern” ideal would suggest. The fact that major projects are usually financed separately, often having their own credit rating, encourages a way of non-evidence based planning that is rife for political interference in infrastructure decision-making. The “art of the deal” is in fact the model for infrastructure projects these days, not the ‘seeing like a state’ that characterized many projects in the post-World War II era.

In this article, I discuss the Cold War as a label, meaning, and referent in academic research. I consider how the label “the Cold War” focuses attention on the conflict between the United States and USSR and draws attention away from the Global South. I show how academics often use the category the Cold War as a diminished subtype of interstate war, with the adjective cold calling attention to the absence of direct military combat. I analyze the meanings and referents associated with different ways of “casing” the Cold War: a case of cold war, a case of interstate rivalry, and a case of empire building. I also examine the separate meanings of the Cold War when it is treated as a world-historical time versus an event. Using the essays in this special issue, I examine how sociologists study the Cold War as an empirical referent. I find that the cultural orientation of sociology emphasizes symbolic and performative aspects of the Cold War that are not traditionally emphasized in work on the Cold War.

This article discusses the history and the prospects of the climate change negotiations and seeks to show that they are structurally and systematically disadvantageous to the countries and the peoples of the Third World/Global South. The article uses the TWAIL approach to discuss the North-South divide and the differing approaches to climate justice. The article then discusses the history of climate change negotiations, in particular, climate finance and loss and damage, and shows that modes of these negotiations have been disadvantageous to the Third World and are unlikely to fulfil their aspirations. The article highlights the need for incorporating certain principles of fairness, not just in substantive law, but also in how negotiations are conducted. It concludes with thoughts on what these principles of fairness may look like, and the role international and domestic courts can play in evolving them.

This paper provides some personal reflections on my experiences as a project leader in four cooperative projects with colleagues from the Global South involving higher education institutions (HEIs) in seven countries—namely, Benin, Uganda, Ethiopia, Colombia, Palestine, Bulgaria, and Kosovo. The aim is to try to assess advantages and shortcomings of some of these funding programs in terms of their framing, structuring, and (limited) funding, and to provide some suggestions for ensuring better coordination of what constitutes an institutionally fragmented field. The focus of my reflections is on three related broad themes—that is, how to enhance international academic cooperation, improve academic mobility, and ensure better access to teaching and research materials for Global South HEIs. The paper first analyzes the issue of funding for North-South cooperation, then moves on to the enhancement of international academic cooperation, international mobility, and finally, the provision of better access to teaching and research materials.

Financial institutions spanning Global North and South are increasingly adopting an agenda of ‘women’s financial inclusion’. The women’s inclusion agenda in finance reflects dynamics of deep marketization that prescribe common economic policy solutions, transcending formerly significant distinctions of geography and social context. In this case, the closing of gender gaps is the universally proscribed policy. Yet this agenda elicits vastly different practices in ‘high’ finance registers where women are recruited as professionals, and microfinance registers where women are incorporated as borrowers. Relating multisited ethnographic materials from a US gender diversity organization and microfinance institutions in India, we ask: on what terms does inclusion take place? First, we examine how gender is constructed across finance institutions by essentializing women as virtuous. These constructions play out according to context-specific gender politics on questions of women’s economic empowerment – concerning neoliberal iterations of feminism in the US case, and financialization of social reproduction in India. Second, what do women’s everyday engagements with the inclusion agenda indicate about the terms of financial inclusion? Women contend with characterizations of themselves as risk-averse professionals and responsible borrowers, respectively, with ambivalence. Their contextually located ambivalent responses are points of both leverage and critique for the financial inclusion agenda.

The EU's non-financial reporting (NFR) regulations have significant impacts on Global South stakeholders, firms that must report, actors lower in the value chain, and organisations seeking investment from NFR-compliant firms or institutions. This paper sets forth six proposals to improve the global equity and sustainability implications of the EU's NFR from a Global South perspective. The proposals involve (1) developing regulation cooperatively with the Global South; (2) streamlining reporting to enable the regulations to have real effects and limit incorrect accounting; (3) digitalising reporting through accessible technologies for greater accountability and lower administrative burdens; (4) mandating scope 3 emissions accounting and incentivising related investment; (5) anchoring financial institutions' role in ethical investment and bridging Northern and Southern actors; and (6) strengthening citizen data and sustainability literacy to close the circle of incentives, implementation, and impact.

The Supreme Court of India's judgment in Vedanta Ltd v. State of Tamil Nadu and Others, affirming the closure of Vedanta's copper smelting plant in Tuticorin in southern India, concludes a long and contentious chain of litigation. The plant's troubled history and the ensuing litigation reflect contestations between economic development, environmental and social devastation, human well-being, and corporate responsibility, which are often characteristic of environmental litigation in the global south. This article analyzes the significance of the Indian Supreme Court's reliance on established constitutional rights principles as well as settled environmental jurisprudence, and highlights the relevance of this judicial pronouncement for climate litigation in the global south.

Cracks in the liberal international order (LIO) have been occurring since its very formation. Yet, some international relations scholarship frames the narrative about imminent threats to the LIO as if such threats were new. From a postcolonial vantage point, this essay contends that mainstream theorizing about international order is problematically Eurocentric and develops a three-pronged argument. In the first place, the essay argues for understanding order as a command or as an imposition. Order as a command renders visible power disparities, injustices, and inequalities of the international order as seen by actors from below. Second, the essay leans on Edward Said's contrapuntal reading method to show that experiences of order are plural rather than singular or universal. Third, the essay argues that from a postcolonial perspective, the opposite of order is not chaos or volatility but rather agency or the authorship to be a rule maker. A full picture of order as imposition requires understanding how togetherness and sameness are modes for Global South actors to find collective unity to resist the injustices and inequalities of the LIO.

This paper analyzes inequities in the distribution of air pollution in Mexico at the detailed scale of localities. We find that air pollution increases in areas that experience a decline in socioeconomic status. We utilize 15 years of remote sensing data on fine particulate matter (smaller than 2.5 microns) for more than 116,500 localities across Mexico. Our panel data models show that localities that face a decline in socioeconomic status experience a 0.24–0.83 per cent increase in annual mean pollution concentrations. Our results hold up to controlling for changes within each municipality and instrumenting with broader municipality level socioeconomic status to test for ecological fallacy. We find that local air pollution inequities are reduced by political participation channels, but not as much by increased share of manufacturing activities due to polluters locating in poorer neighborhoods. Highly dense, urban municipalities witness higher inequities most likely due to traffic, construction, and agricultural fires.