To solve contemporary humanitarian, poverty, and climate crises we need to involve new or more actors and come up with innovative forms of collaborations, partnerships, finance, and solutions adapted to local circumstances. This is one of many reasons for growing interest in South–South security cooperation (SSSC). This concluding article seeks to draw parallels between the growing literature on SSSC and the broader body of literature on South–South cooperation to explore how and to what extent they enrich each other and further our understanding of South–South engagements. The article highlights the heterogeneous and relational nature of SSSC and points to a two-speed global South where larger, (geo)politically more potent and richer countries in the global South assist or export models to, or intervene in, smaller, politically and economically less powerful states. It also highlights internal power dynamics in the global South and carves out the complex ways in which traditional, historically informed power relations also affect the actions of Southern actors.

This article introduces the Special Issue ‘South–South Security Cooperation and the (Re)making of Global Security Governance’. The contributions explore security-driven South–South interactions across the globe, assessing empirical, theoretical, and normative aspects. Our aim is to decentre debates on global security governance, traditionally focused on Northern-led cooperation, and to move beyond simplistic and simplifying assessments of South–South engagements. The Special Issue particularly highlights the ambiguities of South–South security cooperation, including varying degrees of global North involvement and differing interpretations of ‘security’ and ‘South–South’ among the involved actors. The contributions examine the practical outlook, normative consequences, and embeddedness of these cooperations within global hierarchies, and their implications for global security governance. This article sets the stage for this endeavor. Unpacking the categories ‘South’, ‘security’, and ‘cooperation’, we first provide a working definition of South–South security cooperation. Next, we offer a historical perspective, emphasising the role of legacy effects, institutional structures, geopolitical junctures, and international hierarchies in shaping South–South security cooperation. The concluding section presents the contributions to the special issue and discusses the implications of South–South security cooperation for understanding contemporary changes in global security governance.

Survey research in the Global South has traditionally required large budgets and lengthy fieldwork. The expansion of digital connectivity presents an opportunity for researchers to engage global subject pools and study settings where in-person contact is challenging. This paper evaluates Facebook advertisements as a tool to recruit diverse survey samples in the Global South. Using Facebook’s advertising platform, we quota-sample respondents in Mexico, Kenya, and Indonesia and assess how well these samples perform on a range of survey indicators, identify sources of bias, replicate a canonical experiment, and highlight trade-offs for researchers to consider. This method can quickly and cheaply recruit respondents, but these samples tend to be more educated than corresponding national populations. Weighting ameliorates sample imbalances. This method generates comparable data to a commercial online sample for a fraction of the cost. Our analysis demonstrates the potential of Facebook advertisements to cost-effectively conduct research in diverse settings.

Parenting programs are effective ways to reduce child maltreatment and promote nurturing parent–child relationships. Yet, the potential of faith-based, positive parent programs, particularly those conducted globally at scale, remains underexplored. We conducted a pre-post and 6-month follow-up, single-group study of a faith- and community-based parenting program, Celebrating Families (CF), in 12 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Central America and South East Asia. Using a train-the-trainers model, faith leaders delivered group-based parenting workshops over 3–5 days to a nonrandomized sample of 2201 caregivers across 12 countries. Data was collected at three time points. Shifts in caregiver attitudes and beliefs were assessed pre- and post, and harsh parenting behaviors were measured at pre- and 6-months after CF parent program implementation. Acceptability was demonstrated by high attendance and high satisfaction ratings from facilitators and caregivers. Trained faith and community leaders feasibly delivered the CF parent groups and were rated by caregivers to have strong teaching skills. Qualitative analysis of their feedback at 6-month follow-up highlighted barriers to implementation and areas for improvement. Results with those caregivers who completed the program suggest large to medium effect size improvements in caregiver attitudes around harsh discipline and nurturing parenting by country and change in reported use of harsh parenting behaviors at 6 months. Findings suggest that CF is a feasible and acceptable program with promising short-term effects for caregivers of children and adolescents in low- and middle-income countries.

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.

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.

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.

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.