The term 'Global South' nowadays refers to all who have a grievance with 'The West' and the 'world order' which they believe to be rigged to keep the 'Global South' in perpetual poverty. It is a deeply problematic paradigm entrenching victimhood rather than agency. Far more useful would be the notion of the Free South.
The writer and activist Carl Oglesby is credited with inventing the term "global south" in an article published by the Catholic journal Commonweal.
Writing in a special edition dedicated to the Vietnam War, he was describing centuries of northern "dominance over the global south", creating what he described as "an intolerable social order".
The notion of the Global South has, in the years since this 1969 article, become a catchphrase for the "developing world", including parts of Asia, the whole of Africa and Latin America, Central America and bits of the Middle East.
In the 1980s, former West German chancellor Willy Brandt drew a line separating the "wealthy north" from the "poor south". The "Brandt Line" has endured as a rough guide to the "Global South".
It was always a woolly concept and one which was used unenthusiastically for decades to describe a divide between wealthy developed nations and the "developing world".
The trouble with the term "Global South" is that it is too vague to be of any serious analytical value. There is a broad shared geography if you overlook the swerve in the Brandt Line to exclude Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Beyond that, not much.
