Editors’ Introduction

Abstract

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

Essentialising medicines

“…In the pharmaceutical practices I encountered, technological and chemical surveillance were mobilised in the service of ensuring drug safety and were deployed in ways that emphasised industrial geographies of manufacturing and production. Similar geographies were also mobilised in counter-narratives, which emphasised shared historical and postcolonial experience across the Global South (Gupta et al 2018;Kaur 2018) and which produced pharmaceutical practice as a site for humanitarian action, solidarity, and trust. Yet by highlighting the industrial origin of generic drugs, these same tropes produced essentialised understandings of pharmaceutical risk and fraud.…”

“…Writing about 'the Global South' as a geographical and developmental space, scholars have highlighted its limits, revealing 'South-South' relations to be shot through with contradictions (Duclos 2021;Nair 2018), inequalities (Hofmeyr 2018), and racism (Burton 2016), and showing how top-down categories of analysis flatten situated colonial and postcolonial histories through which these geographic connections come into being (Gupta et al 2018;Nagar 2014;Pollock 2019). As Ravinder Kaur has shown, 'the Global South' continues to be an important tool of market-making, a site at once of assumed resistance to capitalist projects and of intensified capitalist extraction (Kaur 2018).…”

“…Given how claims to chemical similarity are central to generic pharmaceutical practice and politics (Hayden 2023), it is perhaps no surprise that history and identity are entwined with pharmaceutical market-making. In the pharmaceutical practices I encountered, narratives regarding shared historical and postcolonial experience across the Global South (Gupta et al 2018) were important means by which both global health programmes and private pharmaceutical markets were produced as locations for humanitarian action, solidarity, and trust as well as for profit-making, exploitation, and suspicion. As Antoinette Burton (2016) and others have shown, the Global South operates not only as a geographical space but also a racialised one, reflected here in how pharmaceutical policies evoke claims to shared 'third world' identities, in the humanitarian visual regimes of drug safety campaigns, or comments by exporters who suspected they might be seen as 'frauds' .…”