In Search of the Global East: Thinking between North and South

Abstract

Carving up the world into Global North and Global South has become an established way of thinking about global difference since the end of the Cold War. This binary, however, erases what this paper calls the Global East – those countries and societies that occupy an interstitial position between North and South. This paper problematises the geopolitics of knowledge that has resulted in the exclusion of the Global East, not just from the Global North and South, but from notions of globality in general. It argues that we need to adopt a strategic essentialism to recover the Global East for scholarship. To that end, it traces the global relations of IKEA’s bevelled drinking glass to demonstrate the urgency of rethinking the Global East at the heart of global connections, rather than separate from them. Thinking of such a Global East as a liminal space complicates the notions of North and South towards more inclusive but also more uncertain theorising.

The baby business booms: Economic geographies of assisted reproduction

“…Young, White, Western women with higher education receive up to 100 times more for their oocytes than egg sellers in India, Mexico, Ukraine, or Georgie (Schurr, ). Commercial surrogacy—where you contract and pay a woman to gestate your baby—is only legal in a few countries, many of them belonging to the Global East (Müller, ) or Global South, where surrogate mothers earn only a fraction of what a Californian surrogate would earn. Just as other kinds of services have been outsourced to low‐wage countries to reduce costs within a global commodity chain, reproductive labor is outsourced in global fertility chains to women living in deprived socioeconomic conditions in the Global South, Global East, and Global North to reduce the price for a baby conceived with the help of a third party.…”

Editorial: In search of the post-socialist urban geography. How do we see the post-socialist city today?

“…Or, to put it differently, it is important that we explore the postsocialist city not only in terms of how well it follows the global trends, but also to what extent it shapes these trends. Such an angle has recently inspired intense theoretical discussions among a number of researchers (Müller, 2018;Müller, 2019;Trubina, 2018;Ferenčunhová, Gentile, 2016). This is also the perspective presented, overtly or implicitly, in the articles published in this issue.…”

Grow, share or buy? Understanding the diverse economies of urban gardeners

“…These insights are only slowly penetrating the academic discourse due to its persistent geopolitical bias. As I also discuss in Section 1.2, knowledge generated in CEE is often neglected, as this region falls through the cracks between the Global North and South and is rarely seen as relevant for global debates (Müller, 2018).…”

“…The construct of CEE as an underdeveloped 'other' (Müller, 2018) presented in the previous sections is not only the domain of Western researchers influenced by their own cultural backgrounds, but it has also been adopted within post-socialist countries, where it has arguably become the most powerful. In this section I outline how this perspective shapes public opinion and policy interventions.…”

“…After the collapse of state socialist regimes, post-socialist Europe became what Domazet and Marinović Jerolimov (2014: 20) term 'semi-periphery': countries which are positioned between the 'core' (that is, in simplified terms, Western Europe and the Global North in general) and the 'periphery' (by and large corresponding to the Global South). While the semi-periphery includes features of both the core and the periphery, it also tends to get lost between the two: it is not as affluent as the Global North but is also not as poor as the Global South; inferior, but not inferior enough; similar, but different (Müller, 2018). CEE, no longer socialist but not quite Western, thus vanishes from the radar.…”