Dossier: BRICS and the emergence of the Global South (Call of Papers)

2025-03-17

This edition of Reoriente aims to address two interrelated topics of great relevance in both academic and political debates: the Global South and BRICS. The intention of the editorial team is to cover the greatest diversity of dimensions and perspectives in the debate on these two themes.

With this purpose, the journal extends an invitation to researchers, professors, international analysts, students, social and political activists to contribute articles that explore, from various disciplines and approaches, the multiple dimensions that currently accompany the debate on BRICS and the emergence or re-emergence of the Global South. This invitation aims to encourage/promote critical and plural dialogue, providing solid and well-documented arguments to support political positioning on the Global South and BRICS.

In an international order historically characterized by deepening inequalities, BRICS emerged as a space of resistance to unipolarity and Atlanticism led by the United States, reclaiming the spirit of Bandung and promoting the Global South as a geopolitical space for cooperation, alliances, and as a lever for the shared destiny of humanity. Its role has evolved to assume increasingly proactive dimensions in reforming international organizations and shaping the fundamental features of a new world order and system, strongly linked to multilateralism. This trend is connected to profound processes shaping the global economy: the collapse of the global hegemony of U.S. power and its abandonment of informal imperialism in favor of outright imperialism; the emergence of systemic chaos and catastrophic stalemate, which create needs, threats, and possibilities for the recreation of the world order; the rise of China, Russia, and India as dynamic powers, offering new opportunities for South-South cooperation; the strategic competition between old powers and rising forces, enabling new alignments, alliances, and spaces to redefine international ties and power systems in different regions; the expansion of BRICS in Latin America and Africa, spaces historically dominated by dependency relations but now including Brazil, South Africa, Egypt, and Ethiopia as full members of BRICS.

The transcendent question is: What role can BRICS and the Global South, or the New Majority, as the Russians prefer, play in the geopolitical scenario of the 21st century? Tentative answers to this question must consider the main features of the crisis, trends, and disputes in the contemporary world-system; the possibilities, limits, and contradictions of BRICS as an organization and the Global South as a geopolitical project; and the resistance that U.S. imperialism, Atlanticism, and their international power relations may offer.

Starting from this concern, we suggest the submission of works that consider one or more of the following topics:

  1. The concepts of the Global South and the New Majority: origins, debates, and theoretical, geopolitical, and historical dimensions.
  2. Towards a new political economy in the Global South? State, capital, workers, and accumulation patterns.
  3. The Global South and migration processes: responses to resistance and tensions in imperialist countries.
  4. The Global South and socialism: historical experiences, challenges, and utopias.
  5. BRICS and the Global South: regional and global dimensions of power construction.
  6. BRICS and international organizations: reform proposals and challenges in building a new global governance.
  7. BRICS and climate: development, energy transition, and the global ecological crisis.
  8. BRICS and new technologies: technological paradigms, innovation systems, and strategic competition.
  9. BRICS and systemic chaos: how to ensure global peace in the face of the threat of a third world war?
  10. BRICS and the world-system: towards new hegemonies and imperialisms, or multipolarity and a new world system?
  11. BRICS and cooperation in international relations: South-South relations and the goal of a shared destiny community.
  12. BRICS and geopolitics: perspectives, contradictions, resistances, and challenges of BRICS expansion.
  13. BRICS and global finance: de-dollarization, establishment of a new global monetary standard, and creation of a new global financial architecture.
  14. The Global South, BRICS, and their relations with the Global North: tensions, contradictions, conflicts, and cooperation; and
  15. BRICS and social and political processes: sovereignty, resistances, anti-imperialism, popular power, democracy, and human rights.

 

Submission deadline: July 1, 2025

Elias Jabbour, Lourdes Regueiro, and Wagner Iglecias (editors)

Articles submission guidelines:

https://revistas.ufrj.br/index.php/reoriente/about/submissions