Southern Interregnum: Remaking Hegemony in Brazil, India, China, and South Africa offers a timely account of what the authors argue is an ongoing conjunctural crisis in the global South whereby governing elites are struggling to reconcile the imperatives of accumulation and legitimation.
As the title suggests, the book draws on Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the “interregnum” to understand the contemporary conjuncture as one in which existing political and economic order is in terminal crisis and “progressive and reactionary political forces are locked in a political struggle over who would give form and direction to the future” (p. 16).
The book consists of four in-depth examinations of how the interregnum is manifest in the key southern emerging powers of Brazil (authored by Fabio Luis Barbosa dos Santos and Ruy Braga), India (Alf Gunvald Nilsen), China (Ching Kwan Lee) and South Africa (Karl Von Holdt).
While each of the countries exhibit features specific to their national histories and positions with the international system, the volume argues that they share a pattern whereby relatively consensual hegemonic modes of rule have given way to crises of legitimation the form of mass protests from below.
Central to the analysis therefore is how hegemonic orders were undermined from within as a result of their promotion of neoliberal reforms. In other words, the processes that lifted these countries to middle income status and facilitated shifts in the global distribution of wealth are also notable for their profound deepening of inequality and the creation of precarious working classes.
As a result, a key feature of the Southern interregnum is the social protests by workers and surplus populations, particularly in the field of capital-labour relations but also over issues such as democratic rights, corruption, gender and racial justice, and collective consumption.
Social dislocation and resistance caused by neoliberal restructuring have therefore led to renewed hegemonic projects that seek to build the legitimacy required to provide stability and sustain specific accumulation strategies. These include elite authoritarianism and evangelical Christianity in Bolsonaro’s Brazil, neoliberal Hindu nationalism in Modi’s India, elite formation through private accumulation and corruption in Ramaphosa’s South Africa, and global expansion and digital accumulation in Xi Jinping’s China.
This analysis of the Southern interregnum also challenges the mainstream literature that argues that we are witnessing ‘the rise of the South’ based upon sustained economic growth and poverty reduction and the potential rebalancing of economic and political power in the international system.
This ‘convergence thesis’ argues that these processes are rearticulating existing geographies of development predicated on the division between a rich developed North and a poor underdeveloped South. In particular, such convergence arguments typically focus on China’s rise and how its rapid development and the associated global commodity boom have further shifted the parameters of global development, providing developing nations with more policy options while undermining global neoliberal orthodoxy.
As the authors argue, such approaches overstate the extent and durability of such changes, noting the reality of China’s ongoing economic slowdown and the end of the global commodity boom, which in turn have negatively impacted the development prospects of the other emerging powers. China also faces a number of serious domestic challenges, such as the poor performance of the vast SOE sector and its high levels of indebtedness, a weak private sector that remains locked in at low value-added tiers in GPNs, declining exports, the collapse of the property bubble, and high levels of youth unemployment.
While these are all indeed significant challenges, it is not self-evident that they in themselves constitute a refutation of the rise of China/rise of the South thesis. Critical political economy approaches have in fact been around since the 1990s, and have highlighted the country’s “shallow integration” into GPNs and its role as the low wage “workshop of the world.” And yet, China has continued to make enormous technological advances in the intervening years.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Critical Technology Tracker shows, for example, that China’s global lead now extends to 37 out of 44 key technologies, including crucial fields including defence, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, advanced materials and key quantum technologies. Trump’s trade war with China in 2025 may have further exposed the limits of US power to coerce Beijing, while the latter has leverage over key resources such as rare earths.
It is not immediately obvious then that the interregnum necessarily means that expectations of China’s hegemonic challenge are misplaced, as the continued advances made since the supposed onset of the interregnum in the late 2000s would seem to suggest otherwise.
While the Chinese party-state no doubt faces some quite serious domestic challenges, it may be premature to simply write off the momentous shifts that do seem to be underway and are being accelerated by the US hegemonic decline under Trump 2.0.
The authors are no doubt correct to examine the tensions and backlash that China’s engagement with the global South have created, a more pressing question now (which in fairness the book could not have dealt with given its publication date) is how this weighs up against Trump’s America First agenda and the very real and damaging impacts of tariffs and the suspension of US aid, along with the widely perceived Western hypocrisy over the Gaza genocide.
Overall, the volume provides a compelling comparative conjunctural analysis of the emerging powers by placing them in the framework of the ‘Southern interregnum.’ It provides an empirically rich analysis by leading scholars in the field of the contrary and turbulent moment in which governing elites in emerging powers are confronted with complex disjunctures between accumulation and legitimation. The book is therefore required reading for anyone interested in the position of the emerging south countries within the broader global juncture, though the question of whether these domestic crises of accumulation and political legitimacy will necessarily derail the so-called ‘rise of the South’ remains an open question.
Comments