There is perhaps no truer provocation about "The South" than the oft-noted "The South is not a monolith." And in terms of The South's diverse populations, and their political and cultural traditions, we absolutely agree. Regional dynamics, when raised to a global scale , reveal a unifying structural dynamic, where "The South" remains the zone of underdevelopment, abandonment, exploitation, and extraction essential for the accumulation of capital and prestige that sustains the Global North.
In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), Guyanese revolutionary guerrilla intellectual Walter Rodney defines "underdevelopment" as "a processof exploitation, which began with European slave trade, continued through colonialism, and is now being perpetuated by neocolonial and imperialist polices. It is susceptible to eradication only by breaking with the international capitalist system and making the transition to Socialism."
This shared process thus raises an imperative to continue to think about "The South" structurally, as a shared dynamic of both underdevelopment and revolutionary potential. This year, escalating genocides, climate crises, and fascist state terror informed publishing that reflects a South-to-South relation that demonstrates the US and Global South as frontiers for capital's newest regimes of violence and accumulation, as well as the spaces Left movements must look to for their resistance strategies. Scalawag's 2025 South-to-South coverage collects pieces that center the history of imperial repression, the coalescing of the global prison industrial complex and techno-fascist surveillance apparatus, and the practices of radical solidarity in struggle against this violent repression essential for our survival.
If there is to be an abolitionist future, the seeds of those chains' undoing are sewn across multiple Souths.
"From the perspective of the U.S. State Department, Black musicians could function as a sort of Trojan Horse for the spread of American values. The 'Jazz Ambassadors' were thus devised by the State Department to fulfill the cultural mission of Americanisation abroad; an unabashed attempt to export a perverse brand of American exceptionalism and thereby launder the violent history of United States Slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy in the process. By employing Black musicians, many if not most of whom had already faced virulent racism and economic exploitation at home, the State Department sought to lubricate a path toward U.S. cultural influence beyond its borders."
"In his poetry collection Light from Deep Under: Writing and Art from a Palestinian Prisoner, Shukri writes about his dreams of eventual freedom, his family, life in prison, and the genocide in Palestine. With his words, he carries his homeland's revolutionary culture and commitment to resistance."
"Together, occupied Palestine and post-Katrina New Orleans clarify why settler violence is essential for colonial regimes to refute Palestinian and Native American sovereignties, in order to underdevelop, dispossess, and police the Black communities most heavily impacted by Katrina."
"These centuries-long carceral continuums are crystallizing into a transnational security infrastructure that deliberately conflates righteous political dissent with terrorism and extremism, conjoining 'war on terror' and 'war on crime' narratives to co-produce a permanent state of exception."
"U.S. and Israeli officials have made comparisons between their respective walls, Israeli companies provide the same radar and surveillance services used by Israel to the U.S., or law enforcement exchange programs between the U.S. police and Israeli police continue to share suppression tactics. Groups like the Anti-Defamation League have encouraged several exchanges wherein law enforcement officials, including those from ICE, have exchanged 'best practices.'
Moreover, ICE and the IDF have similar modalities—operating through the use of militarized checkpoints, constant surveillance, and sometimes arbitrary detentions and arrests—making the connection between the two entities exceedingly clear."
"ICE and the private prison corporations it holds contracts with are not just collaborating with the U.S. military; they are adopting the military's recruitment playbook—exploiting low-income people in the process, subjecting them to moral injury, and sowing deeply entrenched divisions among communities—all while failing to deliver on their promises of benefits and economic liberation. Working people deserve better than the false choice of (a) living in poverty, or (b) taking a job incarcerating people or becoming a service member of the imperial war machine."
"The same imperial systems that clear-cut Georgia's forests also train its police in the Negev Desert. For decades, the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) has flown Atlanta cops to occupied Palestine to drill with the Israeli Occupation Forces. Now, Cop City, a rehearsal ground for urban warfare, has been erected on stolen Muscogee land. These parallels are not metaphors. They are supply chains."