From Non-Alignment to Autonomy in the Global South: A Comparative Essay on Fragmintegration in Africa and Latin America

Resumen

This article focuses on three core conceptual sequences in the trajectory of the Global South since Bandung: non-alignment, the quest for autonomy, and the investment in regionalism as a pathway out of structural dependence. In this regard, the temporal span of postcolonial states’ history cannot be assessed through a simple binary prism—neither as straightforward progressive emancipation nor as the outright failure of a Third Worldist project—but rather as a dynamic of fragmintegration in James Rosenau’s sense, in which forces of integration and fragmentation coexist and partially neutralize one another. Drawing on a comparison between Africa and Latin America, the article shows that this fragmintegration is shaped by distinct bias of concentration: in Latin America, the presence of the United States polarizes regional strategies, whereas in Africa the continued centrality of Europe as a normative, economic and institutional hub operates as a kind of “odor of the father” that affects the trajectories of autonomy. Furthermore, the paper argues that the weakening of South–South solidarities can be explained by a “gaze upon and for oneself” trap: some states in the Global South, having become privileged interlocutors or regional “big brothers”, are courted by great powers and convert their relative success into bilateral capital rather than a resource for coalition-building. The central claim is that the loss of autonomy in the Global South stems not only from the domination exerted by core powers, but also from internal de-solidarization that undermines collective agency.