Conceptualizing the Southern Interregnum across the Asia-Africa Axis

How do we best conceptualize the global South and its role in the rapidly changing world-system of the early twenty-first century? This paper approaches this question through a critical engagement with narratives centred on the idea of a rising South, and especially of claims that emerging powers across Asia and and Africa are spearheading progressive transformations across the contemporary world-system. Against such claims, the article argues that whereas Asian and African emerging powers have been instrumental in driving a reconfiguration of global wealth hierarchies, governing elites in across the two continents confront deep disjunctures between accumulation and legitimation. These disjunctures, I argue, originate in processes of neoliberalization that have deepened inequality and precarity, and manifest in widespread political unrest. Thus, rather than understanding the Asia-Africa axis of world system in terms of a simple story of a rising South, I argue that the current conjuncture is best understood as a southern interregnum – that is, as a protracted moment of crisis in which governing elites in Asia and Africa are compelled mobilize new hegemonic projects to achieve legitimacy. I conclude by reflecting what the character and trajectory of these hegemonic projects – and the wider political economy of the southern interregnum – entail for the future of a fracturing and turbulent world order and for popular classes in Asia and Africa.