Transnational Development, Women and

What is the Third world?

Third World is a highly contentious term. Feminist academics such as Chandra Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres are some of the pioneering scholars in critical analysis of the Third-World discourse. The Third World refers to Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia (excluding Japan.) The term emerged after World War II, when a large number of countries gained their independence from colonial powers. By the 1960s and 1970s, it described countries that shared a series of characteristics, namely, poor, nonindustrial, peripheral to the global system, and ex-colonial. However, since then, the Third World has grown increasingly diverse and thus the concept significantly less useful. Other terms have thus emerged. For example, economists tend to use “less-developed countries” (LDCs) in contrast to the developed countries of the “First World.” For many, LDC is inadequate as it furthers the paternalistic First World/Third World relationship based on, among other things, the notion that the Third World is poor due to its own incompetence. International relations experts often use the term South or Global South, which stems from the geopolitical split that puts the more industrialized countries in the Northern Hemisphere, and vice versa. Often, South and North are preferred, since they are based on shared geography rather than oversimplified assumptions about common political and cultural characteristics. Yet these terms are also inadequate, since not all Third-World countries are in the Southern Hemisphere, and vice versa.

Cultural critics often use the term postcolonial, in part because it captures a shared history of colonialism. Like the others, this term has also been criticized for oversimplifying and homogenizing the diverse experiences of colonialism. For example, much of Latin America achieved independence significantly earlier than most African nations, thus minimizing the similarities in national experience implied by the blanket term. Additionally, the use of postcolonial has been criticized for downplaying the perseverance of a colonial presence in so-called independent nations.

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