Fourth World

Fourth world refers to those persons, groups, and places left behind in the process of globalization and resulting changes in urban and regional systems—including urban and nonurban spaces in both developed countries and the developing world. The term has an interesting history, emerging from an earlier discourse that highlighted the social exclusion of indigenous and minority populations, then highlighting increased poverty and social exclusion in third world nations, and now finding its place within urban studies with new and significant meanings.

The generic label fourth world begins in the development literature that described different regions of the world according to the geopolitics of the postwar twentieth century: The first world included Europe and the United States, and the second world included the Soviet Union and satellite countries in Eastern Europe. The Third World included all other countries, a diverse collection of countries with high levels of industrial development as well as less developed economies, including nations in Africa, South America, and Asia that are commonly thought of as the developing world. Immanuel Wallerstein's world systems theory placed countries within a three-tier system of core, semiperiphery, and periphery based on their level of incorporation within the global capitalist economy; nations might move upward or downward within this system as resources and obstacles within the world capitalist system change.

While fourth world refers to concepts from and thereby fits within the general development literature, it has substantially different meanings. In North America, the fourth world emerged from the growing Native American activism over environmental issues and the development of American Indian Studies programs in North America. George Manuel and Michael Poslum's The Fourth World: An Indian Reality argued that the fourth world contains “many different cultures and lifeways, some highly tribal and traditional, some highly urban and individual” and included aboriginal populations across the globe, including Native Americans as well as aboriginal groups in Australia and New Zealand and the Sami in Scandinavia. The Dene Declaration, signed by some 300 delegates to the Indian Brotherhood at Fort Simpson (Northwest Territories) in 1975, stated, “We the Dene are part of the Fourth World. And as the peoples and nations of the world have come to recognize the existence and rights of those peoples who make up the Third World the day must come and will come when the nations of the Fourth World will come to be recognized and respected.” A contemporaneous United Nations study of fourth-world populations highlighted the social exclusion of included ethnic and religious minorities around the globe, including aborigines in Australia, ethnic minorities in Africa, and religious minorities in the Soviet Union. Within this framework, in other words, the people of the fourth world may share common status of social exclusion and denial of basic rights due to their condition of [Page 281]statelessness. The 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recognized the struggle of indigenous peoples and has led to increased communications and organizing among fourth-world peoples as well as international treaties between aboriginal nations for the purposes of trade, travel, and security. The Center for World Indigenous Studies, founded in Canada in 1984, gives voice to the shared concerns of these stateless and marginalized nations across the globe through the Fourth World Journal, which includes articles on globalization, land rights, climate change, and other issues.

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