We hosted the second Political Economy of the Global South Conference (PEGS) in Bogota, Colombia.
On March 16 and 17, we held the second edition of the Political Economy of the Global South Conference (PEGS) at the Universidad de los Andes.
The meeting brought together academics and international experts in sessions on extractivism, inequality, informality, global fragmentation and international trade, as well as in discussions on new forms of cooperation in the face of the challenges of ecological transition and sustainable development.
These sessions sought to answer a fundamental question that, as Jimena Hurtado, Vice Rector for Research and Creation at the Universidad de los Andes and co-founder of TREES, put it: “How can we understand an economy that does not work for everyone in countries where inequality is not a figure but a daily reality?.
From this perspective, the conference also sought to generate exchanges between countries of the global south that share histories of violence and the search for ways to transform them, with a potential that goes beyond academic dialogue. In Hurtado's words, this type of space allows the construction of collaborations that connect knowledge with concrete historical, institutional and social processes.
The keynote address was given by Julieta Lemaitre, magistrate of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), whose career embodies precisely this crossover between academia and institutions. Her intervention addressed the relationship between citizenship and state, the ways in which communities build solutions in contexts of state absence and the role of justice in post-conflict scenarios, showing how institutions can both reproduce and transform inequalities.
Below, you can view an illustrated publication summarizing ‘Reconstructing’, Lemaitre's keynote lecture.
Thus, PEGS is conceived as a broader process of dialogue among countries of the global South, recognizing both their differences and the existence of shared structural challenges, including inequalities. It does so by articulating the work of centers or initiatives such as TREES in Colombia, the Center for Critical Imagination (Cebrap) in Brazil, the Applied Economics Program of El Colegio de México, Pathways Beyond Neoliberalism in the American University in Egypt, and the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at Wits University in South Africa, which collaborate within the Emerging Political Economies (EPE) Network.
As part of this effort to articulate a network of countries that share similar realities, the conference also reflects a commitment to amplify knowledge of these contexts. In Hurtado's words, the aim is to build agendas that are not “recipients of frameworks developed in other contexts, but interlocutors with their own voice and questions”.
In the same vein, several of the panels highlighted the need to review the frameworks from which the problems of the global south are understood. “It is important to have a global south perspective for a global economy. Sometimes we think from a perspective that doesn't resonate with the way people in these countries live,” said Pierre Nguimkeu, professor of economics at Georgia State University and director of the Africa Growth Initiative at the Brookings Institution.
An example of this type of discussion was the session on inequality, led by Leopoldo Fergusson, professor at the School of Economics of the Universidad de los Andes and co-founder of TREES, with the participation of Rodrigo Uprimny, senior researcher at Dejusticia and professor at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and Raymundo Campos and Aurora Ramírez Álvarez, professors at El Colegio de México.
There, different dimensions of the structural gaps in the region and the challenges to address them from interdisciplinary approaches were discussed. As Uprimny pointed out, there is a disconnect between the field of human rights and the analysis of inequality: while normative frameworks have made progress in addressing discrimination between groups, “when one enters the field of social and economic inequality, the human rights movement is, in a certain sense, silent”. Along these lines, he stressed the need to connect rights more directly with the dynamics of inequality, not only as a theoretical problem, but also as a practical one.
In this regard, Fergusson stressed that inequality is not limited to income differences, but produces deeper forms of social separation: “people with different income levels live so far apart that they end up being culturally distinct, as if they were different groups”. In this sense, he stressed that one of the central challenges is to think about these gaps not only in terms of distribution, but also in terms of rights and what it means to have an equal position in society, particularly in contexts such as those of Latin America.
Labor informality was another of the central themes of the meeting. Laura Alfers, WIEGO's international coordinator, raised the discussion aligned with the idea that the frameworks do not coincide with the realities of the countries of the South: “60% of workers are in informal employment, something that could increase with technological change. Our labor institutions are still oriented around an idea imported from countries in the global north, developed in the 1940s and 1950s for labor markets that do not exist in the south.”
In addition to the academic sessions, the conference included a research workshop, a teaching session and strategic spaces for articulation between centers in the global south that are part of the Emerging Political Economies Network, These meetings helped to consolidate a south-south network to promote those voices and questions of their own. These meetings contributed to consolidate a south-south network to promote these voices and questions.
Throughout the event, the persistence of overlapping and mutually reinforcing structural gaps was highlighted, many of which go unnoticed because we tend to always look in the same places. In this context, the conference highlighted the need to broaden the analytical approach. In Hurtado's words: “to broaden our gaze, to look where we usually do not look and to accept that absence in the record [evidence or data] does not mean absence in reality”.
