This Third World Quarterly (TWQ) special issue, titled “Third World Radicals”, shows how activists and thinkers from Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa have swapped ideas, images and tactics from the 1950s to the present.
The eight articles move beyond headline cases like Cuba and Algeria to uncover lesser-known stories: Kurdish experiments with grassroots “interactive autonomy,” Egyptian Marxists theorising in exile, and
Sandinistas whose revolution veered into authoritarianism.
“The struggle continues in Palestine and in El Salvador, and the revolution will be victorious”, Jihad Mansour, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, c. 1981. Source: The Palestine Poster Project Archive
Several contributions challenge the enduring myth that religion and socialism are inerently irreconcilable. They trace the emergence of an Islamo-socialist politics in Morocco, examine Argentine Catholics who recast martyrdom as rebellion, and highlight Central American liberation theologians who developed a “methodology of descension” that centres the poor. A visual-culture study of Cuban and Chilean radical magazines shows how bold design and iconography kept the spirit of Third-Worldism alive even under neoliberal gloom.
Read together, this special issue portrays radicalism not as a rigid dogmatism but as a creative, cross-border practice, constantly reinvented through South-South networks, faith traditions and generational dialogues. In an era of renewed authoritarianism, genocide, and global crisis, these histories remind us that alternative futures have long been imagined, and, at times, achieved, through solidarity across regions and differences. It calls for fresh research on overlooked exchanges, inviting scholars to explore and centre old and new South-South itineraries.
Find the Special Issue: Third World Radicals: Revisiting Scholarship on the Radical Left in Latin America and the MENA. Guest Editors: Thiago Prates and Khalil Dahbi
About the Special Issue Guest Editors
Khalil Dahbi is a Research Fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), contributing to the ‘World Order Narratives of the Global South’ project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). He earned his PhD from the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, specialising in political sociology with a regional emphasis on the Maghreb. His research interests encompass social movements, contentious politics, political party dynamics, leftist politics, and the intersection of politics and technology.
Thiago Prates holds a PhD in history from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Social History at the University of São Paulo (USP). His research interests encompass the history of the New Left in Latin America, with a particular focus on the Southern Cone; the intellectual history of Leftist movements; and the Cultural Cold War in Latin America and the Third World.
