Vijay Prashad’s landmark previous work, The Darker Nations (New Press) provided an intellectual history of the Third World and chronicled the rise and fall of the Non- Aligned movement. With The Poorer Nations, Prashad picks up where The Darker Nations left off. Past the heyday of the New International Economic Order of the early 1970s, Prashad analyzes the failures of neoliberalism, as well as the rise of the BRICS countries, the World Social Forum, issue-based movements like Via Campesina, and the Latin American revolutionary revival—efforts to create alternatives to the neoliberal project advanced militarily by the US and economically by the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization, and other instruments of the powerful.

Just as Prashad asserted in The Darker Nations that the Third World was a project, not a place, The Poorer Nations sees the Global South as a term that properly refers not to geographical space, but to a concatenation of protests against neoliberalism.

Prashad will be joined by Andy Hsiao, his editor at Verso Books.

Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Professor of South Asian History at Trinity College, Connecticut. He is the author of a number of books, including The Darker Nations: a People’s History of the Third World and Arab Spring, Libyan Winter.

Andrew Hsiao is a senior editor at Verso Books. He was the executive editor of The New Press and a writer and editor for The Village Voice, and is a producer of Asia Pacific Forum on WBAI 99.5FM. He has written for The New York Times, the Washington Post, and other publications, and is the author of a deck of playing cards, Regime Change Begins at Home. He helps coordinate CultureStrike, a national campaign that enlists writers and artists in the immigrant rights movement.