How do people use digital platforms to resist authoritarianism?  
How do extreme forms of labour exploitation sustain the development of AI while deepening existing hierarchies between the Global North and South?

Broad questions to be explored include:
How does platform capitalism reshape labour in largely informal, precarious economies? How does digital colonialism function within specific parts of the Global South?

Digital labour and authoritarianism – mapping transformations under platform capitalism from the Global South Submit your abstract for this special issue on platform capitalism, labour and communication in the Global South and contemporary authoritarianism.

Call for Papers For a TWQ Special Issue on
Digital labour and authoritarianism 
📅 Abstracts: 5 May 2026
📅 Papers: 5 August 2026
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New open-access research in Third World Quarterly traces how Saudi women entering football stadiums since 2018 are reshaping gender authority — not just watching games.Challenges both the reform hype and the sportswashing dismissal.

‘We’re in the stadium; our husbands in the mall with the children’: Saudi female football fans as agents of social change This paper examines the pivotal role of female fandom in the processes of social change in Saudi Arabia. As part of the Saudi Vision 2030 initiative, women were permitted to enter stadiums for the ...

"We're in the stadium; our husbands in the mall with the children."

Aila Bandagi Kandlakunta & Jessie Clark explore how women’s mobility in Hyderabad is shaped by negotiations of authority within families and communities, showing how gender norms continue to mediate access to urban mobility.
#GenderStudies #UrbanStudies #Mobility #ThirdWorldQuarterly #GlobalSouth

Who decides how women travel? Gender, authority and transportation in Hyderabad, India This paper examines how authority is constituted and negotiated in the context of women’s everyday transportation in Hyderabad, the capital city of the newly formed Indian state of Telangana. Drawi...

Who decides how women move through cities?
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Thank you to everyone who has followed and engaged with our work. We truly appreciate your interest and support. 
We look forward to continuing to share new research and perspectives with you. 📚✨

How can the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) contribute to the making of a Global South-centered multipolar world? Special issue aims to refresh critical engagements with the BRI as a transcontinental collaboration impacting—and shaped by—the Global South. Submit now!

⏰ Last call — abstracts due 15 April 2026

Topics: trade, digital infrastructure, green finance, education partnerships, AI governance, and more.

Submit your abstract 👇

Dark IR: Do ‘Dark Times’ Demand Dark Critique? - GLOBAL SOUTHS HUB In this blogpost, Srishti Malaviya, a scholar of International Relations (IR) theory, examines how conventional ideas about inclusion and emancipation can sometimes unintentionally reinforce exclusion, and explores Dark IR as an experimental way to understand and navigate the politics of today’s global crises. “To respond with critique that tries to weave everything back into a Dark IR: Do ‘Dark Times’ Demand Dark Critique?

What if the problem isn't that we're not being inclusive enough, but that inclusion itself can reproduce the very hierarchies we seek to dismantle?
A timely and thought-provoking contribution by Srishti Malaviya.

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The article examines how design practices shaped responses to so-called “natural” disasters, contributing to debates on innovation and humanitarian governance.

Part of the forthcoming special issue Design Emergencies — stay tuned 👀
#ThirdWorldQuarterly #HumanitarianAid #Resilience #DesignResearch

Resilience by design: emergency architecture, testing and the ecology of aid (1970–1980) Since the late 2000s, the humanitarian sector has witnessed what scholars have described as an ‘innovation turn’ in response to what humanitarian innovators conceive as the field’s inefficient, bac...

New in TWQ: Tania Messell explores the intersections of architecture, humanitarian response, and resilience in the 1970s–1980s.

📖 Open access:

Bernardo Carvalho de Mello, Law School, @newcastleuni.bsky.social, in new research in Third World Quarterly, examines how the Inter-American Human Rights System continues to marginalise Indigenous knowledge systems, despite progressive jurisprudence on Indigenous rights.

Epistemic violence in the Inter-American human rights system: Indigenous cosmologies, legal pluralism and paths towards decolonial justice This article examines how epistemic violence operates within the Inter-American Human Rights System through the systematic marginalisation of Indigenous knowledge systems. Despite progressive juris...

How does international law reproduce epistemic violence?

In new research, published in Third World Quarterly, Christopher Szabla, Assistant Professor in International Law at Durham University, traces the roots of contemporary migration debates to the “long 1970s.”, which was a key turning point in global migration governance.

The rise of repatriation: Global South refugees and forerunners of the International Organization for Migration in the long 1970s Contemporary international migration debates have been marked by a confrontation between the requirements of refugee and asylum law, on the one hand, and accusations they are being abused, concerns...

When did today’s migration debates really begin?

Constitutional challenges of green development projects: how financialised global commodity chains intensify extractivism in Brazil This article examines the legal dynamics of two critical sectors shaped by a ‘green development’ ideal: the expansion of soybean agriculture and lithium mining in Brazil’s Cerrado region. Recent tr...

How does law shape extractive economies in the name of “green development”? 🌱
Sanchez-Badin argues that Law doesn’t just regulate extraction—it can be a site of extraction itself.

🔗 Read the article below.

Operationalising the Liptako-Gourma charter: Alliance des États du Sahel Unified Force, sovereignty imaginaries and the (re)making of security order in Central Sahel The launch of the Alliance des États du Sahel (AES) Unified Force by Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger marks one of the most consequential reconfigurations of regional security governance in West Africa...

Can the new Alliance des États du Sahel (AES) Unified Force stabilise the Central Sahel?

Insightful Research Note by @woleojewale.bsky.social from Dakar, published in Third World Quarterly.

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🎉 Congrats to @jittipm.bsky.social winner of the 2026 Edward Said Award @thirdworldq.bsky.social awarded at @isanet.bsky.social 👏

Her paper on epistemic exclusion in climate science highlights how #GlobalSouth knowledge is marginalised with real consequences for climate policy.

Ecological labour law, just transition and extractivist constitutionalism: Argentina in light of Inter-American jurisprudence This article examines the prospects and limits of developing an ecological labour law within Argentina’s extractivist constitutional order. Argentina constitutes a paradigmatic case of structural c...

New article out in @thirdworldq.bsky.social. I explore whether labour law can move beyond its productivist logic and how the notion of a just transition (referenced by the IACtHR) may help rethink labour law so that climate transitions leave no workers behind.

🔗 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

From ghost projects to grassroots future: the Gwadar Haq Do Tehreek and reclamation of failed development in Gwadar, Balochistan In this paper, we delve into the lingering spectral presences resulting from the failed China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) infrastructural endeavour in Gwadar, Balochistan. We focus specifical...

What happens to infrastructure after development fails?

Part of the Ghost Projects Special Issue 

Read the full article: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0143659...

#ThirdWorldQuarterly #GhostProjects #Infrastructure #CPEC #Balochistan

The study focuses on three issues: the overall extent of public support, the characteristics of supporters and opponents, and the factors each prioritise when evaluating Hezbollah.

📢 New research in TWQ by Kota Suechika, scholar of Middle Eastern politics and Professor at the College of International Relations, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan, examines this question through original survey experiments with 823 Lebanese adults (in January and February 2025).

Fixed attitudes, contextual shifts: deconstructing public support for Lebanese Hezbollah through survey experiments This study examines Hezbollah – the most powerful armed non-state actor (ANSA) in Lebanon and the Middle East – through an original survey experiment with 823 adults (January–February 2025). It int...

How does the Lebanese public perceive Hezbollah?

Reworlding feminism and social movements from the Global South Based on the Womandla! Feminism and Social Movements in the Global South Online Seminar Series, this special issue originated in a conference that was to be held in South Africa but became caught u...

🌍✊ ✨ To celebrate the 67th International Studies Assocation Convention in Columbus, Ohio and Women’s History Month, TWQ’s special issue Womandla! in the Global South is now free to read until 30 April 2026.

📖 Read the article and join the conversation:

Ritu Vij - GLOBAL SOUTHS HUB Academic Editor, Third World Quarterly Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Aberdeen. Research interests: Social theory; International Political Economy; Social Policy and Civil Society About Ritu Vij is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Aberd...

Welcome Dr Ritu Vij to the Third World Quarterly! 📚🌍

🔗 Read more about her in the @globalsouthshub.bsky.social 
https://globalsouth.org/ritu-vij/

#ThirdWorldQuarterly #GlobalSouth #InternationalRelations

The geopolitics of reporting a genocide: an analysis of the coverage of the Israeli invasion of Gaza in Foreign Affairs and the New York Times This article critically examines the media coverage of the Israeli war on Gaza following the invasion of October 2023. It reports on a critical discourse analysis of Foreign Affairs output (the off...

📢 New in TWQ 
How elite media shape Gaza war narratives — and why accountability matters. 

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📢 Join us at ISA 2026

TWQ is pleased to sponsor a Joint Drinks Reception.

📅 Sunday, 22 March
⏰ 7:15 – 10:15 PM
📍 Room T01 – Hayes, Hyatt Regency Columbus

We look forward to seeing colleagues and friends there.

📢 TWQ is recruiting a Coordinating Lead Editor

A unique opportunity for an academic with a strong record in Global South Studies.

📅 Application Deadline: 31 May 2026

🔗 Read more
think.taylorandfrancis.com/editor_recru...

Ghana in the age of cities: critical challenges to the urban informal economy in Ghana Rapid urbanisation and informality are characteristic features of many developing countries. Ghana, like many other sub-Saharan African countries, is undergoing rapid urbanisation. The urbanisation...

📢 New in TWQ

𝐆𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐚 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬: 𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐮𝐫𝐛𝐚𝐧 𝐢𝐧𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐥 𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐲 𝐢𝐧 𝐆𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐚 

How can policymakers better support informal workers in rapidly urbanising cities? 🌍

Read here 🔗 https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2026.2632715

#NewPublication #PhdSky