South-South Cooperation: building bridges between Latin America and Africa

LUCILA ROSSO; VALERIA GIACCHINO; ANDREA MOLINARI

Acra

Congreso; ISA Accra International Conference: Exploring the Agency of the Global South in International Studies (Practices); 2019

International Studies Association

The beginning of the 21st century has been marked by the emergence of powers from the developing world, with a growing weight of the Global South within the international system. The alliances achieved by these countries gave a new impetus to multilateralism and placed development at the center of the global agenda. As a result, since the early 2000s, South-South Cooperation (SSC) has been gaining increasing prominence and constituting an integral part of the cooperation strategy of a large number of developing countries (LDCs). Within such framework, this article aims at reflecting upon the contributions of this kind of cooperation modality. Focusing through its political, technical and economic dimensions, it also analyses the strengthening of interregional integration processes. To do so, we study the Latin America - Africa case. With this in mind, we investigate the relationship between these two regions and the existing and potential SSC among their countries. We take into account the similarities they present in terms of their development challenges, seeking to identify the SSC potential that can improve the external insertion of LDCs and their productive structure diversification.