The State in the Third World

Abstract

The changing imagery of the Third World state reflects the new reality, particularly for states in Africa and large parts of Latin and Central American, Asia, and the Middle East as well as those Eastern European states that have now been downgraded from the Second to the Third World. Despite the formidable heterogeneity of this 'South' and the susceptibility to charges of ethnocentrism and simplification to which one exposes oneself in trying to deal with it as one undifferentiated whole, the states, or most of them, do, I think, share a common reality in their subordinate situation - their peripheralization or marginalization - within an increasingly globalized and polarized world capitalist system. This justifies the blanket term 'Third World;' and it is with this rapidly changing and evolving entity that the present contribution is concerned.