World Order Narratives of the Global South (WONAGO)

World Order Narratives of the Global South (WONAGO) is one of the research areas of the department of Global History at the Faculty of History of Hamburg University. Our studies are carried out within the framework of the homonymous project developed in collaboration with the German Institute of Global Area Studies (GIGA) and funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Funding reference: 01UC2106A).

The decades since the late twentieth century are marked by both the end of the bipolar world order and the rise of the countries and regions of the Global South. There are many explanations of these epochal changes. Some see a new hegemony of the USA, others underline multilateralism or a new bloc confrontation between two superpowers, China and the USA. Most of these explanations have in common that they focus on political and economic power and do not pay much attention to ideas of order on which political and economic decisions are based. In particular, little research has been done on ideas that are not from the Global North but from the countries and regions of the South. This also affects cultural and social developments.

The WONAGO team researches influential world order narratives in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. World order narratives are understood as explicitly formulated concepts that articulate power and interests in a way that connects them with ideas about the global position of a country and/or region. Our multinational team of researchers has been studying issues such as postcolonial theories, visual history and colonial photography in Africa, Third World discourses of solidarity and Third-Worldism ideology, narratives of identity and intellectual exchanges between Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

You can check our news and events on this page, find more information about our team members and their respective research projects, and our WONAGO network.