World-Historical Trajectory and Contour of Struggles Against Exploitation in the Global South in Long Durée

This study explores the world-historical trajectory and contour of struggles against exploitation in the global South in the long twentieth century. This study develops a more inclusive concept of labor unrest focusing on the primary theme of exploitation in the global South. Struggles against exploitation thus include social movements, popular protests, and labor unrests that mobilize people to demand an end to their capitalist exploitation. Based on this conceptual discussion, this study examines 4,400 protest events spanning 43 countries/regions in the global South in The New York Times from 1870 to 2020. One of the most striking findings of the empirical investigation is the identification of four greater waves – 1918-22, 1928-38, 1945-66, and 1980-90 – of popular struggles against exploitation in the global South while the overall frequency of struggles began to decline since the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century. In addition, the epicenter of struggles against exploitation has shifted from the upper-tier semiperiphery to core-contenders of semiperiphery after the protest wave of the long 1950s. Regionally, the main clusters of struggles against exploitation in the global South moved from Latin America (Mexico, Argentina, Cuba, Brazil, and Chile) to Eastern Europe (Poland and Russia) during the wave of the 1980s and then to Asia (India and China) after the four greater protest waves in the twentieth century. As a result, the temporal and spatial clusters of struggles against exploitation in the global South have been changed in the long twentieth century due to the logic and characteristics of each phase of hegemonic cycles in the global political process as well as the long-term dynamics of capitalist accumulation in the capitalist world-economy.