Beyond "dichotomania"

The invention of the categories of “developed” and
“developing” in the mid-20th century created a representation of
the world whose impact has been nothing short of extraordinary.
So much so that this binary opposition still constitutes today the
basis for mapping all international institutions and global policies:
globalization has been written in the language of development.
This bipartition of the world has a double nature: it separates
countries according to their economic and social indicators, but it
also constitutes a division of nations according to shared identities,
forged by modern history, along a dominant/dominated axis.
However, since the beginning of the 21st century, the bipartition
of the world into two homogeneous and separate economic blocs
has been increasingly contradicted by facts. The “camel-like” global
distribution of income has evolved from a “two-humped” model
to a “one-humped”, Gaussian configuration. Regardless of the
indicators one chooses to focus on, the world remains marked by
deep inequalities, but has also become more “compact”, which has
allowed for a state of developmental in-betweenness of considerable
magnitude. At the same time, the political identity shared
by countries originally defined as developing seems to have endured
the test of time and has become a given in the cartographies of
global policies. As a result, political structure of the world no longer
corresponds to its material structure. The emergence and rapid
affirmation of the notion of a global South is presumably part of this
perspective.
It is thus time to move beyond the dichotomy of development
and to sketch new worlds for global politics.