Building Sovereignty from a Tricontinental Political Economy

Emiliano López

Shiran Illanperuma

Neoclassical economics had cast Marxist dependency theory (and other heterodox schools of thought) as a relic – a Latin American intellectual curiosity from the Cold War era, now superseded by globalisation, global value chains (GVCs), and the triumph of market-led development. This verdict, repeated in mainstream economics and political science, had acquired the status of common sense and conveniently erased the fact that dependency theory was not the property of a single region, but a Tricontinental intellectual project forged across Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

The dismissal of dependency theory served a very precise function: it cleared the ideological ground for neoliberalism in the periphery by marginalising classical concepts such as imperialism, structural transformation, and the international division of labour. With these concepts out of the way, there were only prices to get right, institutions to build, and markets to open. Underdevelopment became an original state, and modernisation a linear cookie-cutter path prescribed by the Washington Consensus.

When China’s rise – the most spectacular developmental success of our time – became impossible to ignore, Western academia and policy circles rushed to explain it with the neoliberal toolkit: openness to trade, integration into GVCs, and liberalisation. The fact that China’s trajectory rested on precisely what dependency theory prescribed – public ownership over the commanding heights of the economy, capital controls, conditioned foreign investment, and the subordination of external relations to internal developmental priorities – was systematically obscured. The success of the periphery had to be narrated as a vindication of the centre’s prescriptions.

The Hegemony Cracks, but the Chains Remain

As the twenty-first century unfolds, the neoliberal order is in crisis. In the core, neoliberalism has led to financialisation and deindustrialisation. In the periphery, integration into GVCs created new structural barriers to technological upgrading (often misdiagnosed as a ‘middle-income trap’). In both the core and the periphery, the result has been social polarisation and a crisis of political legitimacy for the ruling class.

The instability and unreliability of the US-led economic order have created cracks in the neoliberal order’s superstructure. The economic rise of China (now accounting for 30% of global manufacturing production), combined with new efforts at South-centred regionalism (ALBA-TCP, AES) and South-South multilateralism (BRICS+), reflects a new mood in the Global South. The unipolar moment is ending, regardless of Washington’s increasingly erratic attempts to resuscitate it through tariff wars, sanctions regimes, and military provocations. The gilded chains of the neoliberal era – free trade agreements, concessions to foreign investors, and the international intellectual property – are increasingly replaced by blunt instruments.

The peripheral economies of Africa, Latin America, and large parts of Asia remain trapped in patterns of subordination that Paul Baran, Samir Amin, Ruy Mauro Marini, and Theotônio dos Santos would have recognised immediately. Financial hierarchies still discipline peripheral monetary policy through the dollar system and the IMF. Technological concentration in a handful of transnational corporations still excludes the periphery from innovation frontiers. Profit repatriation, interest transfers, and the systematic compression of wages below reproduction costs – what Marini called super exploitation, the mechanism by which peripheral capital compensates for its structural disadvantages by squeezing workers harder than the centre ever needs to – continue to operate as the hidden architecture of global accumulation.

The difference is that these mechanisms now operate through what appear to be voluntary, market-driven processes. The compulsion is no longer primarily colonial; it is embedded in the financial architecture, in intellectual property regimes, in the institutional design of trade agreements, and in the structure of GVCs where peripheral firms occupy subordinate positions by design, not by accident. Yet the intensification of militarization and the open weaponization of tariffs, sanctions, and technology controls – particularly visible since the late 2010s – reveal that coercion has never truly receded. It has, rather, been held in reserve: the lead pipe behind the invisible hand, deployed whenever the softer mechanisms of financial and institutional subordination prove insufficient to discipline peripheral states or contain the rise of competitors. Dependency has not disappeared. It has been laundered – and when the laundering fails, the force behind it is made explicit once more.

The ‘Good Governance’ and State ‘Capacity’ Illusion

For the past three decades, the twin concepts of ‘state capacity’ and ‘good governance’ have been invoked as the key to overcoming underdevelopment. Build better institutions, strengthen governance, reduce corruption, and improve the business environment – these were the mantras of the post-Washington Consensus. Even some heterodox economists embraced a version of this argument, pointing to the East Asian developmental states as proof that state capacity could overcome structural constraints.

What much of this literature refuses to confront is that what has been celebrated as ‘state capacity’ and ‘good governance’ in most of the Global South was often nothing more than the subordination of public institutions and policies to the interests of foreign capital and its local allies. This meant the depoliticisation of economic policy and governance, substituting ‘independent technocrats’ for political representatives. Thus, ‘good governance’ and ‘crony capitalism’ are not opposites but in fact twins.

The neoliberal state in the periphery was never weak or ineffectual. On the contrary, it was quite effective in disciplining labour, asset stripping public enterprises, privatising natural resources, deregulating financial flows, and dismantling industrial policy. State capacity did not fail but was built in the service of a class project; governance was, in fact, ‘good’ for a narrow ruling class.

The peripheral bourgeoisie, unable to directly compete with the more technologically advanced and financially wealthy firms in the core, often willingly entered a junior partnership in the chain of dependency. They embraced a programme of dismantling developmental institutions and smashing the local proletariat and peasantry to secure their domestic class position. They were satisfied playing the role of merchant mediaries to the financial-industrial combines of the core. The IMF may have provided the script, but domestic compradors were often eager performers.

The comprador bourgeoisies of the periphery – local capitalist classes whose profits depend not on developing the domestic economy but on brokering its subordination to foreign capital, what Vania Bambirra called ‘dominated-dominant’ classes – found in neoliberal restructuring the perfect vehicle for consolidating their own position within the global hierarchy of capital accumulation.

The institutionalist and developmental state literature, when uncritically applied to peripheral realities, mystifies this process by treating state capacity as a neutral endowment rather than a contested terrain shaped by class struggle.

A Theory Forged across Three Continents

Overcoming this impasse requires reconstructing Marxist dependency theory as the cornerstone of a Tricontinental political economy. The standard narrative reduces dependency to a Latin American affair of the 1960s – Raúl Prebisch’s terms of trade, the structuralism of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, and the disappointments of import substitution. Provincializing a dependency theory, a global intellectual project, severs it from its roots in classical theories of imperialism and from the sustained dialogue across Latin America, Africa, and Asia that gave it its analytical power.

One of the earliest analyses of colonial wealth extraction, in fact, originates in Asia, where Indian nationalist Dadabhai Naoroji analysed Britain’s drain of wealth from India – a scholarship that has been developed over time by Indian Marxist economists like Utsa Patnaik. In China, Mao Zedong identified the comprador class as ‘appendages of imperialism’ that actively ‘hinder the development of productive forces. For Africa, Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin analysed how local economies were structurally oriented toward serving external demand rather than internal needs, while Guyanese historian Walter Rodney demonstrated how Europe systematically underdeveloped the continent through centuries of colonial extraction and social restructuring.

These strands of thought constituted an integrated intellectual project, forged through a shared history of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle, and encounters like the 1955 Bandung Conference, the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, and the 1972 Dakar Conference convened by Amin. Crucially, this tradition understood dependency not as a post-war anomaly but as a longue durée – a structural condition rooted in the colonial foundations of the capitalist world system. Dependency theory articulated a general theory of how global capitalism systematically produces and reproduces structural asymmetries through class configurations that are simultaneously domestic and international – and it did so from the standpoint of three continents, not one.

Mapping Contemporary Dependency

Building on this tradition, I have developed a dual analytical framework built around two indices. The Structural Dependency Index (SDI) measures objective constraints across commercial, technological, financial, productive, network, and distributive dimensions – capturing how contemporary dependency operates through the entire circuit of capital. The State Mediating Capacity (SMC) index measures the institutional resources available to navigate these constraints – from public-sector control over strategic sectors to capital-flow regulation and industrial policy intensity.

The intersection of these two dimensions generates what I call the Dependency Map:

At one end of this map, we find what I call Non-Hegemonic Autonomy – economies like China, Vietnam, and, to a lesser extent, Malaysia that have managed to subordinate their external relations to internal developmental priorities. What makes their autonomy distinctive is that it does not derive from imperial positioning at the apex of the global hierarchy, but from a deliberate political and institutional strategy: what Amin theorised as the condition for autocentric peripheral development. The hegemonic centres – the United States, Germany, Japan – also display low dependency, but for qualitatively different reasons that reflect imperial extraction rather than developmental achievement.

The most troubling configuration is that of the Subordinate Periphery – economies trapped in high dependency with depleted institutional capacity. Argentina, Chile, Peru, Honduras, Kenya, the Philippines: these are societies where decades of structural adjustment have dismantled the very institutions that might have enabled a different trajectory. The perverse logic here is self-reinforcing – the weaker the state’s developmental capacity, the deeper the dependency, the more difficult it becomes to reconstruct that capacity.

Finally, the most analytically significant – and politically contested – terrain is what I term the Contested Semi-Periphery. India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Turkey, Nigeria, and arguably Russia occupies this space, where significant state capacity coexists with persistent structural constraints. These economies possess institutional resources that could, under different class configurations, be deployed for genuine developmental transformation. But they remain trapped in contradictory positions: enough capacity to resist full subordination, yet insufficient political articulation to break the structural logic of dependency. It is precisely in this contested zone where the political stakes of the multipolar transition are highest.

The Pathway That Matters: from Quadrant III to Quadrant I

The critical insight of this framework is not the static classification but the path of transformation it reveals. The decisive question for the Global South today is how to move from Quadrant III to Quadrant I – from Subordinate Periphery to Non-Hegemonic Autonomy. This is not merely a technical question but also a political one.

The first movement (from III to IV) requires the reconstruction of institutional foundations for autonomous action: rebuilding public control over finance, developing people-centred industrial policy, strengthening fiscal and monetary sovereignty, and regulating capital flows. This is the terrain of ‘state capacity’ and ‘good governance’, but not in the depoliticised sense of the mainstream literature. The state itself is a field of class struggle – rebuilding administrative institutions requires confronting domestic elites that benefit from the existing order.

The second movement (from IV to I) requires the strategic deployment of accumulated capacity to restructure domestic accumulation patterns – what Amin called ‘delinking’, understood not as autarky but as the subordination of external relations to internal developmental priorities. China’s trajectory demonstrates that this requires not isolation from the world economy but strategic conditioning of integration: capital controls, technology-transfer requirements on foreign investors, state ownership of commanding heights, and selective engagement with global markets under sovereign direction.

The contemporary multipolar conjuncture creates conditions more favourable for both movements than the unipolar moment ever did. The institutional architecture of South-South cooperation – BRICS+, the Belt and Road Initiative, alternative development banks, and bilateral arrangements outside the dollar circuit – provides material alternatives to Western-dominated institutions. But the capacity to leverage these opportunities varies dramatically depending on where countries sit in the Dependency Map. Countries in Quadrant IV can extract developmental benefits from new partnerships; countries in Quadrant III risk merely shifting the locus of their subordination from Washington to somewhere else.

This is why class analysis remains indispensable. The obstacle to peripheral development lies not in cultural factors or policy failures, but in the class configurations that peripheral capitalism systematically produces. Comprador bourgeoisies – whether they wear the mask of neoliberal technocrats or nationalist populists – will not lead a genuine process of delinking, because their accumulation depends on maintaining the dependent relationship. The transformation from subordination to sovereignty has never resulted solely from elite-led modernisation. It has always required broad coalitions from below – workers’ movements, peasant organizations, popular forces – capable of articulating a coherent political project that challenges the structural foundations of dependency.

The analytical categories of Marxist dependency theory – super exploitation, unequal exchange, the comprador bourgeoisie, and delinking – remain both relevant and vital today. They are the theoretical weapons forged by a Tricontinental political economy that helps us to understand the structural constraints facing the Global South and identify the political strategies capable of overcoming them.

The multipolar moment opens a door. But doors close. The question is whether the popular forces of the periphery – across Latin America, Africa, and Asia – can build the social movements and political leadership to walk through it.

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Emiliano López is a researcher at CONICET-Universidad Nacional de La Plata and Chief Economist at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. His recent work develops renewed frameworks for dependency analysis as the cornerstone of the Global South political economy in the multipolar era.

Shiran Illanperuma is a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and a co-editor of the international edition of Wenhua Zongheng: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Thought. He is a Visiting Lecturer at Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies. His current research focuses on development and industrial policy in Asia.