Start Here: What This Substack Is About

There is a question that haunts the three continents.

It is not why we are poor — because we are not poor. Latin America, Africa, and Asia hold the world’s minerals, oil, lithium, fertile soil, and labour. The question is not about scarcity. It has never been about scarcity.

The question is: where does the wealth go — and who decides how it is distributed?

This Substack follows the surplus. We trace how wealth is extracted from the countries that produce it and accumulated by the countries that don’t — through capital flight, debt traps, unequal exchange, and the class alliances that make the whole system work.

This is a collective project of Tricontinental Political Economy at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Our team brings together researchers across Latin America, Africa, and Asia — the three continents whose intellectual traditions and political struggles gave rise to dependency theory in the first place. Each article is signed by its author or authors, but the programme is shared: rigorous theory, empirical evidence constructed from the standpoint of the three continents, and the political question that dependency theory has always insisted on asking — not just how does the system work? but what would it take to change it?

WHERE TO START

This Substack is built as a cumulative argument. Each series of notes takes up one dimension of the dependency structure. Here’s where to begin, depending on what interests you:

📊 The data — “Where Does the Surplus Go?” asks what happens to the wealth produced in the Global South. Using diverse indicators of dependent accumulation across 41 countries and 26 years — surplus reinvestment, capital flight, unequal exchange, productive concentration — we track how Latin America reinvests only 15% of its economic surplus while China reinvests 36%. The gap explains ‘underdevelopment’ better than any corruption index.

💸 The financial trap — “The Financial Leash” maps capital flight across Latin America and Africa. Chile loses 9.1% of its GDP annually. Nigeria lost $340 billion. The Republic of Congo’s capital flight is equal to 706% of its GDP. The data is devastating — and it has a direction.

🧭 The framework — We build original analytical tools to measure dependency across multiple dimensions simultaneously: commercial, financial, productive, network, distributive, and technological. Not just ‘are you dependent?’ but how, through which channels, and what would it take to break free.

🌍 The geopolitics — If the old hegemony is dying, what are the conditions for building something different? Multipolar does not mean just. The question is whether popular forces can walk through the door before it closes.

🧠 The tradition — From Baran to Amin, from Marini to Rodney, from Mao to Bambirra, the three continents of the Global South have produced a body of thought that mainstream economics has tried to bury. We recover these thinkers and put their categories to work on the concrete problems of our time: financialisation, platform capitalism, the green transition, food sovereignty, and debt crises.

🗺️ Regional analyses — Country and regional studies that go beyond the headline: Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, South and East Asia. What does the data say about Argentina’s capital flight? About the class structure behind Nigeria’s oil wealth? About India’s industrial trajectory?

WHAT TO EXPECT

Long-form articles, data-driven analyses, regional studies, and shorter notes — all theoretically grounded and politically honest. No punditry. No hot takes. The kind of analysis that takes the three continents seriously as producers of knowledge, not just objects of study.