A truly global history that examines the prospects of a worldwide power shift from North to South.

In The Darker Nations, Vijay Prashad provided an intellectual history of the Third World and traced the rise and fall of the Non-Aligned Movement. With The Poorer Nations, Prashad takes up the story where he left off. Since the '70s, the countries of the global south have struggled to build political movements. Prashad analyses the failures of neoliberalism, as well as the rise of BRICS countries, the World Social Forum, issue-based movement like Via Campesina, the Latin America revolutionary revival — in short,efforts to create alternatives to the neoliberal project advanced militarily by the US and its allies and economically by the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and other instruments of the powerful.

Just as The Darker Nations asserted that the Third World was a project, not a place, The Poorer Nations sees the Global South as a term that properly refers not to geographical space but to a concatenation of protest against neoliberalism.