The Dictionary of Human Geography

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geographers have used the term to displace

oppositional categories in geographical analy-

sis, such as the opposition between academic

theorizing and political activism (Routledge,

1996b; see also Pile, 1994; and seeactivism).

Hyndman (2003) argues that feministgeo-

politicsrepresents a third space in the con-

text of thewaronterrorism, beyond the

binaries of either/or, here/there and us/them

(seefeminist geographies). Rather than pro-

mote an oppositional stance in relation to par-

ticular political principles or acts, the third

space attempts to map the silences of the dom-

inant geopolitical positions and undo these by

invoking multiple scales of enquiry and

knowledge production.

Third spaces also challenge conventional

understandings of the world by reconceptualiz-

ing ways of thinking about space. For

Soja (1996b), drawing on Lefebvre (1991b),

the notion of third space disrupts many of the

binaries through which geographers have often

conceptualized space itself (see alsoproduc-

tion of space). The third space is simul-

taneously material and symbolic, and also

eludes the distinction Soja detects in much

Westernphilosophybetween dynamictime

and staticspace. For Soja (1996b, p. 11),

third space is ‘simultaneously real and

imagined and more’. This ‘more’ is where

Soja locates the critical potential of third

space: it is more because it both contains bin-

ary ways of thinking about space but also

exceeds them with a lived intractability to

interpretative schemas that allows for poten-

tially emancipatory practices. However, third

spaces are not always emancipatory forma-

tions: Gregory (2004b) argues that detention

camps such as Camp X-ray at Guantanamo

Bay are extraterritorial – liminal places that are

within sovereign states yet outside of those

states’ judicial norms. pr

Third World A term first used by French

economist Alfred Sauvy in 1952 to locate a

group of countries not formally aligned with

the USA or the Soviet Union in thecold war,

and not always attached tocapitalismorso-

cialismas defining economic models. The

first Prime Minister of independent India,

Jawaharlal Nehru, was a key figure in both

these projects. He played a leading role in the

Non-Aligned Movement, whose inaugural

meetings were held at Bandung in Indonesia

in 1955. He also called for a ‘third way’ of

promoting economicdevelopment– that of

planning under a system of democratic social-

ism – long before ideas of a Third Way were

popularized by US President Bill Clinton and

British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The initial concept of a Third World as a

new Third Estate has been consistently

reworked since its introduction into public dis-

course (Mintz, 1976; Pletsch, 1981). Many of

its initially positive connotations were dimin-

ished in the 1960s. They were replaced by an

idea of the Third World that located a group of

countries inasia,africaandlatin americain

terms of certain presumed absences. These

countries were lacking in infrastructure,

lacking in education and healthcare systems,

lacking in fiscal resources or foreign exchange,

lacking in skills and so on. As such, they

needed to be mended, both by their own gov-

ernments and by donor agencies and military

personnel from the First and Second Worlds.

This conception of the Third World has

fallen from favour over the past thirty years.

Peter Bauer, an economist associated with the

counter-revolution in development theory and

policy, argued consistently in the 1970s that

the giving and receiving of foreignaidinvented

the Third World. Worse, in his view, it turned

the Third World into a supplicant (Bauer,

1974). It deprived African and Asian countries

of the motivation to pull their own peoples out

ofpovertyby means ofmarket-ledeconomic

growth. In the 1990s this argument was given

fresh legs by Arturo Escobar, one of the lead-

ing theorists ofpost-development. Escobar

(1995) argued that the Third World had

been invented by American aid programmes

and Cold Wargeopolitics. It had been infan-

tilized and pathologized by a ‘discourseof

development’ that ‘discovered mass poverty’

throughout this apparently uniform geograph-

ical and social space. Large parts of it had also

been turned into battlegrounds in the struggle

between the USA and the Soviet Union (liter-

ally so in various proxywars).

Escobar recognizes that some Third World

countries have turned this form of identifica-

tion to their own advantage, not least through

the politics of Third Worldism. This is a com-

mon strategy ofsubalternsocial groups and it

found expression in the 1970s in Southern

demands for a New International Economic

Order. Escobar, however, is more inclined to

think outside the confines of the ‘Third World/

Third Worldism’ categories. In his view, it is

important to create new spaces for social

and economic action in what he calls ‘the less

economically accomplished countries’. Others

have suggested that the Third World should be

renamed as the Two-Thirds World, and that it

should not be restricted to the ex-colonial

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_T Final Proof page 754 31.3.2009 9:40pm Compositor Name: ARaju

THIRD WORLD