For Mignolo the Global South names a condition rather than a hemisphere. He reads the phrase, which came into use as talk of a Third World faded after the Soviet collapse, as shorthand for the parts of the planet that absorbed the costs of European expansion — pockets of which sit north of the equator, while Singapore and the Gulf states straddle both categories.

Western civilization, he insists, is a latecomer: only after 1500 did one of several coexisting civilizations begin imposing its economy, its law, its cartography and its criteria for knowledge on all the others, assembling what he calls the colonial matrix of power. Carl Schmitt's account of a Eurocentric world order is put to use and then turned against itself for failing to notice where its author was standing.

The essay closes by sorting today's contenders — rewesternization, dewesternization, a scattered left, and the decolonial and spiritual options — by which part of that matrix each disputes.