Vijay Prashad

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, journalist, and public intellectual whose work focuses on the political history of the Global South from colonial rule and anti-imperial movements to the structures of today’s world economy.

Over the past three decades, Prashad has written more than forty books that examine how countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have navigated power, development, and global inequality. His best-known works include The Darker Nations, which recounts the rise of post-colonial solidarity movements after the Second World War, and The Poorer Nations, which traces how many of those ambitions were constrained by debt, financial institutions, and geopolitical pressure.

Vijay Prashad serves as the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, an international research institute that produces studies on global political economy, labour movements, and development. He is also chief correspondent for Globetrotter and chief editor at LeftWord Books. Across these roles, he works with researchers, journalists, and activists around the world to document how political decisions made in major capitals reverberate across the Global South.

A prolific commentator on international affairs, Prashad writes regularly about wars, economic sanctions, debt crises, and the shifting balance of global power. His analysis often places contemporary conflicts, from the Middle East to Latin America, within a longer historical arc that stretches back to colonial rule and the Cold War. The aim, he has often argued, is not simply to catalogue events but to understand the structures behind them.

In recent years, Vijay Prashad’s work has gained renewed attention as debates intensify over the future of global power, the legacy of Western dominance in international institutions, and the growing political voice of countries in the Global South. At a time when many crises appear fragmented and overwhelming, his writing attempts to connect them into a broader historical narrative — one that centres the experiences, struggles, and aspirations of the majority world.