The Return of Third Worldism
An interview with Zineb Riboua about the Left's ideological pivot
As we have been observing over the past two years, the Left is undergoing an ideological transformation—away from the woke excesses of the late 2010s and early 2020s and toward a complex blend of socialist economics, embrace of mass migration, and dogmatic opposition to Israel. Zineb Riboua, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute, has risen to prominence with her work identifying this ideology as a form of“Third Worldism.” In this interview, Riboua explains what precisely Third Worldism is, why the Left has chosen to embrace it now, and how it differs from left-wing causes ranging from socialism to Islamism.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Rufo: New York Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently declared that Woke 1.0 is over and the Left is going to be moving on from what she characterized as the “crazy” excesses of its past. But moving on to where? It’s long been my thesis that what’s next on the Left’s agenda is the ideology of Third Worldism.
Zineb, you recently published a great piece about the origins and ideological contours of Third Worldism. To start out, I just want to keep it very simple: What is Third Worldism?
Riboua: I would say that Third Worldism is really about seeing everything through a very specific lens: one where you show who is the colonizer and the colonized, who is the oppressor and the oppressed, and you frame things on a geopolitical scale through the lens of the Global North versus the Global South. It’s a very binary way through which one can see the world—and, ultimately, the thesis is that the people of the South should triumph against the people of the North. So, it’s very absorbed in that type of revolutionary quest that I think we can see now. It takes different forms, obviously, but I think right now it’s really being driven by anti-Zionism.
