Nature has a “global south” problem

Written By VERENA Consortium

Before I get to the princess-and-the-pea sized issue that motivated this blog post, I want to actually hand it to Nature. Out of the big career-making journals, Nature is clearly working the hardest to give scientists a voice, even - maybe especially - when it comes to global politics and power. Scroll through the recent opinion or news headlines, and you’ll see things like:

This is good! Journals should be giving space to these kinds of issues, and dozens obviously do, but Nature has one of the biggest news sections, the widest audience, and the most influence. People – more precisely, people with power to fix the problems that affect scientists (and presumably other people) – take the Nature name seriously. 

Given all of this, I cannot begin to understand why Nature’s in-house style guide has a rule against using the phrase “the Global South” as a proper noun.

A couple of months ago, we submitted this open letter to Nature, which they very kindly rushed to publication. When we received our proofs, “Global South” had been replaced throughout with “poorer countries,” with an unsigned comment from an editor: 

“We avoid using ‘global north’/‘global south’ to refer to rich/poor countries, because they can be ambiguous or inaccurate (eg, Australia, one of the governments that blocked the IP waiver, is in the southern hemisphere).” 

There’s a lot to unpack here, obviously. But the most important thing is that this misunderstands what the “Global South” actually is: the terms Global North and South don’t map directly onto the Northern and Southern Hemisphere, and they also don’t refer primarily to country income or poverty levels. They capture so much more: the geography of colonialism; the ongoing way that racism and orientalism play into global power dynamics; even specific nuances about how individual countries like China are situated in global geopolitics. None of that is captured by “poorer countries.” 

We said all of this back to the journal, and “global south” made its way back into our article’s final proofs – uncapitalized. Our response was simple: Global North/South are proper nouns and have to be capitalized (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South)

By this point, you might be wondering if this entire blog post is really about a petty editorial grievance about capitalization. It is! Weeks later, I’m still frustrated that the editors decided to ignore this correction and published our article with “global south” in lowercase. I’ll probably still be cranky about this years from now when I revisit this piece. That’s not how we intended it to look, and it’s not what the 290 signatories to the letter saw. It undercuts a precise term with rich political meaning in a piece where every single word was chosen carefully. 

But above all, it’s just obviously incorrect on its own merits. I don’t want to pretend this is a deeply principled stand for justice. I write for a living, and it eats away at me to know that someone has permanently made something I wrote wrong. Proper nouns are capitalized. The Global South, as a phrase, is capitalized, just as “the United States” or “the Group of the Seven (G-7) countries” might be. Correct grammar has been rendered incorrect! On purpose!

Putting aside my own pet peeves, though, I do think it’s worth asking: why is Nature’s editorial department seemingly going out of their way to enforce an obviously incorrect editorial rule?

Once you know that this is a policy in Nature’s editorial department, you can see it basically everywhere in the Opinion section. Each of those commentaries I listed above features the phrase “global north” or “global south,” only ever used in lowercase. Occasionally, they also throw in a “global-south,” which makes me shudder.

On one hand, this rule is probably a relic from when the term “Global South” was less commonly encountered in academic discourse. But journals like Nature set the terms, quite literally, on academic thought and speech. It trivializes the idea of the Global South – or worse, refuses to engage with its legitimacy (or even constructive debates about the utility of the term) – to make authors fight for its inclusion and correct construction, particularly if they’re from the Global South. Because of the influence these journals wield (and that individual editors may be perceived to wield) in scientists’ careers, these kinds of anachronisms probably go unchallenged for much longer than they would at, say, a small society journal. 

On some level, I think Nature’s editorial team must know this is an issue, or be split on how to apply it. On one hand, this rule has been applied since the first time “global south” was used as a phrase in Nature, which appears to have been in 2014. On the other hand, it’s unclear if this rule is always applied to research articles. Nature podcast transcripts don’t follow this rule. Nature Climate Change definitely doesn’t follow this rule. Neither does Nature Ecology & Evolution or Nature Communications. Unsurprisingly, Nature Africa doesn’t either. Nature’s main competitor Science capitalizes the term regularly in opinion and research articles, as does PNAS. None of those journals’ editorial teams seem to think the term is ambiguous or inaccurate. So why do the editors at Nature? It’s strange for a journal that has done so much to platform scientists from the Global South (and the issues they face) to reject the term itself. 

I hope they’ll consider changing their style guide. As I’ve said, this is first and foremost a petty frustration, and I can’t say this is in the top 500 issues that their editorial board should act on to support or empower scientists in the Global South.

But that’s why this is a blog post - and not a letter to nature.

— Colin Carlson

VERENA Consortium
Next

Building a global atlas of wildlife disease data