Geopolitical musings from a ‘Southerner’

For anyone interested in world development, social sciences, or any global topic for that matter, using the term ‘global South’ to refer to lower-income countries and the ‘global North’ for wealthy nations is becoming more and more normalized in academic and non-academic publications.

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The Double-Edged Sword of Cultural Tourism

During my summer field research, I traveled to the Maasai Mara, the Kenyan half of the incredible Serengeti-Mara ecosystem, and the home of the Maasai ethnic group.  For many of us, this probably evokes a sense of timelessness, and a society untouched by the ‘evils of modernity’. It is also one that many National Geographic documentaries and glossy tourist brochures continue to perpetuate. However, it is but a small sliver of the reality there, like looking at one pixel of an entire photograph; beautiful, perhaps, but incomplete.

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