It first appeared in the world of finance in the 1980s (Bret, 2011 Gabas and Losch, 2008). The term of “emerging country”, now widely used, participated in this evolution, even though it does not refer to a unified group of countries in international statistics or to a set of quantified criteria. This led to the appearance of new terms that aimed to account for this diversity: newly industrialized countries (NIC), less advanced countries 2 (LAC), transition countries (countries from the former Soviet bloc), etc. “The erosion of analytical frameworks and political models, as well as the great diversity of economic realities, created awareness of the multiplicity of national trajectories.” (Gabas and Losch, 2008, p. 27).
We all know that saying is doing, and naming is claiming ownership: the social construction of categories, spatial or other, is a common scientific practice, which needs to be subjected to a critical analysis. Categorisation as an issueģ First of all, it needs to be emphasized that the term “emergence” belongs to a history of categories that were invented to think the world, its diversity, its disparities and inequalities. The aim is to understand how, in what should really be called the majority world, the different actors’ everyday geographies are constantly shifting. We will adopt a critical approach in order to reconstruct power relations as well as practices. This special issue 1 aims to go beyond this opposition: starting from empirical observation we will show how reconfigurations brought about by “emergence” have important repercussions in the social field amongst others. 1 This issue of Echogéo is partly the outcome of the ACI Jeunes chercheurs « Une géographie des espac (.)Ģ However, this label is caught between its ubiquity - which cannot be very productive scientifically - and its heavy focus on economic and political phenomena.Emergence has become a new category, understood as a way of ordering the world in order to better describe or conceptualize it. More broadly, the trope of emergence is frequently called upon to designate the vast, shifting complex of political, economic, social and cultural phenomena that have brought about a reconfiguration so dramatic that the term of “emerging worlds” - note the use of the plural - is now used ( Atlas du Monde diplomatique, 2012). Those countries are now included under the umbrella term of “emerging countries”, a reference to their relatively recent arrival into the concert of great powers. More specifically, those expressions refer to a transition towards a multi-polar world: the domination of the West and later the Triade is now counterbalanced by the economic and perhaps political power of countries that were once called under-developed - China being the archetype. 1 New economic world order, new geographies of development, new powers… A whole range of expressions has appeared in the past three decades to coin the major and multi-dimensional changes that have affected global political economics.