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Paper short abstract

Using South Korea’s engagement with Africa (and Southeast Asia as contrast), this paper asks whether South–South Cooperation pluralises development or reconfigures hierarchy, showing how Korean SSC diversifies partners yet creates uneven development trajectories.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines whether South–South Cooperation (SSC) enables a more pluralistic, justice-oriented development order or instead reconfigures hierarchy under new forms of strategic influence through the case of South Korea’s engagement with Africa. SSC is widely promoted as a horizontal, solidarity-based alternative to Northern official development assistance, yet recent scholarship shows that it can also reproduce asymmetries of power, expertise and debt within a multipolar aid regime. South Korea is a pivotal “hybrid” actor: an OECD-DAC member with Northern-like economic and technological capacity, but a recent history as an aid recipient and a long-standing claim to Southern identity and shared developmental experience. This research conducted interviews with Korean officials and practitioners, policy and strategy documents, and sectoral and regional ODA profiles, triangulated with secondary literature on Korea's knowledge-sharing programmes and Saemaul Undong–branded cooperation. Focusing on Africa, and using Southeast Asia as a comparative reference point, it shows that Korean SSC pluralise the aid landscape by diversifying sources of finance and policy advice and by offering an alternative developmental reference through the Knowledge Sharing Programme and related model-export initiatives. Simultaneously, the analysis demonstrates that Korean SSC generates uneven development trajectories within the Global South. African partnerships are more frequently configured as sites for policy transfer, demonstration projects and the projection of Korean developmental narratives whereas more intensive production-network integration and digital/industrial upgrading are concentrated in Southeast Asia. The paper concludes that SSC “beyond aid” modifies rather than overturns the global aid architecture, redistributing influence while allocating unequal development possibilities across regions.