Rethinking Risk Society from the Global South: On the Unequal Distribution of Risk

Beck’s theory of risk society offers a powerful account of manufactured uncertainty, transboundary hazards, and the limits of national and class-based insulation under reflexive modernization. Yet its universalizing language remains insufficient for explaining how risks are differentially produced, displaced, governed, and lived across colonial and postcolonial geographies. This article critically reconstructs Beck from the standpoint of the Global South, understood not as a fixed geography but as a historically produced positionality within unequal global power relations. I argue that the key issue is not whether risks become transboundary but how unequal capacities for protection, buffering, accountability, and repair stabilize asymmetrical exposure under global interdependence. To address this, I propose the concept of unequal risk regimes , through which accumulation logics, spatial displacement, slow violence, and institutional–epistemic mechanisms combine to routinize and obscure harm. Beck’s theory should not be abandoned; rather, it should be transformed through a justice- and mechanism-oriented sociology of global risk.