Global inequality and injustice (original) (raw)

Political Equality and Global Poverty: An Alternative Egalitarian Approach to Distributive Justice

I argue that existing views in the political equality debate are inadequate. I propose an alternative approach to equality and argue its superiority to the competing approaches. I apply the approach to some issues in global justice relating to global poverty and to the inability of some countries to develop as they would like. In this connection I discuss institutions of international trade, sovereign debt and global reserves and I focus particularly on the WTO, IMF and World Bank.

Global Economic Justice: A Structural Approach 1

2012

This paper aims to make a contribution to the debate concerning the moral obligations which follow from the facts of the pervasiveness of acute poverty and the extent of global wealth and income inequality. I suggest that in order to make progress in this debate we need to move beyond two dominant ways of thinking about when the demands of distributive justice apply. The first approach focuses solely on the global distribution of resources, regardless of background social relations and institutions. This approach, exemplified by Simon Caney, identifies positive ‘humanity based’ obligations to promote or support institutions that fulfil the socio-economic rights of other humans. The second approach concentrates on the justice of the coercively enforced institutional arrangements governing access to resources. This approach, shared by theorists like Thomas Pogge, focuses on negative obligations not to harm other humans by imposing upon them resource regimes which avoidably fail to sec...

Institutional Mechanisms of Global Inequality Reproduction

2014

In the field of International Relations, some extent of disciplinary agreement exists that inequalities matter to global political outcomes. Yet, it is striking that the very term “inequality” does not occupy a central position in the vocabulary of IR theorists and a shared conceptual framework to compare different dimensions of inequality is so far missing. Similarly, for research about social inequalities, the dimension of global relations has not played a major role, so far. Ideas to formulate a theory of global inequality have been proposed , yet not systematically explored. The paper argues in favour of broadening inequality research to the realm of the global. The main focus of the paper is on (in)equality in institutional orders, proposing that international organisations and institutions can alleviate but also perpetuate and deepen inequalities among state and/or non-state actors. Which processes within organised forums contribute to the production or mitigation of inequalities and thus function as mechanisms is a further key question of the paper.