Socialist Globalization against Capitalist Neocolonialism: The Economic Ideas behind the New International Economic Order

April 20, 2015 by
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This is one entry in a roundtable on the NIEO, featuring posts by scholars who contributed to Humanity’s recent special issue on the topic. Be sure to read other posts by Kevin O’Sullivan and Patrick Sharma. My article focuses on the economic ideas behind the NIEO, specifically the ideas of the staff working for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Their ideas are rather surprising. They wrote about the need for markets, liberalization of trade, structural adjustment, export-oriented production, and increased financial flows. In our discussions at the Continue reading →

Theses on the philosophy of human rights history

April 20, 2015 by
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[I wrote these for the exciting upcoming Princeton conference; comments welcome below.]   The “history of human rights” is not a field I personally think ought to exist. The most important fact about it, in a certain sense, is that no one ever proposed to bring it into being until the present day. As its coverage expands backwards before the near present, it normally describes some interesting but partial inquiries that have long figured and could still figure in various prior fields, from the history Continue reading →

The Rich Countries’ Substitute for the NIEO

April 13, 2015 by
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This is one entry in a roundtable on the NIEO, featuring posts by scholars who contributed to Humanity’s recent special issue on the topic. Be sure to read other posts by Johanna Bockman and Kevin O’Sullivan. Last October, the Chinese government announced the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). The AIIB is intended to rival the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), which are dominated by the United States and other developed countries, in providing financial assistance to countries in Asia. Continue reading →

The civil rights movement for corporations

April 8, 2015 by
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Joseph Slaughter, one of the members of Humanity‘s editorial collective, published “We’re in the Middle of a Corporate Civil Rights Movement” on Talking Points Memo. Check it out. Among other things, Slaughter notes that while people “often talk of the women’s liberation and gay rights movements as building on the success of the African-American Civil Rights Movement,” corporations “may be the biggest beneficiaries of abolition and the civil rights struggle—as the successful pushback against the Indiana RFRA will ultimately prove.” As Slaughter points out, this has a history, Continue reading →

The New International Economic Order: A Reintroduction

March 19, 2015 by
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Download PDF Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven! —William Wordsworth, 1805 I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. —H.P. Lovecraft, 1917 What, exactly, was the New International Economic Order (NIEO)? Promulgated as a United Nations declaration in 1974 (reprinted as the frontispiece to this special issue of Humanity), the NIEO was the most widely discussed transnational governance reform initiative of the 1970s. Its fundamental objective was to transform Continue reading →

African Socialism and the Limits of Global Familyhood: Tanzania and the New International Economic Order in Sub-Saharan Africa

March 19, 2015 by
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In November 1963, Julius Nyerere, president of the newly independent East African country of Tanganyika, delivered a stirring speech to open a conference of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in Rome. He began by commending the rise of an “almost world-wide recognition of the common humanity of man, and a growing sense of human brotherhood,” affirming that “the existence of the FAO is indeed one of the expressions of this feeling of involvement in each other’s welfare.” Yet Nyerere’s speech quickly departed Continue reading → Continue reading →

Bookend to Bandung: The New International Economic Order and the Antinomies of the Bandung Era

March 19, 2015 by
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The opportunity to rethink the historical record of the 1970s from the perspective of the developmentalist aspirations of the global south is welcome. A decade often cast as a historical exception and interruption—wedged between the development orthodoxy of the 1960s and the neoliberal turn of the 1980s—the 1970s now increasingly appear to mark the dawning of a sustained crisis of accumulation in the capitalist world system. Undoubtedly, the 1970s witnessed utopian aspirations for the developing world, as evidenced by the “Third Worldist” tenor of the Continue reading → Continue reading →

Competing for the Last Utopia? The NIEO, Human Rights, and the World Conference for the International Women’s Year, Mexico City, June 1975

March 19, 2015 by
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In the mid-1970s, the United Nations hosted a dramatic attempt to totally transform the world economy, which appeared to be on the cusp of victory at the Sixth Special Session of the General Assembly in April and May 1974. In a moment that represented the highest tide of southern self-confidence, the Group of 77 (G-77), unleavened by the language of compromise, demanded global redistribution as a matter of right. The manifestos of this revolt of sovereigns were the Declaration on the Establishment of a New Continue reading → Continue reading →

Mossadegh Madness: Oil and Sovereignty in the Anticolonial Community

March 19, 2015 by
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The emerging literature on the New International Economic Order (NIEO) has the spare conventions of a new topic in contemporary history. The narrative typically begins by identifying its origins as a historical intermingling of national and international, political and economic, and social and cultural factors. A sketch beginning at some point in the twentieth century follows, delving into some combination of these elements, their tensions sometimes fecund but, most likely, ultimately harmful. Then the story flows on in a more or less chronological fashion, finally Continue reading → Continue reading →

Current Issue

Our long-awaited issue of Humanity journal is out! Its special dossier, Iran under Sanctions, examines the myriad and devastating impacts of international sanctions on society, culture, and politics. The issue includes an essay on the legal case Herero and Nama v. The Federal Republic of Germany to theorize reparations for German colonialism and slavery as they became linked with the aftermath of the Shoah. It also includes essays on T.H. Marshall and the right of access to justice; visual representations of Armenian genocide survivors; and, the concept of radical friendship in relation to the Farmers’ Protests in India.

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