The Great Global Poverty Debate: Is Something Missing?
| Author | Neera Chandhoke |
| Published date | 01 November 2013 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12091 |
| Date | 01 November 2013 |
The Great Global Poverty Debate: Is
Something Missing?
Neera Chandhoke
University of Delhi
Abstract
Over the last two decades, academics (based largely in the west) and activists have invested a great deal of energy in
global poverty. This article asks: why should people not be poor? Surprisingly, this question elicits a number of
answers. The pragmatically inclined can suggest that the existence of a large number of poor people poses a direct
threat to the social and political order. Humanitarians are likely to argue that poverty breeds unfortunate conse-
quences, which demoralises human beings, and violates our best-held convictions that no one should be compelled to
live below the threshold of decency. The response of normative theorists might be that society is complicit in the crea-
tion and recreation of poverty. Then society is obliged to remedy the wrongs that it has visited upon the heads of the
poor. This constitutes a basic code of remedial justice. These responses can form the axis of separate and distinct argu-
ments on the reasons why people should not be poor. In this article, I argue that there is more to the question.
In retrospect, it is surprising how rapidly the phenome-
non of poverty and the sorry plight of a category that
has come to be called the global poor has come to com-
mand overpowering attention in academia (first in phi-
losophy departments, from where it spilled over to other
disciplines), policy-making establishments, political party
agendas and activists’platforms. At the risk of overstate-
ment, let me suggest that global poverty has come to
rival globalisation as the main preoccupation of academ-
ics and policy makers since the 1990s. The number of
hearts that bleed for the global poor, and often bleed
rather profusely, is truly astonishing.
Perhaps the double focus on globalisation and on the
poor who are expected to live and work in countries that
are collectively termed the global south is not all that
unexpected. Few defenders of globalisation expected
that the set of processes that can generically be termed
globalisation would generate an active debate on politi-
cal norms as well as normative politics, mainly because
of the dark underside of globalisation. The optimism
seems rather out of place because by the 1990s the first
phase of the globalisation project, propelled by doctrines
of free trade and unregulated markets, had run into trou-
ble in Mexico, Thailand, Japan, Russia and Brazil, impov-
erished thousands and generated rage and discontent.
Since the 1980s, countries in South America and in Sub-
Saharan Africa had been rocked by what came to be
known as anti-IMF riots. Now activists proceeded to tar-
get multilateral institutions identified as being responsi-
ble for the generalised misery of the global south. The
major shift in the rhetoric and strategies of global institu-
tions was in response to aggressive and sustained pro-
test movements across the world in the sometimes
concrete, often virtual space of global civil society. If acti-
vists in global civil society spoke of justice for all –partic-
ularly the poor in the global south who sell their labour
for, as Marx put it neatly, ‘a mess of pottage’–political
philosophers began to speak of principles of global jus-
tice that apply to all people irrespective of national
boundaries.
The global justice debate
The debate on global justice, which has now been
around for more than 20 years, commands a great deal
of attention. A number of distinguished philosophers
have joined in the debate; conferences and special edi-
tions of reputed journals are dedicated to an exploration
of the issue; a publishing industry has grown around the
theme; and no academic course in departments of politi-
cal science and philosophy can afford to leave out this
topic. Interestingly these debates, unlike earlier ones on
the unjust global order viz dependency theory, are
largely confined to western intellectuals. Because these
theories concentrate mainly on the duties of justice that
the richer west has towards the global poor who live in
the developing world, scholars from the latter part of the
world are excluded from the debate by definitional fiat.
These theories do not conceive of a universal humanity
in which all of us have duties of justice to each other.
©2013 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2013) 4:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12091
Global Policy Volume 4 . Issue 4 . November 2013
420
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