Vulnerable Women and Neo-Liberal Globalization: Debt Burdens Undermine Women's Health in the Global South

Contemporary processes of globalization havebeen accompanied by a serious deterioration inthe health of many women across the world. Particularly disturbing is the drastic declinein the health status of many women in theglobal South, as well as some women in theglobal North. This paper argues that thehealth vulnerability of women in the globalSouth is inseparable from their political andeconomic vulnerability. More specifically, itlinks the deteriorating health of many Southernwomen with the neo-liberal economic policiesthat characterize contemporary economicglobalization and argues that this structure issustained by the heavy burden of debtrepayments imposed on many Southern countries. In conclusion, it argues that many Southerndebt obligations are not morally bindingbecause they are not democraticallylegitimate.     

Real World Justice

Despite a high and growing global average income, billions of human beings are still condemned to lifelong severe poverty with all its attendant evils of low life expectancy, social exclusion, ill health, illiteracy, dependency, and effective enslavement. We citizens of the rich countries are conditioned to think of this problem as an occasion for assistance. Thanks in part to the rationalizations dispensed by our economists, most of us do not realize how deeply we are implicated, through the new global economic order our states have imposed, in this ongoing catastrophe. My sketch of how we are so implicated follows the argument of my book, World Poverty and Human Rights, but takes the form of a response to the books critics.     

Religious Ethics and Economic Inequality

This essay serves as an introduction to five papers on economic inequality in this issue of the Journal of Religious Ethics. In addition to introducing the articles individually, the essay also gives a brief overview of recent economic developments that have led religious ethicists to call attention to the issue of inequality.     

社会经济不平等对个体生命史策略的影响——国家发展水平的调节作用

经济不平等不仅是经济问题,也会对个体心理行为产生诸多影响。前人认为,经济不平等会强化个体阶层提升意愿。结合生命史理论,研究提出高不平等将使个体偏好后代质量而非数量,以实现阶层提升,且这一现象在高发展水平国家中更为明显。基于开源数据,通过国家/个人两个水平上的分析发现,在高发展水平国家,经济不平等降低了国家生育率,并使个体更关切后代教育。研究结果可为理解特定经济环境下的个体心理和行为提供参考。     

The Psychology of Dependence Between Landlord and Sharecropper in Northeastern Brazil

Contrasting beliefs and attitudes held by sharecroppers and their landlord on a fazenda in Northeastern Brazil reveal a tendency to split one another into positively and negatively idealized images. Sharecroppers who ambivalently seek patronage construct good vs. bad landlords/patrons. The landlord, defensive about envy and hostility among sharecroppers, constructs good vs. bad tenants/workers. Theory from the Kleinian school of psychoanalysis concerning envy, splitting, and idealization provides a framework for interpreting ethnographic case materials.     

Leave No Poor Behind:

Globalization is being celebrated in many circles as a distinctive achievement of our age, drawing peoples and societies more closely together and creating far greater wealth than any previous generations ever knew. While the first of these assertions is correct in the sense that societies and cultures are colliding, hitherto relatively closed horizons are opening up, and spaces and time are compressing, the second deserves critical interrogations. Using Africa's experience with globalization as a case study, this article argues that globalization be understood as an emerging preference for certain institutional and policy practices that are creating and coercively imposing pervasive but avoidable conditions of material deprivations on many societies. The article defends a motivational rationale anchored in the normative vision of socio‐economic and development rights as a way to mitigate the deleterious effects of unguarded globalization.