For more than a century and a half, the most powerful national governments have created institutions of multilateral governance that promise to make a more inclusive world, a world serving women, working people, the colonized, the "backward", the destitute, and the despised. This book is a study of that promise and the real impact of this actually-existing world government. Global Institutions, Marginalization, and Development discusses what systems of global institutions have done, and what they have not done, to keep their promise to the truly disadvantaged. It examines whether the system will serve the world's least-advantaged, or marginalize them further. The future will largely be determined by the understanding of the global political economy developed by the world's most powerful people - corporate leaders and government officials in the strongest states. Their worldviews, in turn, will be influenced both by the political action and the ideas of social movements and by the views of those who study the global political economy.
Whether it is the "economists and political philosophers" of the rich or the social movements of the disadvantaged that are most likely to influence the world's lawmakers and the processes by which they will complete the next generation of multilateral institutions are the central topics of this book. Key content includes: World Organizations and Human Needs Liberal Internationalism Social Movements and Liberal World Orders Political Consequences of the New Inequality Leadership and Global Governance for the information age Marginalization and the Privileged This book is important reading for anyone with an interest in international political economy, global governance, development and the politics of north-south relations. Craig N. Murphy is Historian of the United Nations Development Programme while on leave from Wellesley College, where he is M. Margaret Ball Professor of International Relations.
He was chair of the Academic Council on the UN System from 2002 to 2004, president of the International Studies Association in 2000 to 2001, and a founding editor of Global Governance, which received the 1996 award of the Association of American Publishers for the best new scholarly journal in business, the social sciences, and the humanities. One of the leading critical scholars in the field, he has published widely on international institutions and north-south relations.