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Michael Franczak's book, "Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s," provides a critical analysis of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) proposed by the emerging Third World coalition in the United Nations in 1974. The book explores how the NIEO and North-South dialogue shaped U.S. foreign policy decision-making during the 1970s and early 1980s. It examines the role of food and energy crises, the influence of European allies, and the rise of the neoconservative movement in shaping U.S. positions toward the NIEO. The book also discusses the Carter administration's foreign policy toward the developing world and the Reagan administration's opposition to the NIEO. Overall, the book highlights the impact of global inequality on U.S. foreign policy during this period. [Extracted from the article]

This article revisits Ibrahim Shihata's role in developing the financial aid policies of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) after the formal inauguration of the New International Economic Order project (NIEO) in 1974. As director of the OPEC Special Fund, subsequently the OPEC Fund for International Development, after its establishment in 1976, Shihata spearheaded the development of the organization's aid policies. He also defended the NIEO as a set of sensible reform measures for redistributing wealth, resources, and technology. This article contends that Shihata's vigorous defence of OPEC's aid record aimed to demonstrate that the NIEO – an enterprise OPEC supported – involved not simply structural reform of the inter-state system but direct engagement with questions of intra-state distribution, and that OPEC aid was designed partly to keep the 'Third World bloc' from disintegrating due to the growing distance between oil-producing and non-oil-producing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 2019 Canada's National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls released its final report. This short Reflection focuses on the National Inquiry's supplementary legal analysis, which concerns the law of genocide. I contend that this analysis is correct in holding that the murder and disappearance of large numbers of Indigenous women, girls, and other persons ought to be understood as an ongoing crime facilitated by specific policy choices, legal decisions, and socio-economic structures. I also contend that the systemic, recurrent, and large-scale nature of this crime is best captured by the term "genocide." I argue that formal legal definitions of "genocide" such as the one offered in the 1948 Genocide Convention, though conceptually clunky, historically contingent, and politically inadequate, are key to illuminating some of the structural forces underlying and animating a range of events that may otherwise appear unrelated. Genocide, the ultimate collectivist crime, is a concept of preponderantly legal origin, which means that serious consideration must be given to its specifically legal definition when trying to determine whether it is justifiable or appropriate to apply it to a given social phenomenon. Its standard legal definition may be unable to do justice to the specificities of different modes of group violence, but its abstract generality is also what enables those who employ it to highlight the intrinsically systemic character of such destruction. Ultimately, I suggest that Canada's genocide "debate" turns on the relation between "law" and "society"—the question, that is, of how precisely a legal definition is to be interpreted and applied under different, and often rapidly changing, social conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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