Search

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of global access to human vaccines. There is, however, no empirical work on either the unequal distribution of international trade or on its determinants. Applying a gravity model to the UN Comtrade database between 2000 and 2019, we explain the patterns of bilateral trade across 116 countries. Using the Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood methodology, our results show that inequalities in international vaccine trade have steadily increased. In general, supply and demand drivers play a role in explaining the flow of human vaccines. The impact of these drivers varies depending on the income level of the importing country. High-income countries intensify their flows with demand factors such as GDP per capita, or supply factors such as the location of big pharmaceutical companies. Conversely, low-income countries receive more vaccines according to their population. Our results show that a poor country that houses a big pharmaceutical company acts as an exporting platform to developing and poor countries. Middle-income countries present features similar to rich countries both by producing more and also by exporting more. The imbalance endangers the global fight against the current COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Literacy is one of the most fundamental skills for people to access and navigate today’s digital environment. This work systematically studies the language literacy skills of online populations for more than 160 countries and regions across the world, including many low-resourced countries where official literacy data are particularly sparse. Leveraging public data on Facebook, we develop a population-level literacy estimate for the online population that is based on aggregated and de-identified public posts written by adult Facebook users globally, significantly improving both the coverage and resolution of existing literacy tracking data. We found that, on Facebook, women collectively show higher language literacy than men in many countries, but substantial gaps remain in Africa and Asia. Further, our analysis reveals a considerable regional gap within a country that is associated with multiple socio-technical inequalities, suggesting an “inequality paradox” – where the online language skill disparity interacts with offline socioeconomic inequalities in complex ways. These findings have implications for global women’s empowerment and socioeconomic inequalities.

This paper compares across six nations the mental health systems available to prisoners with the highest acuity of psychosis and risk combined with the lowest level of insight into the need for treatment. Variations were observed within and between nations. Findings highlight the likely impact of factors such as mental health legislation and the prison mental health workforce on a nation's ability to deliver timely and effective treatment close to home for prisoners who lack capacity to consent to treatment for their severe mental illness. The potential benefits of addressing the resulting inequalities are noted.

The Covid-19 pandemic reveals and exacerbates inequalities in various ways. Gender inequalities—intertwined with intersectional differences along class, ethnicity, or origin—are highly visible. Legacy and social media around the world cover and perform these issues as much as they conceal them. On the one hand, they have the ability to give those affected a voice and to intervene in public discourse. On the other hand, they reproduce stereotypes and imbalances and rely on gendered (infra)structures. This thematic issue explores the entanglement between empowering and restricting forms of media discourse and media practices. Ten contributions from different world regions, which analyze various media, and involve diverse methodological approaches, make visible reproductions of established power structures as well as new visibilities and counter-practices of marginalized groups. In sum, they generate a complex body of knowledge about global and local inequalities and the ramifications of the pandemic in and through media.

Literacy is one of the most fundamental skills for people to access and navigate today's digital environment. This work systematically studies the language literacy skills of online populations for more than 160 countries and regions across the world, including many low-resourced countries where official literacy data are particularly sparse. Leveraging public data on Facebook, we develop a population-level literacy estimate for the online population that is based on aggregated and de-identified public posts written by adult Facebook users globally, significantly improving both the coverage and resolution of existing literacy tracking data. We found that, on Facebook, women collectively show higher language literacy than men in many countries, but substantial gaps remain in Africa and Asia. Further, our analysis reveals a considerable regional gap within a country that is associated with multiple socio-technical inequalities, suggesting an "inequality paradox" – where the online language skill disparity interacts with offline socioeconomic inequalities in complex ways. These findings have implications for global women's empowerment and socioeconomic inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We begin our introduction by situating our special issue Our Bodies Breathe Resistance: COVID19 Stories From/In the Margins within the emergent academic debates around global inequalities, breathing and the body under COVID19 conditions informed by international relations, critical development studies, and anti/post/decolonial feminist scholarship. We do this while articulating our experiential approach to knowing as one that questions false dichotomies between theory and practice. In this way we practice enfleshed and positioned thinking while dialoguing with literature that de-centres from western 'contemporaneity' and allows us to display the limits of detached and disembodied thinking in times of COVID19. Guided by the following question: What happens when global inequalities, breathing, and bodies are thought of from a different geo-genealogy to that of western critical feminist antiessentialist approaches we introduce each of the contributors to the special issue organized around the actions of Refusing, Healing, Caring, Eating, and Learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares across six nations the mental health systems available to prisoners with the highest acuity of psychosis and risk combined with the lowest level of insight into the need for treatment. Variations were observed within and between nations. Findings highlight the likely impact of factors such as mental health legislation and the prison mental health workforce on a nation's ability to deliver timely and effective treatment close to home for prisoners who lack capacity to consent to treatment for their severe mental illness. The potential benefits of addressing the resulting inequalities are noted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Internationale Bildungsforschung und Entwicklungspädagogik is the property of Waxmann Verlag GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article argues that Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system approach was instrumental in revealing sociology’s theoretical and methodological blind spots and in formulating a comprehensive framework for the study of global inequalities. In doing so, it anticipated both the critique of Eurocentrism and methodological nationalism put forth by transnational and postcolonial approaches as well as the debates over the rise in global inequalities by several decades. I trace this analytical primacy to several factors: first, to world-systems analysis’ methodological shift from the nation-state to the entire capitalist world-economy as an early global sociology; second, to the relation between the methodological shift to the epistemological critique and their role in Wallerstein’s early approach to global inequalities. Finally, I address the relationship between the self-definition of world-systems analysis as a form of protest against mainstream social science (rather than as a theory) and the theoretical and political filiations with postcolonial and decolonial approaches in order to show how they contributed together to the prominence of global inequalities as a topic.

Developing the critique of notions of the “integration of immigrants”, twelve propositions are advanced to diagnose the methodological nationalism of mainstream approaches. The concept of “integration” contains assumptions about the nature and functioning of modern society which, in a post-industrial and post-colonial context, are falsely trapped within the normative bounds of thinking for the nation-state. An alternate empirical operationalisation is suggested that would render traditional types of assimilation and integration research obsolete.

This article argues that world-systems analysis was instrumental in revealing sociology’s theoretical and methodological blind spots and in formulating a comprehensive framework for the study of global inequalities. In doing so, it anticipated both the critique of Eurocentrism and methodological nationalism put forth by transnational and postcolonial approaches, as well as the debates over the rise in global inequalities by several decades. I trace this analytical primacy to several factors: first, to world-systems analysis’ methodological shift from the nation-state to the entire capitalist world-economy as an early global sociology and, second, to the relation between the methodological shift to the epistemological critique and their role in Wallerstein’s early approach to global inequalities. Finally, I address the relationship between the self-definition of world-systems analysis as a form of protest against mainstream social science (rather than as a theory) and the theoretical and political filiations with postcolonial and decolonial approaches in order to show how they both contributed to the prominence of global inequalities as a topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legacy of Eurocentrism continues to affect knowledge production in the social sciences. Evidence produced in and about the global North is assumed to be more “universal,” whereas evidence from or produced in the global South is considered valid only for specific contexts (i.e., “localized”). We argue that these dynamics are evident in the phrasing of articles’ titles based on the examination of more than half a million social science research articles indexed by Scopus (1996 to 2020). We find that empirical articles written by authors affiliated to institutions of the global North, using data from these countries, are less likely to include a concrete geographical reference in their titles. When authors are affiliated to global South institutions, and use evidence from global South countries, the names of these countries are more likely to be part of the article’s title. We confirm this overarching pattern by looking at 1) differences between world regions, 2) differences within world regions, and 3) patterns in 23 social science subfields. These gaps are large and consistent, yet article naming conventions are merely the “tip of the iceberg” of the imbalances in knowledge production between the global North and South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of SWS - Rundschau is the property of Verein fur interdisziplinare sozialwissenschaftliche Studien und Analysen and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article frames constituency in relation to international corporate persons (ICPs) as a Jessupian 'human problem', constructively and politically. Drawing from examples in international trade law and international investment law it demonstrates the transformative power of ICP interests in the making of contemporary international economic law (IEL). It then analyses the logics of the economic and legal thinkers who facilitate this power in IEL and suggests these logics enabled a corporate constituency that separates the interests of the law from the interests of humans, both as subjects of law and as sources of institutional legitimacy. In the process, it shows that at least one 'human problem' with IEL's corporate constituency—and by extension IEL itself—is that it is based on domestic market wisdoms projected internationally. By failing to account for the political and legal influence of the most significant transnational market participants, IEL is structurally insulated from human problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International Relations theorists have recently paid increasing attention to the hierarchical nature of international society, that is, to its built-in structural inequalities. In this article, we focus on one thus far neglected aspect of global social stratification by highlighting the role that international institutions play in both reproducing and transforming inequalities among states and other global subjects. We argue that this focus on institutions can advance our understanding of the processes through which global inequalities are maintained and changed, and that institutionalist research can in turn benefit from shifting its attention from the predominant cooperation paradigm to capturing the manifold 'inequality' effects of institutionalised interactions in world politics. We illustrate this shift of perspective with a dual case study of the Ottawa and Oslo Conventions banning anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to conceptualize the relational dimension of the border regime and its function in reinforcing and reproducing global inequalities. It does so by analyzing the social connections that shaped my fieldwork on The Gambia's “backway,” the illegalized trip to Europe. In particular, the article focuses on what I define as moments of ethical entrapment that my main Gambian interlocutor and I faced while interacting with people in Serekunda. In interrogating those entrapments as simultaneously provoked by and exposing the border regime, the analysis highlights how borderwork and the potentiality of border violence constantly haunt social connections at/in/across borders. At the same time, the article looks at the emergence of such entrapments as a product of the shifting and ambiguous positionalities subjects hold in the different nodes of borders’ temporally and spatially scattered assemblages. I argue that the analysis of such social connections and ethical entrapments discloses the implications of doing anthropology of the border regime through the border regime itself. On the one hand, borders’ capacity to act on and through subjects—even beyond their conscious will—reinforce the principle of dissimilarity on which they rely and reproduce. On the other hand, the ethical entrapments emerging from the connections that the border regime creates between people illuminate its socially productive, counterintuitive, and fragmented dimensions, potentially opening space for what Povinelli defined as the otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trade has given rise to global inequalities in sustainable development, while the occurrence of trade frictions between China and the US has led to changes in the global trade market landscape. Whether these changes will exacerbate disparities in sustainable development between regions remains uncertain. Quantifying the impact of changes in the trade market landscape is of significant importance in accelerating global progress towards sustainable development. Therefore, this article, based on the GTAP 10.0 database and using the GTAP model, calculates the extent to which changes in tax policies affect the global achievement of sustainable development goals (SDGs) by assessing the impact of alterations in trade patterns. The research findings are as follows: (1) The decoupling of China and the US has intensified these inequalities. Economically advanced regions have made significant progress in sustainable development compared to relatively underdeveloped regions, such as the US and Sub-Saharan Africa. (2) Regions closer to China and the US are more affected by changes in trade taxes, with economically advanced regions in close proximity to China and the US benefiting more than those farther away. (3) Environmental aspects of SDGs have shown the lowest growth rates, with marginal variations across different regions. (4) Global inequalities in achieving SDGs primarily stem from inter-regional disparities. Over time, inter-regional inequalities decrease while intra-regional inequalities increase, with underdeveloped regions experiencing higher levels of intra-regional inequality compared to developed regions. The growth in tax rates between China and the US contributes to a comprehensive increase in both inter-regional and intra-regional inequalities. Based on these conclusions, this study aims to provide a scientific basis for promoting global sustainable development and reducing regional disparities in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A widespread assumption alleges that human rights are not universal, as they claim to be, but are instead Western oriented. Yet a growing body of research provides evidence that human rights are not just Western. Both perspectives are critical of repressive dimensions in the human rights regime, though they recommend different approaches to addressing them. This article explores both viewpoints from an International Political Theory perspective. Examining the pluralist idea, institutionalization, and application of human rights, the first section argues that human rights are not just Western. The second section investigates why it nevertheless matters to ask whether human rights are Western. This article develops four interrelated criteria: dynamic pluralism, awareness of power and inequalities, contextual universalism, and open normativity. These criteria help determine whether human rights are (not just) Western, and, more importantly, they provide the basis for an emancipatory human rights regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union and Germany are pursing a global transformation project by fostering the bioeconomy. Through research and technological innovation, they strive to support the transition from using fossil resources to renewable resources (biomass) and the establishment of a circular economy. However, since colonial times, the global production of biomass has been permeated by unequal relations of exchange between biomass producing semi-/peripheries and biomass processing (technology-)centres. As countries around the world are now engaging with/in the bioeconomy, the question arises whether this will change global inequalities in the fl ow of materials and the production of knowledge. Drawing on new strands of world-systems theory on unequal ecological exchange and global knowledge production, we show how the bioeconomy’s transnational material and technological exchange relations are updating existing global inequalities between centres and semi-/peripheries. Among other things, this analysis expands the fi eld of research on states’ bioeconomy strategies and the political debates surrounding them, which has, to date, primarily focused on Europe and North America. Through taking a global inequalities perspective, as is familiar within critical development theory, this paper offers an indispensable shift in point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the pervasive forms of consumerism which underpin the cruise experience. Drawing upon Baudrillard, among others, we examine the process of 'magical thinking' utilised by passengers to mask the hidden social, economic, environmental, and cultural harms that surround the international cruise industry and which in turn serves to reinforce inequalities and structural harms between the Global North and South, particularly in developing and 'exotic' destinations. In doing so we aim to unpack the construction of leisure cruising in contemporary western society, arguing that it has become the epitome of the normalisation of banal capitalist consumption which underpins the current global neoliberal capitalist system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominant international discourse about 'fragile states' calls for external actors to build the capacity of domestic institutions as a means of overcoming poverty and insecurity in the global South. It frames the pathway to greater peace and prosperity as primarily, if not entirely, domestically constituted, thereby confining the causes of poverty and insecurity to the domestic arena as well. This article argues that by focusing so intently on the domestic capacity of these states, international peace/state-building and development interventions discount, and thereby reinforce, non-domestic factors that impede security and development. These include: external support for repressive regimes; the sale of weapons to local actors; and the preservation of international trade arrangements implicated in sustaining global inequalities. This article argues that while each of these issues have greater levers for change in the North than in the South, they are generally excluded from discourses about overcoming poverty and insecurity. Therefore, if international actors are serious about attending to these issues, there are more pressing areas for reform than the internal institutional configurations of Southern states. Intervening in domestic institutions is, however, what development and state-building agencies are structured to do, meaning that to overhaul this mandate would directly challenge their existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following is a brief overview of selected topics and research agendas in migration studies presented at the XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018, Toronto, Canada). Migration studies occupied a prominent place at the Toronto Congress: More than 100 sessions (out of app. 1000) with more than 500 presentations were directly related to the issues of migration. They overwhelmingly concerned transnational migration in all its diversity. To provide even a cursory overview of this rich material is practically impossible. However, an attempt at presenting several salient topics and research agendas is worth making. This overview will focus on new concepts and research agendas in migration studies, on forced displacement, and on privileged migration. Аcknowledgements. This publication was supported by the Russian Science Foundation, Project No 16-18-10092 “Social risks of the international youth migration in contemporary Russia”.