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 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' 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 topic 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 internationalpolitical economy, global governance, development and the politics of north & south.

1. Institutions and Marginalization 2. International Institutions and the Pursuit of Human Needs 3. International Organization and the Unfolding of Liberal Internationalism 4. The Historical Processes of Establishing Institutions of Global Governance 5. A Twice Passed-Over Alternative: The promise of democratic 'functionalism' in the 1930s and 1990s 6. International Institutions, Decolonisation and Development 7. The Failure of the Third World Alliance 8. Freezing the North-South Bloc(k) after the East-West Thaw 9. Global Governance: Poorly done and poorly understood 10. Political Consequences of the New Equality 11. The Epistemology of Poverty and the Poverty Epistemology 12. Building Global Governance in the Twenty-First Century 13. Marginalization, Development and International Relations