The current world economic crisis has highlighted a profound challenge to conventional thinking on and approaches to human rights, especially the right to development. Human rights, primarily economic and social rights, are based on a theory of constant expansion of the economic pie for all, and the right to development is explicitly predicated on the idea of the nation State leading the ever-i...

ilona kickbusch’s thought provoking editorial is criticized in this commentary, partly because she fails to refer to previous critical work on the global conditions and policies that sustain inequality, poverty, poor health and damage to the biosphere and, as a result, she misreads global power and elides consideration of the fundamental historical structures of political and material power tha...

On May 4 and 5, 2012, international relations experts gathered at Princeton University for a workshop on " The Future of Liberal Internationalism: Global Governance in a Post–American Hegemonic Era. " The workshop followed on similar meetings in January 2010 and 2011, which addressed " Rivalry and Partnership: The Struggle for a New Global Governance Leadership " and " New Foundations for Globa...

Today's global health crisis illustrates many of the transnational governance challenges the United States faces today. In the arena of global health, the United States can create a new role for itself by moving beyond a national-interest paradigm and strengthening its "soft power" position in health. Health in recent administrations has moved beyond being "just" a humanitarian issue to being o...

As the world recovers from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the international community should promote a mix of policies to sustain this global recovery and create jobs through reducing carbon dependency, ecological degradation and poverty. Such a Global Green New Deal (GGND) requires a long-term commitment to implementing and coordinating “green investments” by the Group o...

Development aid forms an important link between rich countries, poor countries and poor people. But there have been serious concerns raised by aid critiques about the quality and accuracy of the global aid data (Riddell 2007, Easterly and Pfutze 2008 and Birdsall et al, 2010). It is often incomplete and of poor quality. Though OECD DAC has long played a key role in defining and capturing data o...

The Washington Consensus, through which neoliberal global capitalist governance gained hegemony over the third world, entered a crisis in the late 1990s. Triggered by the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and by contestations of neoliberal governance from global civil society, two remakings of global capitalist governance can be identified: A ‘post-Washington consensus’ whose relation to neoliberali...

Global health is increasingly reliant on financial markets. The ongoing financialisation of global health raises new questions of governance, which we expect to affect policy makers as much as doctors, nurses and patients in the years to come. In this editorial, we will first explain what is meant by financialisation, then illustrate its nature in the field of global health via three examples, ...