Current Sociology

The contribution in this introduction, and in this monograph issue of Current Sociology itself, is to explain how patterns of inequality associated with global capital have been reconfigured in different contexts and have historically produced varied results. The definition of global inequality used here transcends Euro- and US-centric models of linear development and comparisons of national income and its distribution to explain how complex socioeconomic hierarchies, including – but not limited to – class, reinforce inequalities among social groups around the globe. The editors trace contemporary patterns of inequality back to the history of imperial and colonial power so as to reintroduce into the scholarly dialogue on inequality a broader understanding of ascriptive hierarchies of race, gender, caste, and national citizenship and their relationship to colonial conquest, enslavement, and labor migrations as interrelated contexts of the global production and reproduction of inequality patterns.

The article explores the collision and collusion between inequalities and identities with a focus on transnational mobilities. The author engages critically with the notions of identity and belonging before exploring racism, and integration and diversity discourses and practices, as ways in which non-belongings become shaped and reinforced. Belonging and identity simultaneously raise the question about boundaries of ‘difference’ and ‘identity’ and how they are struggled over but also relate to how people are placed hierarchically within societal systems of resource allocation and inequality. Struggles about membership, entitlements and belonging become ever more politicized where there is competition over resources in the translocational and transnational spaces of today’s world. Racisms forge and reconstitute forms of non-belonging which are central to inequalities, and as forms of boundary- and hierarchy-making, mark the boundaries in particularly violent and dehumanizing ways. Diversity and integration discourses are discussed in relation to European developments in the management of migration, with a particular focus on the UK. They are regarded as being underpinned by a hierarchization, culturalization and essentialization of difference. Finally, the article explores the potential of a ‘translocational’ and intersectional frame for understanding the transnational positioning of social actors in terms of hierarchy and inequality.

An entire Occidentalist tradition of citizenship theory viewed citizenship as a modern, progressive institution that helped overcome particularities of unequal social origin. Contrary to the claims of this (mainly male) Western scholarly tradition, the article argues, first, that the institution of citizenship has developed in the West through the legal (and physical) exclusion of non-European, non-White and non-Western populations from civic, political, social and cultural rights; these exclusions, and thus citizenship as such, have historically been (en)gendered. Second, the article maintains that citizenship and gender are the most decisive factors accounting for extreme inequalities between individuals in rich and poor countries in the twenty-first century. Forms of racialization, sexualization and precarization to which the acquisition of citizenship and the corresponding gain in social mobility are linked today are illustrated with examples of practices to subvert citizenship law through marriage or childbirth in countries relying primarily on jus sanguinis and jus soli, respectively.

This article offers a template for understanding and analyzing racialization as a paradigm. Further, this template is applied to the North American case – an important one because it has endured and spread across the globe despite the enormous weight of scientific evidence against it. The fallacy of race (and in particular the North American Anglo-origin variant) endures for two reasons. First, social agents seeking to gain or maintain power and control over paradigm-relevant resources benefit from reinvesting in pseudoscientific racial paradigms. Second, new science proving the fallacy of race is ignored because ignoring new paradigmatic science is in fact the way normal science operates. Thus, a paradigmatic analysis of race may help to explain why current social science approaches to the demise of racial thought may be ineffective.

Social science literature on caste tends to view it as a peculiar institution of the Hindus, emanating from their past tradition and religious beliefs/scriptures. This view also presumes that the processes of urbanization and industrialization, unleashing the process of modernization, will end caste, eventually producing a shift from a closed system of social hierarchy to an open system of social stratification based on individual achievement, merit and hard work. Drawing from a large volume of recent writings the author argues in this article that this approach to the understanding of caste is based on an assumption of Indian exceptionalism. Such an orientalist view of caste also denies the possibility of deploying the framework of caste for understanding caste-like ascriptive hierarchies that exist in many other (if not all) societies. Some of the recent theorizations of caste could perhaps provide useful conceptual tools for developing a comparative understanding of social inequalities.

India’s commercial surrogacy market literally produces humans and human relationships while sustaining global racial reproductive hierarchies. The post-colonial state’s aggressive anti-natalism echoes the broader global population control agenda framing the global South’s high fertility rates as a ‘global danger’ to be controlled at whatever cost, but is at odds with the neoliberal imperative of unrestrained global fertility tourism. Womb mothers (surrogates) subvert hegemonic discourses by taking control over their bodies and using their fertile bodies ‘productively’. But in controlling their own reproduction through decisions about fertility, sterilization and abortion in order to (re)produce children of higher classes and privileged nations, they ultimately conform to global neo-eugenic imperatives to reduce the fertility of lower class women in the global South. Surrogates creatively construct cross-class, -caste, -religion, -race and -nation kinship ties with the baby and the intended mother, disrupting hegemonic genetic and patriarchal bases of kinship, but fundamentally reify structural inequality.

Shifting the unit of analysis from the nation-state to the world as a whole fundamentally changes our understanding of migration. Elsewhere, the authors have argued that ascriptive criteria centered on national identity and citizenship have long served as a fundamental basis of inequality in the world. Here, they develop a model that seeks to identify the main forces driving migration across the world-economy. They test this model by drawing on an original cross-national dataset on population flows. This allows them to more precisely identify country- and region-specific patterns of outgoing and incoming migration, and to assess the relative weight of specific variables (e.g., wage differentials between countries, the extent of income inequality and social mobility in sending and receiving countries, civil war, famine, geopolitical location, and migration policy regimes) in explaining these patterns. Finally, the authors discuss the implications of their findings for a more productive understanding of global social stratification and mobility in the contemporary world-economy.

As Africa witnesses a shift from Afro-pessimism to Afro-euphoria, contemporary discourses on the continent have been hinged on the notion of a ‘Rising Africa’. This article explores the often-ignored structural defects upon which the notion is hinged, particularly in resource-rich contexts. The analysis is based on a critique of current narratives of a rising Africa as being far too simplistic and subjective to serve as an enduring basis for capturing the dialectics of change in a resurgent continent. It does this by engaging a multi-level analysis that draws upon the political economy of oil, growing inequalities in resource-rich states, strategic and energy security calculations of global actors, and the complex web of global forces that define the parameters and limits of development on the continent. Given the marginal position of the continent in the global extractive regime, this article posits that a lot will depend on understanding the implications, risks and opportunities embedded in Africa’s current resource boom, with a view to charting a viable and sustainable path in its unpredictable search for development.

Until recently, conventional discourses on global inequality and justice have been inundated with what can be called the narrative of the ‘global women’s rights issues’ industry. Interpersonal themes dominate the global social mission in an almost exclusive focus on alleged remnants of colonized cultures’ ‘bad cultural practices’ – e.g. ‘rape’, ‘forced marriages’, ‘domestic violence’, ‘FGM’, ‘honour killing’. Moreover, these widely accepted cultural judgements are deployed mainly on the basis of the ‘universal values’ of ‘solidarity’, ‘egalitarianism’ and ‘liberty’ – all slogans of Western ‘Enlightenment’ philosophy. There is a genealogy of geohistorical forces (that mirror key trends in the modern/colonial matrix of power) that must be considered if we are to understand the ascendancy of the ‘global womanhood’ discourses and the institutional frameworks of reasoning upon which they rely. This article traces this genealogy, presenting an onto-epistemological critique of humanitarian imperialism that proceeds under the guise of ‘global women’s human rights issues’.

Recent decades are marked by an impressive expansion of actors and legal structures intended to globally extend a certain ‘Western’ catalog of human rights. Recently, too, legal scholars have developed concepts to justify normatively the expansion of human rights (e.g. Habermas, Walker, Koskenniemi). This article reviews recent legal literature on global constitutionalization of human rights to reveal its blind spots, at two levels: i) the reaffirmation of European precedency for establishing the sources of human rights and ii) a lack of sociological tools for describing interpenetrations between law, power and social inequalities. In order to empirically illustrate these objections, the article analyses the recent global expansion of human rights of minorities, using two examples: cases treated by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Brazilian legalization of ancestral territories of afro-descendants. Finally, the article argues for a decentered perspective that (at the local level) connects human rights with concrete claims for justice.