The accumulation of wealth in the Global North is a direct cause and result of poverty in the Global South. The economic policies of the World Bank and the IMF (international financial institutions that claim to eradicate poverty and promote development) have had disastrous effects on the countries of the Global South: forced market liberalization has meant that countries of the Global South have had to cut public spending, subsidies, regulations, and other financial protections from poverty while allowing the Global North to benefit. This website aims to make accessible the hegemony and violence of these institutions and ask: how do they keep getting away with it?
The goal of this website is not to remove agency from the Global South but instead recognize that economic hegemony occurs when economic agency is mediated and the predominant economic ideology is harmful to a large portion of the world, and the poor people of the Global South bear the disproportionate brunt of this harm.
The Global North and Global South are terms that distinguish between affluent and privileged countries and politically, economically, and socially marginalized countries. The image on the right displays countries that are often conceptualized as the Global North (blue) and those as the Global South (gray). I choose to use these terms on this website because while they are a geographic generalization they describe the divide between countries that (generally) have historically and currently been the colonizers/reap benefits from colonialization and those that have been colonized/bear the violence of colonialization. I use these terms instead of developed/underdeveloped because those terms assign morality to a state of “development” that is arbitrary and ecologically unsound. Development can mean many different things: see this website which builds a Sustainable Development Index and aims to understand development in a new way that accounts for ecological damage.
This website focuses on the World Bank, but throughout this site you will also see “the IMF” which stands for the International Monetary Fund, and was established at the same time as the World Bank and has also been responsible for much of the policy discussed on this site. The World Bank and IMF differ in that the World Bank’s explicit role (these days) is to reduce poverty through loans whereas the IMF’s role is to ensure the stability of the global monetary system.
