ABSTRACT

At its 96th plenary meeting of 20 December 1995, the General Assembly of the United Nations proclaimed the period of 1997 to 2006 as the “First United Nations Decade for the Eradication of Poverty” (henceforth: “the Decade”). The first part of the Resolution took a state-centric, modernizationist view, suggesting that key sites for the reduction of global inequality were inside the worst-affected societies (UN 1995: 4, §5.c): It

The second part of the Resolution “calls upon” [emphasis in original] not only “States,” but also

In setting tasks to actors “beyond” states, the document seems tacitly to recognize the origins of global inequalities-largely exogenous to individual states-and the general contribution of state-by-state differences to the gross amount of social inequalities in the world. At this point the Resolution

touches upon-of course without ever mentioning them explicitly-some deep controversies within the sociological literature on the relative magnitudes and the proportion between the within-state and state-to-state components of global inequality.3