Knowledge/power/inequality

This anthology does not provide another statistical accounting of the gaps between the rich and poor. Nor is there an attempt here to proselytize or to recruit new converts into a community of the indignant. After all, international society may already have transgressed that self-righteous boundary of embarrassment (if we are to believe that one ever actually existed). Given sharp disparities in plenty and misery and the emergence of global apartheid in which lifeboat ethics and triage appear to coexist alongside triumphal claims of the end of history and the coming of a global civil society, it is difficult to envisage how shame or guilt could be seriously entertained as purposeful solutions to durable inequalities, old or new. Our alternative-to concentrate on the nexus between inequality and knowledge about inequality-offers a more critical setting to revisit questions that have become even more complicated under new conditions. To the extent the international is an enactment of inequality, the absence of pervasive or meaningful discussion of inequality in mainstream IR can merely suggest an oversight, an innocent omission born of lazy habits which established knowledge-structures usually produce. Conversely, the silence within the discipline on international inequality may also be an efficient method of banishing potential remonstrations against IR's own culpability in helping manage an unequal global social order. In either case, the erasure of international inequality from the theoretical field of IR provokes many untold stories. A part of the present undertaking, therefore, is to reclaim not necessarily the story, but the right to vocalize some versions of it, however partial and incomplete. These essays "problematize" international inequality, suggest some of the infrequently traversed pathways to understanding it, and recognize the inseparability of knowledge claims about the shape of the world and the shaping of it.