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Available open access digitally under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.
This book examines the significance of both historical and contemporary inequality in shaping diplomatic disagreements in international relations.
The author demonstrates that the North-South divide has endured into the 21st century by drawing on three decades of data measuring the foreign policy positions of states on divisive global issues, including new text-based measures of international priorities within the United Nations General Assembly. This divide reflects the dissatisfaction of many states of the Global South with the post-Cold War international order, owing to historical legacies of unequal development.
Wide-ranging and rigorous, this new empirical investigation demonstrates the ongoing relevance of material inequality for international politics and the multilateral system.
“Lees offers an insightful and compelling account of how differences in foreign policy preferences can be attributed to the enduring North-South divide in global politics. The book combines robust empirical analyses and a rich array of theoretical insights to trace the factors that have contributed to global inequalities and that divide the foreign policy of the Global North and Global South. This is an important piece of scholarship that speaks to varying theoretical and empirical perspectives on global inequality and foreign policy.” Theresa Squatrito, The London School of Economics and Political Science
1. Introduction: Historical Inequality and Contemporary Disagreement
2. The Concepts of North and South
3. Theorising the North-South Divide in International Relations
4. A Strategy for Researching International Disagreement
5. Debating Across the Divide: A Text Analysis of the United Nations General Debate
6. Geography and the North-South Divide: How Deep Are the Roots of International Inequality?
7. State History in the Making of the North-South Divide: Divergence and Reversals During the European Colonial Era
8. The World Economy and the North-South Divide: Structuralism Revisited
9. Diversity in Discontent: Exploring Foreign Policy Variation Across the Global South Using Cluster Analysis
10. Conclusion: The Enduring Relevance of the North-South Divide
Appendix: Research Design and Methodology