Library News

As the pandemic continues, a key topic in international affairs is the relationship between inequality and COVID-19. The virus, according to Oxfam, "has exposed, fed off and increased existing inequalities of wealth, gender and race." Inequality is perhaps most stark in regards to vaccine distribution, where the WHO notes "poorer countries haven't even been able to vaccinate their health workers and most at-risk population." This has led to immunity inequality and a situation that the UN Secretary-General calls "a moral indictment of the state of our world."

Inequality is even more pronounced when analyzing the divide between wealthy countries and Global South. The Global South can be defined, in part, as countries that are economically disadvantaged. But this is only the beginning of a more robust and expansive definition that moves beyond geography and into the realm of political subjectivity and metaphor, referencing the history of "colonialism, neo-imperialism, and differential economic and social change through which large inequalities in living standards, life expectancy, and access to resources are maintained."

In order to provide a deeper understand of the relationship between the pandemic, inequality, and the Global South, we look to a recent publication by one of our parters, Dejusticia. An internationally-ranked research center based in Colombia, Dejusticia takes academic studies and translates findings into policy-designed educational and legal resources. Their ebook, Pandemic Inequality, examines the pandemic through the lens of inequality and asks: how does our analysis change when studying the perspective of Lahore or Abuja as compared to London or San Francisco? How can this viewpoint help us rethink the role of civil society? According to the editors of this collection,

[T]he virus has laid bare the deep dividing lines in our societies, as the pandemic met existing and chronic forms of racial, economic, and social inequality, which rendered a vastly unequal distribution of suffering from both the virus itself and the various forms of social and economic devastation that came in its wake... although COVID-19 has revealed structural inequalities and the failure of many states to effectively manage the crisis, it has also created an opening for civil society to evaluate and reorient its forms of action.

With recent partnerships with the BRICS Policy Center, African Economic Research Consortium, and the Sana'a Center For Strategic Studies, CIAO is growing into a significant repository for scholarship from and about the Global South.