Domesticating Wealth Inequality

Abstract Relative wealth inequality between countries of the North and South has not improved since the era of decolonization, yet the LIO's economic regime has scarcely been challenged since the 1970s' New International Economic Order. This paper seeks to explain this puzzle by theorizing and empirically tracking a pervasive pattern of rhetorical “domestication” through which wealth inequality was framed as a domestic instead of an international problem. As part of a rhetorical process of “containment,” the NIEO challenge was met with two alternative, liberal discourses from the 1980s through the present: a “responsive” discourse embodied by the Brandt report and its social-democratic middle ground; and a “resisting” one typified by a speech delivered by Ronald Reagan in Cancun in 1983. Our empirical demonstration illustrates how LIO proponents discursively contained NIEO contestation through the spread of a domesticated rhetoric. Using a corpus of General Assembly annual debates from 1971 to 2018, our machine learning textual analysis reveals how a growing proportion of diverse countries address economic development in an increasingly managerial way. By tracking rhetorical tropes, we document a groundswell movement away from structural and political contestation of the LIO. Overall, our original methodology—based on an inductive and relational approach to machine learning text analysis—allows us to capture the many euphemisms that containment diplomacy at the UN entails, and more generally, how key political problems get muffled in global debates.