11 September and the widening North-South gap: root causes of terrorism in the global order.

One feature of the globalized society is that disaster can happen at the global level, so we are now in this process where either we grasp the moral and political implications of this increasingly shared fate we have with other people or very bad things will happen.

Robert Wright, 13 March 2001 (see: Wright and Kaplan, 2001)

MAKING SENSE OF TRAGEDIES AND CHAOS: AN INTRODUCTION

BEYOND THE IMMEDIATE PREDICTIONS and short to medium range implications, New York's tragic events may stand as a moment for fundamental moral and political choice. It may mark the end of a certain global order and the emergence of a new one rather than the consolidation of the existing unipolar order. In that sense it may not be far-fetched to see 11 September as symbolic as the 1956 Suez Canal war. No observer can avoid some direct or indirect reference to the symbolism involved in choosing the targets for the criminal attack nor can analysts and policy makers alike avoid looking at its root causes of violence and terrorism when long term policy responses are considered and/or assessed. Eradicating international terrorism or "drying its sources" using the Middle Eastern popular policy phrase involve more than identifying the immediate "visible" or "invisible" enemy directly responsible for the criminal acts. It entails identifying and eliminating its root causes. It is these root causes that provide some elements of a claim to "justice" and "legitimacy" for these otherwise small isolated minorities of organized terror. It does not matter whether or not such claim to legitimacy was systematically held or reinvented (the Palestinian cause of bin Laden after New York and Saddam after the invasion of Kuwait). Without falling into the trap of formal logic, undermining the basis for such claims to "justice" and "legitimacy" is the only way to eliminate their implicit or explicit characterization of their acts as being a "public good" and as the only available route to making peace the "public good."

OUR/THE "GLOBAL VILLAGE": THIRTY YEARS APART

Some thirty years or so, I was studying "introduction to development" in the other bank of the Nile. The first lecture was on the widening gap between the rich and poor nations. A week or so later, I started teaching "introduction to development" at the other bank of the same Nile. In both cases the widening gap between the two worlds was highlighted but there was a fundamental difference. Back in the 1970's the gap was less visible, less dramatically felt and hopes to catch up were still high not only among ordinary people, but among the elites, decision makers and international bureaucracies. Thirty years later, the gap was still widening. The twin effects of globalization (and the associated processes of differentiation and marginalization) and the information and communication revolution (transcending both income and alphabetization barriers) combined to make such a gap so glaring, so visible and so utterly discouraging for any notion of hope. "The international demonstration effect was already identified in the 1950s but it has become stronger and more widespread. However, because of tenacious incidence of poverty and unemployment, this means that "whole society sees their expectations frustrated." (1)

"Those young people are exposed to information and stimuli about a wide range of novel goods and services which are inaccessible to them" Gert Rosenthal points this out as one of the reasons for threats to urban security and the rise of violence in the cities, "which all seriously affect levels of social integration and governance." (2)

The central issue of the widening North-South gap seems to be trapped in a narrowly defined boundary of resources, hastily reading of the long term trends and an undifferentiated notion of the South that stresses the achievements of the "few" escapers at the expense of the "no-where" majority of LDCs. Historically, there was almost no gap between South and North. "Starting from research providing historical evidence that Southern Countries were considerably richer in the past than previously believed. Pritchett points out, divergence would even be larger than his own results shows." (3) He quotes Bairach's 1993 findings that there was almost no gap between North and South as late as 1800, which means before the heyday of colonialism, when many southern economies were crippled. (4) Pritchet's study of the per capita growth rates from 1870 to 1990 provides new convincing evidence: "Although there is not a great deal of historical evidence on GDP estimate in the very long term for the less developed countries, what there is, confirms the finding of massive divergence. There is a staggering increase in the absolute gap in per capita income between rich and poor." (5)

Recent World Bank claims of a closing gap were based on two primary assumptions: That the economies of the developing countries are growing faster than the industrialized countries' economies, and that large net capital flows are now heading to developing nations. (6) Examining these claims, Broad and Landi used economic data from the World Bank and United Nations' specialized agencies, and concluded that the North-South gap continues to widen in all but roughly a dozen Third World countries, and that there remains a net flow of resources from most Southern nations to the North. (7) Broad and Laundi's calculations of both growth rates and portfolio flows are extremely concentrated in a dozen or so countries with privatization-driven flows representing "a one time non-replicable increase in portfolio flows." (8) Similar conclusion was reiterated by Hans Singer, who suggested that Sub-Sahara Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean need to grow by a staggering average of 8.8 percent and 10.5 percent respectively in order to return to the 1965-1980 trajectory. (9) His conclusion was unequivocally far from optimistic: "In other words, the task is impossible except, perhaps, for upper middle income countries."

The conclusion to be drawn is unmistakably clear. Some few 'not the bottom of the ladder' LDCs, with sufficiently developed service sectors may have access to the flow of investment capital. For the majority of LDCs and the 'club of least developed' the exceptional conditions of the 1970s that made possible large borrowing from the international markets to finance balance of payment deficits, no longer exist and/or have been made extremely difficult. Bonds between this group of LDCs and the global system will largely be confined to the historical legacy of the rescheduled debt in the short to medium terms. Prospects in most of the least developed countries will depend to a great extent on the success of policies aiming at halting and reversing marginalization, not vice versa. But, understanding the growing global divide beyond the convergence-divergence dichotomies, based on short to medium fluctuations in development indicators and/or particular reading of certain success stories including NICs, requires, as does the failed modernizatinn project, a wider definition of the global divide and an understanding of the processes at work that are shaping the reproduction and further deepening of the global divide.

The Changing Dynamics of Global Divide

However, once we move to a wider definition of resources, such detailed calculations and disaggregating are not even necessary or indicative. Once the resource-gap is extended to include non-physical capital including the re-discovered "human capital" and knowledge, such a widening gap and its direction of growth become more evident and traceable. Its direction is not at all different from Myrdars pessimistic but visionary prediction of the late 1950's: "In the absence of certain policies enforced by the nation state (protection and exchange controls), capital is likely to flow from South to North, rather than vice versa." (10) Although Myrdal was very much concerned with physical capital like most of his contemporary development economists, his prediction of the direction of flow holds tragically with the demise or pre-mature shrinking of the feeble basis of the nation-state in the "failed development model" of LDCs. (11) The thesis of net negative flow of resourees out of the South is supported by the growing evidence of the magnitude and intensity of the "brain-drain," its irreversibility but most importantly its understudied implications for the potential of future development in the sending countries of the South. An overall estimate of the negative South-North flow of resources was provided by the United Nations when the phenomenon hardly attracted any attention. UNCTAD estimated that between 1961 and 1972, Northern nations received around $51 billions of "human capital" through migration. (12)

While the implications of contemporary global and regional migration to industrialized countries may well be as significant as emigration, it "has transformed the domestic milieu within which (SIACS) collective strength, and patterns of alliances of political actors has changed, and migration has reshaped political interests and perception of these interests." (13) Such implications to sending nations may be detrimental to their potential to develop, not only in the direct and obvious limited notion of "brain-drain" and depletion of the tiny basis of accumulated technical and professional skills, but in terms of major disrupters and discontinuities in their historical and socioeconomic processes. For the weakest nations in the chain of 'left-behind,' (because of initial weak conditions or alternatively the degree of intensity of the "pressure cooker" effect a la Goldman, 1983) (14) these are serious matters.

Country-level intensity of global migration is far more important in terms of both the relative importance and implications to the development potential in the sending countries. In other words, although net outflow of engineers from a particular country represents a negative outflow of resources, what matters more is how this affects the accumulated engineer population in that country in quantitative as well as qualitative terms. Such data is sporadic in nature and difficult to find, reflecting among other things the declining capacity of the nation-state to monitor, let alone to reshape the international pattern of migration. For many LDCs, where the 'failed development model' was accompanied or followed by prolonged social conflicts, such global migration resulted in a significant erosion, not only of its accumulated stock of skills, but also of its middle class, elite in the Gramscian sense of the 'organic intellectual.'

The internal loss of productive capacity through wars, declining health and education is compounded by loss of its skilled workforce to the outside world. Between 1985 and 1990, Africa lost 60,000 or so professionals who immigrated.15 Using 1979 prices, UNCTAD put a cash value of $184,000 on each African professional migrant. The African "brain drain" is not confined only to war torn countries. Recent studies show more than 21,000 Nigerian doctors are practicing in the United States and that 60 percent of all Ghanaian doctors trained locally in the 1980s have left the country. (16) Comparable figures for the Sudan are alarming. Sudan lost 90 percent of its medical doctors to the outside world and its universities were left with 30 percent of its trained staff. (17) Thus, through the brain drain the South seems to be falling into yet a new low equilibrium trap a la Leibenstein. (18)

The skill exodus from the South to the North is particularly relevant in the context of the divergence-convergence debate. It seems clear that examples of convergence occur in the world economy. (19) In the cases of the East Asian economic "tigers," for example, any initial tendencies towards divergence could be overruled or were non-existent. The latter possibility is supported by more recent research which tends to show the existence of stronger technological capacity, especially in human capital, in the tiger economies, enabling them to retain the fruits of technical progress and to move rapidly into the more knowledge-intensive types of manufactured exports, thus avoiding negative effects of deteriorating terms of trade. (20)

Rather than the futile divergence-convergence discourse that seems to have dominated the development literature over the last three decades, long-term trends as well as the acceleration of rates of growth of these trends through globalization processes tends to suggest that a new dynamic is reinforcing the global divide. The relevance of the implications of accelerated resources and skills flows is that they almost completely undermine the basis for the optimistic convergence scenario. The basis of such a scenario is essentially the suggested tendency of the Incremental Capital Output Ratio (ICOR) to be more favorable in LDC than in DCs because of the diminishing returns to investments in the Capital-abundant North or the potential for catching up using existing technology and historical experiences in catching up. (21) The New Growth theories emphasizes that investment has increasing rather than decreasing returns, that knowledge and technology feed upon themselves; those with access to and understanding of advanced technology have the best chances of improving their knowledge and technology further. (22)

The operation of the new dynamics of a widening gap is exasperated by factors operating beyond the terms of trade, albeit linked to it, but not included in their measurement. These forces include the unequal capacity of rich and poor countries to adjust themselves to change in the terms of trade by way of substitution of cheaper products and factors of production for those which have become relatively expensive; the tendency of R&D is to work more in the direction of substituting and replacing primary products than vice versa and the unequal capacity to provide and/or new superior products. (23)

Furthermore, the skills exodus noted earlier set in motion a new process, whose negative impact transcended the limited notion of brain-drain. Educated elite's reproduction trajectories were radically altered and, with the loss of inter-intra generational transmission of knowledge and traditions, continuity and potential for dynamism is also lost. Such countries fell or are in the process of falling into much inferior 'low equilibrium trap.' Sudan, Algeria, Iraq, Burundi, Rwanda and Afghanistan, representing a wide range of initial conditions and development potential, are just some illustrative examples. The disruptive nature of such a sizable emigration of elite is also affecting, seemingly less desperate LDCs, such as Iran, Syria, Ghana and Nigeria, to cite only few. Therefore not only the visible and measurable bases for convergence has been eroded but far more seriously a new dynamic of differentiation was set in motion, threatening the feeble potential for halting the process of marginalization let alone revising it and for catching up.

The threats embodied in such a vertically divided global village is well captured by Vilanilam:

   If there were 100 residents in this global village, only one
   would get opportunity for education beyond school level, 70
   would be unable to read and write. Over 50 would be
   suffering from malnutrition, and over 80 would live in substandard
   housing. Six of the 100 would hold off the entire
   income of the village. How these six live in peace with their
   neighbors without arming themselves to the teeth and
   supplying arms to those willing to fight their side? (24)

ISLAM AND THE GLOBAL DIVIDE

A good deal of post-11 September discourse focused on the Islamic factor in the global divides. As Blank (2001) noted "Since the end of the cold war, Muslim fundamentalism seems to have replaced Soviet communism as the West's bugbear of choice. Both in academia and in popular circles, the core values of tradionalist Islam are commonly portrayed as inherently hostile to those of modern pluralistic society." (25) Huntington's thesis on the clash of civilization seems to have dominated the discourse about sources of threats and driving forces in the south. (26) Many scholars rejected his identification of Islam as the major source of such threats. Needless to say that the naivety of Huntington's reference to Islam stems from his characterization of religion as a trans-historical, transcultural phenomenon and the assumption of one Islam or as Assad aptly described "the insistence that religion has an autonomous essence not to be confused with the essence of science, or of politics, or of common sense-invites us to define religion (like any essence) as a transhistorical and transcultural phenomena. It may be a happy accident that this effort of defining religion converges with liberal demand in our time that religion be kept quite separate from politics, law, science .... This essentialist definition is at once part of a strategy (for secular liberals) of the confinement, and for (liberal Christians) of the defense of religion." (27)

Yet Huntington is not irrelevant as far as identifying 'Who?' in the wrong side of the global divide that has the potential for delivering a response to the divide and its order. This is true despite the fact that Islam's capacity to do so is not quite visible and institutionalized as in Christianity as Gramsci once noted "Implicitly "Christianity" is considered inherent to modern civilization ... (but) why could Islam do the same as Christianity? It seems to me rather the absence of massive ecclesiastical organization of the Christian-Catholic type ought to make this adaptation easier." (28) It is this invisibility end dormancy of the Islamic potential that reinforces the notion of irrelevance of the Huntington thesis.

The relevance of Huntington's thesis on Islam lies in the huge mobilization potential of Islamic networks end the ongoing radicalization of Islam through the political agency of various groups across the Islamic world. While the mobilization capacity through politicization of traditional networks (based on religion or ethnicity) is not unique to Islam, the extent of Islamic presence in the South is. That Islam happened to exist extensively in the wrong side of the global divide needs no great effort to prove. With few exceptions, Islam is almost entirely within the boundaries of the South. What Huntington did not spell out clearly is the huge mobilization capacity of Islam based on effective networks that has the capacity to transcend ethnic end other divisions, modern methods of control end policing of the nation state, even when such state is relatively strong end where official Islamic institutions are relatively strong (for example Egypt). In most Islamic communities such huge end effective networks remain inactive (dormant) until a major social upheaval occurs end a certain agent "anti-colonial front, political Islam party" activates such networks end utilizes its multifaceted institutional structure based on mosques, mosques end other numerous forms of communications. What is more, Islamic institutions provide an alternative educational system that represent some effective alternative to the millions of illiterate end hardly educated in the standard modern schools. The relevance of an Islamic alternative informal educational system has to be seen in conjunction with the extent of such networks in rural as well as in shantytowns end among the urban poor at large and the recent resurgence of Islamic movements in the same sites.

Historically, there are many important incidences through which such huge and effective networks of Islam were effectively energized end mobilized by political actors. More then fifty years have elapsed since Trimingham wrote his classical book on Islam in Sudan. Fascinated by the tranquility and tolerance in this particular version of Sufi African Islam, Trimingham (1949) wrote: "The Sudanese received Islam wholeheartedly, but, through their unique capacity of assimilation, molded it to their own particular mentality; escaping the formulae of theologians, they sang in it, danced in it, wept in it, brought their own customs, their own festivals into it, paganized it a good deal, but always kept the vivid reality of its inherent unity under the role of God." (29) Writing less than fifty years after the defeat of the Mahadist of Sudan, Trimingham was aware of the latent potential in such Islam. "Though the Nubiaus were once Christians and though some of their customs have a Christian origin, all memory of their former religion has vanished. They are bigoted Muslims but their Islam lacks the intensity unless stimulated by other than religious traits of such a movement as the Mahaddiyya or by their passion for trade." (30)

Those familiar with the history resistance to colonial domination in North Africa (Algeria and Libya) will recall how political agents were able to activate such powerful but dormant networks of Sufi Islam. Such an understanding of the role of the passive, but potentially powerful and effective networks of Islam and its huge mobilization capacity, is important in understanding the relative success of political Islam in reaching and mobilizing the marginalized as the modernization project failed to deliver, resulting in a shrinking state and massive rural-urban migration in mushrooming shanty towns surrounding the capitals.

Algeria, not withstanding the complexity and specifity of its case, offers another interesting example of how political agents (colonial state, anti-colonial resistance, post-colonial state and various opposition movements) attempted to use or reconstitute Islamic networks and ended up radicalizing such networks.

While the colonial state attempted to eradicate urban Islam, where ulema (the teachers) and the qadi (jurists) established during the Ottoman Turkish control, played a key role giving dominance to rural-based popularist Islam focused on local charismatic leaders, or marabouts, located in organized communities called Zawiya. According to Adamson, "The colonialist process effectively destroyed the organized religion of the urban community and in so doing created further space for the development of a popularist rural-based Islam, particularly because rural practice did not depend in quite the same way on institution reference points." (31)

Departing from the linear programs suggested by Geliner, (32) Adamson shows how unions tried to reconstitute Islam and utilize its networks and how these acts were shaped by external factors (Sandi support, Afghanistan and Bosnia later) in what he terms "a new globalization of Islam." (33) Despite the specifity of the Algerian Islam, similarities and are clearly emerging:

   Thus, although what was left of Islam in Algeria had been
   primarily rural, it is not the rural areas which are the focus area
   of today's Islamist movements. In practice, these movements'
   strength is to be found in the expanding urban areas. In the
   same way as the Algerian state drew upon the external Muslim
   world, so has Islamists movement. (34)

Evidence from diverse sites, historical background, different political socioeconomic structures and varying degrees of failure within the modernization project in the Islamic world suggest that a certain dynamic of radicalization of Islam with common features is emerging. In this dynamic certain political actors (such as political Islam) is utilizing, with varying degrees of effectiveness, the 'dormant' but huge Islamic networks operating mostly within the marginalized, most often rural migrants and/or urban poor where the urban-rural divide is almost blurred or where the failed development projects have failed to the extent of "ruralizing" the urban space. (35)

The shift away from the flexible and tolerant forms of Sufi Islam to more formal and rigid Islam that made it paved the way for further radicalization. This should be seen as an outcome of several factors at work. Beside the mobilization of networks by political actors, population flows and the powerful outreach of modern mass media were also instrumental in affecting such changes. Population flows between largely Sufi Islam countries and non-Sufi Islamic countries assumed a massive character following the oil price hikes of the 1970s. As opposed to the short religions pilgrimage, the extended economic one made possible longer and enduring interaction. Invariably such interaction resulted in unmistakable creeping influence of the more rigid Wahhabi Islam on Sufi Islam. A further shift towards the streamlining of the interpretation of Islam resulted from the leap on the outreach of mass media enabling a few charismatic clergymen (Sheiks) to monopolize it and to preach a particular interpretation of Islam. This may be a common scene in Arabic speaking Muslim countries but it also applies to non-Arabic speaking Islamic communities. Analyzing the polarization within Islamic communities in Nigeria, Watts noted that "Since 1960, anti-Sufi movements have proliferated through the intellectual leadership and adroit communication strategies of Sheikh Abubaker Gumi who has effectively used Radio Telvision Kaduna, the Nigerian Telvision Authority, the Kaduna-based Hausa language newspaper Gaskiya to fi Kwobo, and distributed taped cassettes of his tafsir sessions in the Sultan Belle Mosque in Kadua. (36) In Gumi's view, "Sufism is not part of Islam because it emerged long after Islam had been completed." (37)

In both cases, the bases of soft and accommodative Sufi Islam were increasingly eroded and a more formal and streamlined form of Islam gradually assuming an upper hand. While such changes in Sufi Islam are not synonymous with its radicalization by political agents, yet they seem to reinforce each other. The twin impact of both formalization and radicalization of Islam seems to overshadow the potential for an alternative reformed Islam that may develop its own vision for modernity. Some recent writings on Islam and modernity suggest that such potential is real. Examining the development of Islamic polity in Iran, Ansari suggested that religion will provide the social cohesion on which the political base can stand and flourish "The determinant ideology of this emergent Islamic democracy will be that of 'religious nationalism,' in which Islam is wedded to the nation and the nation is seen as the guarantor of the faith. Yet the faith itself will also be subjected to changes, taking on a new dynamic flexibility which is likely to make more durable and sustainable in a modern environment." (38) Blank's study of the Daudi Bohra community (a Shi'i community in East Asia), suggest the viability of a modernistic manipulation of tradition by pre-modern elite. (39)

Yet such potential does not seem to emerge in any viable form. A common characteristic of this radicalization and formalization of Islam is its increasing internationalization across nation-state boundaries, whether such internalization was a result of cold war agency or of the oil wealth. Invariably such movements are cultivating a new ideology, reconstituting Islam in a certain image that so far has not offered or delivered an alternative to the failed modernization project but seems to be a product of its failure. Invariably the radicalization of Islam, by political agents, transformed Islam into an intolerant ideology. An ideology that gives an illusive sense of identity and sense of moral superiority and functions as in Vaclav Havel's to justify even criminal acts without denying the potential of this inherently political religion to offer a more tolerant interpretation of Islam. (40)

Making the Global Village a Reality

In standard textbooks, public good is defined as one that each person can consume or use without subtracting from the consumption of the same good. Usually a lighthouse is given as an example of perfect public good. All mariners benefit from it and their use of it does not prevent others from also using it. It is in that sense that global peace stands out as almost as good an example of a public good as the lighthouse. Although it is, alas, much less physically visible than the lighthouse. Furthermore, given its modest cost, a single authority may easily transcend the market's inability to provide a lighthouse but the provision of global peace is not easily accessible. As the editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal painfully recognized, the requirements of providing health as a global public good: "We cannot increase our stock of global public goods without international solidarity. But the protestors below Parnassus are right to persist in their vigilant harassment of the new order of demigods who, unelected are assuming governance of a corporatized world. The invisible hand of the market has become larger, but not visible. And in so far as private interests govern the market it will be prone to inequality. What will the implications be in a market place of health?" (41) Ironically, the path to making peace a global good can only be traveled through the same path of undermining terrorism claims to legitimacy.

How to re-activate international interest and consciousness of the economic interdependence and the need to address the increasing divide within the global village when there is evident "compassion fatigue". (42) "Indeed, the response to human distress, not least because of the powerful impact of television, continues to be notably prompt and generous. But support for institutional intergovernmental transfers of resources, for the concept of 'targeting' and 'gapology' and for the assigning of guilt for the past injustices has dropped." (43)

Several months prior to the 11 September disaster, Robert Wright and Robert Kaplan sensed that tragic interdependence of the global village, "I expect this dynamic to grow and persist in the future because in a world where disease can spread across borders in no time at all, it is in the interest of Americans to worry about the health of the people of Africa or Asia. In a world where terrorists can wield lethal technologies, it's in the interest of Americans to worry about political grievances before they fester to the point of...." (44)

Unipolar Order and Global Peace: The Incompatibility

Using the old language of economics, moving towards a less divided world is a necessary step towards peace but not the sufficient one. The implications of the ongoing growing interdependence of nations and the growing logic behind cooperation is well captured in Wright's statement, "In theory, as globalization makes relations among nations more and more a non-zero-sum, you would expect to see more in the institutionalized cooperation to address these problems." (45) The Iragic events of 11 September brought to the forefront of the daily global management agenda the urgency of such institutionalized cooperation. But, it also brought up a far more important issue with regard to the future of the newly established unipolar global order. The inherent incompatibility between the foundation of the unipolar order and the need for an institutionalized international cooperation has been highlighted in the aftermath of the September events.. Speculating about the images of the coming international order, Michael Mastanduno, (46) suggested that the future durability of the unipolar order depends on the ability of the United States to meet three challenges namely: to discourage the rise of states that combine formidable economic and military capability with global ambition; to manage and minimize what has been termed the arrogance of power (i.e., the temptation to go alone); and finally to maintain domestic support for political and economic policies needed to preserve preponderance. The dramatic changes in the nature and sources of threats to global peace following the September events rendered both the management of the "arrogance of power" and even the statecraft not only insufficient but also less relevant. A shift towards a multipolar world order in politics seems to inevitable. But such a multipolar global order needs to incorporate mechanisms that will allow a wider global participation if the invisible enemy is to be made more visible and if the non-nuclear dangers are to be averted. The frenetic shuttle diplomacy that followed September in desperate attempts to create an ad hoc institutionalized international response to the events testifies to the need for such a mechanism on a permanent basis. There are important lessons to be learnt from the sluggish responses from the international community to the call for joint action against terror. These are: The limited room for maneuver of the nation state with reference to deep divides within its national boundaries (Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, to cite only few examples); and with reference to its direct interests and actual and potential spheres of influence (The Industrialized countries); and finally the inadequacy of unipolar order as a vehicle for providing a broad international platform for joint action. The demise of the relatively youthful decade old unipolar global order seems to have been greatly accelerated by the September events.

ENDNOTES

(1.) Kunibert Rafter and H.W. Singer. The Economic North-South Divide: Six Decades of Unequal Development (Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA.: Edward Elgar, 2000), p. 30.

(2.) Ibid: p. 30; see also: Gert Rosenthal, "Social Development in Latin America and Caribbean," Social Development Review. No. 1 (1997), pp. 4ff.

(3.) L. Pritchett, "Divergence, Big Time," The Journal of Economic Perspectives. No. 1 (1997), pp. 3ff.

(4.) Paul Bairoch. Economic and World History: Myths and Paradoxes (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1993).

(5.) Rafter and Singer, The Economic North-South Divide, p. 22.

(6.) World Bank, "Global Economic Prospects and the Developing Countries," (Washington, DC.: World Bank, 1994).

(7.) Robin Broad. "Whither the North-South Gap?" Third World Quarterly. Vol. 17, Issue 1 (March 1996).

(8.) Ibid: p. 12.

(9.) H.W. Singer. "Beyond the Debt Crisis." Development, Journal of the Society for International Development. No. 1 (1992).

(10.) G. Myrdal. Rich Lands and Poor: the Road to World Prosperity (New York: Harper, 1957), p. 53.

(11.) In the absence of certain policies enforced by the nation state (protection and exchange controls), capital is likely to flow from South to North, rather than vice versa. (Myrdal, 1957, p. 53).

(12.) UNCTAD (1982) cited in R. Broad and C.M. Landi, "Wither the North South Gap," Third World Quarterly. Vol. 17, Issue 1 (March 1996).

(13.) D. Held et. al. Global Transformation: Politics, Economics and Culture (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1999), p. 322.

(14.) Marshall I. Goldman. U.S.S.R. in Crisis: The Failure of an Economic System (New York: Norton, 1983).

(15.) The Courier. September-October, 1996, p. 59

(16.) UNDP, 1992

(17.) Ibrahim Elnur. "Globalization and Marginalization: International and National Context of Development Policies for the Sudan," paper presented to the Fourth Triennial Meeting of the International Sudan Studies Association, Cairo, 11-14 June 1997. (Published in El-Hiwar, XI and XII, 1999); and Elnur, Ibrabim, "The Second Boat of African New Diaspora: Looking at the other side of the global divide with emphasis on Sudan," African Issues. Special Issue. The Pitfalls and Possibilities of the African "Brain Drain" to the North. (Summer 2002).

(18.) Harvey Leibenstein. Economic Backwardness and Economic Growth: Studies in the Theory of Development (New York and London: J. Wiley and Sons and Chapman and Hall, 1957).

(19.) Hamdy Abdel-Rahman, "The Islamic Movement in the Sudan: The Case of The National Islamic Front," in Ola Zeid (ed). Islamic Movement in a Changing World (Cairo: Cairo University Press, 1995).

(20.) Rafter and Singer, The Economic North-South Divide, p. 20.

(21.) Ibid: p.24.

(22.) Ibid.

(23.) Ibid: p. 25.

(24.) J.V. Vilanilam. Reporting a Revolution: The Iranian Revolution and the NWICO Debate (New York: Sage, 1999), p. 80.

(25.) Jonah Blank. Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity among the Daudi Bohras (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

(26.) Samuel P. Huntington. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

(27.) Talal Asad. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD : John Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 28.

(28.) Antonio Gramasci. Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

(29.) J. Spencer Trimingham. Islam in the Sudan (London: Barnes and Noble, Inc. 1949).

(30.) Ibid.

(31.) Ibid: p.6

(32.) E. Gellner. Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion (London: Routledge, 1992).

(33.) Kay Adamson. Islamic Movements and the West: The Algerian Case (London: Cassell, 1998).

(34.) Ibid: p.6

(35.) See: Hugh Roberts. "Radical Islam and the Dilemma of Algerian Nationalism: The Embattled Arians of Algeria," Third World Quarterly. Vol. 10, No. 2 (1988); and, Asef Bayat Street Politics: Poor People's Movement in Iran (Cairo: The American University Press, 1998).

(36.) Michael Watts, "Islamic Modernities? Citizenship, Civil Society and Islamism in a Nigerian City," Public Culture. Issue No. 8 (1996), pp. 251-289.

(37.) Ibid: p. 275

(38.) Ali M. Ansari. Iran, Islam and Democracy: The Politics of Managing Change (London: The Royal Institute of International Affairs, Middle East Programme, 2000), p. 220.

(39.) Jonah Blank. Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity among the Daudi Bohras (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

(40.) See: Vaclav Havel. Power of the Powerless (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1990), pp. 28-29.

(41.) CMAJ "Global Doubts," Canadian Medical Association Journal. Vol. 165, Issue No. 1 (October 2001).

(42.) Peter Marshal. "Whatever happened to the NIEO," Round Table. Issue 331 (July 1994), p. 331.

(43.) Ibid.

(44.) Robert Wright and Robert Kaplan, "Mr. Order Meets Mr. Chaos," Foreign Policy. Issue 124 (May 2001), p. 50.

(45.) Ibid.

(46.) Michael Mastanduno. "Economies and Security in Statecraft and Scholarship," International Organization. Vol. 52, No. 4 (1998), pp. 825-854.

Ibrahim Elnur is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Office of African Studies at the American University in Cairo.