The Global Poverty Debate: Locating the Superrich of the Developing World

This chapter presents global poverty as the most urgent moral and policy concern in the global justice debate. It provides an outline of the principal theoretical strands of the debate that have shaped or continue to shape the scholarly treatment of global poverty or more specifically the question of allocating the responsibility for its alleviation. The chapter primarily focuses on two themes; first, to provide a comprehensive and critical commentary on the Cosmopolitan theorisation of global poverty– – a theoretical tradition that continues to incite scholarly attention and imbuing the debate with the global character; and second, to highlight some parochial dimensions of this theoretical tradition. It concentrates mainly on Thomas Pogge’s Human Rights Cosmopolitanism, which paradoxically restricts the scope of the duties of global poverty to the developed world. This chapter argue that Thomas Pogge’s Cosmopolitan theory, notwithstanding its parochial slant, offers a useful framework for interrogating responsibilities of the superrich of the developing world towards the poor.