Discussion Forum Posting Guidelines
Your discussion forum postings should be at least 300 words. You are to respond to two
of your peers’ postings in a thoughtful way adding new information and value to your
esponse.
Writing a Successful Discussion Post:
1. Read the discussion prompt carefully.
Pay special attention to:
• Purpose: What question or required reading are you being asked to respond to?
• Response type: You may reflect on personal experience, determine a solution to a problem,
compare two ideas, or make an argument
2. Prepare adequately.
• Before beginning your post, make sure you have read all of the required readings with a critical
eye.
• Access your instructor's feedback on previous assignments. Based on that feedback, how do you
want to improve in this next post?
• After reading, spend some time jotting down your reactions, ideas, and responses to the reading.
• Determine one-two of your strongest ideas, which you will structure your response around, by
assessing the amount of evidence you have to support a particular assertion, response, or claim.
3. Construct a draft.
• Use your evidence to build your response and persuade your readers by supporting your claim
with course readings or outside sources.
• Make sure that each piece of evidence keeps your post focused, relevant, clear, and scholarly in
tone.
• Make sure you have adequately cited all information or ideas from outside sources in your post.
4. Review and revise.
After writing your post, review your ideas by asking yourself:
• Is my main idea clear and relevant to the topic of discussion?
• Does my response demonstrate evidence that I have read and thought critically about required
eadings?
• Have I proposed a unique perspective that can be challenged by my classmates?
• Do I support my claim with required readings or other credible outside sources?
• Have I used a scholarly tone, avoiding jargon or language that is overly conversational?
• Have I proofread my response for grammar, style, and structure?
5. Submit.
• Copy and paste the final version of your draft into the discussion forum.
• Do a quick check to make sure no formatting mishaps occu
ed while uploading.
• Wait patiently for responses from your classmates.
Writing a Successful Response to Another's Post:
Please note that as part of your final grade you will be required to respond to another’s post within the
week that the discussion forum has been posted. You will have 2 days from Sunday when the
assignment is due, to respond to your peers forum posting.
• Read postings by your classmates with an open mind; think critically about which posts are the
most provocative to you.
• When responding, use the student's name and describe the point so that your whole class can
follow along. Example: Jessica, you make an interesting point about technology increasing
without training increasing.
• Whether you are asserting agreement or disagreement, provide clear and credible evidence to
support your response.
• Avoid using unsupported personal opinions, generalizations, or language that others might find
offensive.
• When in disagreement, keep responses respectful and academic in tone.
• Ask open-ended questions, rather than questions that can be answered with yes or no. Those
types of answers end the conversation, rather than pushing it forward.
Writing a Successful Discussion Post:
1. Read the discussion prompt carefully.
2. Prepare adequately.
3. Construct a draft.
4. Review and revise.
5. Submit.
Writing a Successful Response to Another's Post:
Please note that as part of your final grade you will be required to respond to another’s post within the week that the discussion forum has been posted. You will have 2 days from Sunday when the assignment is due, to respond to your peers forum post...
Paper Number 2
Final Research Project Ideas
All papers should be minimum 8 pages long, font size Arial 11, double spaced with appropriate referencing as per APA. That doesn’t include the title or Reference page.
1. Identify a country in which you plan to work or do business in the future. Construct a report describing business customs and practices in that country. Your task is to prepare a businessperson to act appropriately in one or more business situations (e.g., an office meeting, a project proposal, a negotiation, a dinner meeting, and an interview). Be sure to take into account both the cultural practices of this country and the cultural practices of the person for whom you are writing the report (you may be attempting to train a Latin American to do business in China, for example, so you would want to account for typical Latin American business practices when describing how the Latin American should conduct him/herself in China).
BTTM4860: Global Citizenship BTech
Course Code: BTTM4860
Course Description: Global Citizenship
Term Research Pape
Word count: Your paper will be XXXXXXXXXXwords. That doesn’t include the title or Reference page.
APA: Follow APA 7th edition in your title page, Reference page, and in-text citations.
Assignment:
· Write a research paper informing a general audience (ie. writing in general, accessible language) about the na
owed-down topic and how you see it as connected to course themes/material.
· The essay should include an introduction paragraph, body paragraphs, and a conclusion paragraph.
· In the introduction, you should make it clear what na
owed-down topic you’re focused on and why in your opinion it relates to course themes/ material.
· Use research to help explain your stance and inform the reader.
Topis
The idea of voluntourism as the negative impact
Some sources
https:
www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/08/09/ XXXXXXXXXX/american-with-no-medical-training-ran-center-for-malnourished-ugandan-kids-105-d
https:
www.theguardian.com/world/2013/fe
13
eware-voluntourists-doing-good
https:
www.theguardian.com/world/2013/fe
25/in-defence-of-voluntourism1
The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions - PDFDrive.com
Contents
About the Book
About the Autho
Title Page
Dedication
PREFACE Beginnings
Part One The Divide
ONE The Development Delusion
TWO The End of Poverty … Has Been Postponed
Part Two Concerning Violence
THREE Where Did Poverty Come From? A Creation Story
FOUR From Colonialism to the Coup
Part Three The New Colonialism
FIVE Debt and the Economics of Planned Misery
SIX Free Trade and the Rise of the Virtual Senate
SEVEN Plunder in the 21st Century
Part Four Closing the Divide
EIGHT From Charity to Justice
NINE The Necessary Madness of Imagination
Endnotes
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
For decades we have been told a story about the divide between rich
countries and poor countries.
We have been told that development is working: that the global South is
catching up to the North, that poverty has been cut in half over the past thirty
years, and will be eradicated by 2030. It’s a comforting tale, and one that is
endorsed by the world’s most powerful governments and corporations. But is it
true?
Since 1960, the income gap between the North and South has roughly tripled in
size. Today 4.3 billion people, 60 per cent of the world’s population, live on less
than $5 per day. Some 1 billion live on less than $1 a day. The richest eight
people now control the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world
combined.
What is causing this growing divide? We are told that poverty is a natural
phenomenon that can be fixed with aid. But in reality it is a political problem:
poverty doesn’t just exist, it has been created.
Poor countries are poor because they are integrated into the global economic
system on unequal terms. Aid only works to hide the deep patterns of wealth
extraction that cause poverty and inequality in the first place: rigged trade deals,
tax evasion, land grabs and the costs associated with climate change. The Divide
tracks the evolution of this system, from the expeditions of Christophe
Columbus in the 1490s to the international debt regime, which has allowed a
handful of rich countries to effectively control economic policies in the rest of
the world.
Because poverty is a political problem, it requires political solutions. The Divide
offers a range of revelatory answers, but also explains that something much
more radical is needed – a revolution in our way of thinking. Drawing on
pioneering research, detailed analysis and years of first-hand experience, The
Divide is a provocative, urgent and ultimately uplifting account of how the world
works, and how it can change.
About the Autho
Jason Hickel is an anthropologist at the London School of Economics. Originally
from Swaziland, he spent a number of years living with migrant workers in
South Africa, studying patterns of exploitation and political resistance in the
wake of apartheid. Alongside his ethnographic work, he writes about
development, inequality, and global political economy, contributing regularly to
the Guardian, Al Jazeera and other online outlets. His work has been funded by
Ful
ight-Hays Program, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren
Foundation, the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation and the Leverhulme Trust. He
lives in London.
THE DIVIDE
A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
Jason Hickel
for the wretched of the earth
Preface
Beginnings
I grew up in Swaziland – a tiny, landlocked country near the eastern seaboard of
southern Africa. It was a happy childhood, in many ways. As a little boy I ran
around barefoot through sandy grassland with my friends, unhindered by fences
or walls. When the monsoon rains hit we would sail tiny bark boats through the
dongas, welcoming the wet. We climbed trees and plucked mangoes and lychees
and guavas to snack on whenever we grew hungry. During lazy afternoons I
would sometimes wander up the hill from our little bungalow along the dirt track
towards the clinic where my parents worked as doctors. I still remember the cool
of the polished concrete floors and the
eezy shade of the courtyard. But most
of all I remember the queue – the queue of patients winding out of the door,
some sitting on wooden benches, others on grass mats, waiting to be seen. To
me, it seemed that the queue never ended.
As I grew older, I began to learn about things like TB and malaria, typhoid and
ilharzia, malnutrition and kwashiorkor – scary words that were nonetheless
familiar and well worn among our family. Later still I learned that we were
living in the middle of the worst epidemic of HIV/AIDS anywhere in the world.
I learned that people were suffering and dying of diseases that could easily be
cured, prevented or managed in richer countries – a fact that to me seemed
unspeakably ho
ible. And I learned about poverty. Many of my friends came
from families that scraped together meagre livelihoods on subsistence farms
subject to the constant caprice of drought, or who struggled to find work while
living in makeshift shelters in the slums outside Manzini, the country’s biggest
city.
They were not alone. Today, some 4.3 billion people – more than 60 per cent of
the world’s population – live in debilitating poverty, struggling to survive on less
than the equivalent of $5 per day. Half do not have access to enough food. And
these numbers have been growing steadily over the past few decades.
Meanwhile, the wealth of the very richest is piling up to levels unprecedented in
human history. As I write this, it has just been announced that the eight richest
men in the world have as much wealth between them as the poorest half of the
world’s population combined.
We can trace out the shape of global inequality by looking at the distribution of
income and wealth among individuals, as most analysts have done. But we can
get an even clearer picture by looking at the divide between different regions of
the world. In 2000, Americans enjoyed an average income roughly nine times
higher than their counterparts in Latin America, twenty-one times higher than
people in the Middle East and North Africa, fifty-two times higher than sub-
Saharan Africans and no less than seventy-three times higher than South Asians.
And here, too, the numbers have been getting worse: the gap between the real
per capita incomes of the global North and the global South has roughly tripled
in size since 1960.
*
It is easy to assume that the divide between rich countries and poor countries has
always existed; that it is a natural feature of the world. Indeed, the metaphor of
the divide itself may lead us unwittingly to assume that there is a chasm – a
fundamental discontinuity – between the rich world and the poor world, as if
they were economic islands disconnected from one another. If you start from this
notion, as many scholars have done, explaining the economic differences
etween the two is simply a matter of looking at internal characteristics.
This notion sits at the centre of the usual story that we are told about global
inequality. Development agencies, NGOs and the world’s most powerful
governments explain that the plight of poor countries is a technical problem –
one that can be solved by adopting the right institutions and the right economic
policies, by working hard and accepting a bit of help. If only poor countries
would follow the advice of experts from agencies like the World Bank, they
would gradually leave poverty behind, closing the divide between the poor and
the rich. It is a familiar story, and a comforting one. It is one that we have all, at
one time or another, believed and supported. It maintains an industry worth
illions of dollars and an army of NGOs, charities and foundations seeking to
end poverty through aid and charity.
But the story is wrong. The idea of a natural divide misleads us from the start. In
the year 1500, there was no appreciable difference in incomes and living
standards between Europe and the rest of the world. Indeed, we know that
people in some regions of the global South were a good deal better off than thei
counterparts in Europe. And yet their fortunes changed dramatically over the
intervening centuries – not in spite of one another but because of one another –
as Western powers roped the rest of the world into a single international
economic system.
When we approach it this way, the question becomes less about the traits of rich
countries and poor countries – although that is, of course, part of it – and more
about the relationship between them. The divide between rich countries and poo
countries isn’t natural or inevitable. It has been created. What could have caused
one part of the world to rise and the other to fall? How has the pattern of growth
and decline been maintained for more than 500 years? Why is inequality getting
worse? And why do we not know about it?
*
From time to time I still think back to that queue outside my parents’ clinic. It
emains as vivid in my mind as if it were yesterday. When I do, I am reminded
that the story of global inequality is not a matter of numbers and figures and
historical events. It is about real lives, real people. It is about the aspirations of
communities and nations and social movements over generations, even
centuries. It is about the belief, shaken with doubt from time to time but
otherwise firm, that another world is possible.
At one of the most frightening times in our history, with inequality at record
extremes, demagogues rising and our planet’s climate beginning to wreak
evenge on industrial civilisation, we are more in need of hope than ever. It is
only by understanding why the world is the way it is – by examining root causes
– that we will be able to a
ive at real, effective solutions and imagine our way
into the future. What is certain is that if we are going to solve the great problems
of global poverty and inequality, of famine and environmental collapse, the
world of tomo
ow will have to look very different from the world of today.
The arc of history bends towards justice, Martin Luther King Jr once said. But it
won’t bend on its own.
PART ONE
The Divide
One
The Development Delusion
It began as a public-relations gimmick. Ha
y Truman had just been elected to a
second term as president of the United States and was set to take the stage for his
inaugural address on 20 January 1949. His speechwriters were in a frenzy. They
needed to whip up something compelling for the president to say – something
old and exciting to announce. They had three ideas on the list: backing for the
new United Nations, resistance to the Soviet threat and continued commitment to
the Marshall Plan. But none were very inspiring. In fact, they were downright
oring and the media was bound to ignore the speech as yesterday’s news. They
needed something that would tap into the zeitgeist – something that would sti
the soul of the nation.
Their answer came from an unlikely source. Benjamin Hardy was a young, mid-
level functionary in the State Department, but as a former reporter for the
Atlanta Journal he had a knack for a good headline. When he stumbled across a
memo requesting fresh ideas for the inaugural address, he decided to pitch his
oss a wild thought: ‘Development’. Why not have Truman announce that his
administration would give aid to Third World countries to help them develop
and put an end to the scourge of grinding poverty? Hardy saw this as a sure
victory – an easy way, he wrote in his pitch, ‘to make the greatest psychological
impact’ on America and ‘to ride and direct the universal groundswell of desire
for a better world’.
Hardy’s bosses shut him down. It was a risky, out-of-the-blue idea, possibly too
new to make much sense to people; it wasn’t worth experimenting with it in such
an important setting. But Hardy was determined not to let the opportunity pass.
He managed to fake his way into the White House, gave a rousing defence of the
idea to Truman’s advisers and – with a little bit of careful manoeuvring by
supporters on the inside – his plan ended up as an afterthought, ‘Point Four’, in
Truman’s draft. Truman approved it.
It was the first inaugural address ever to be
oadcast on television. Ten million
viewers tuned in on that cold January afternoon, making it the largest single
event ever witnessed up to that time. More people watched Truman’s address
than watched the inaugural addresses of all his predecessors put together. And
they loved what he had to say. ‘More than half the people of the world are living
in conditions approaching misery,’ he proclaimed. ‘Their food is inadequate.
They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant.’ But
there was hope, he said: ‘For the first time in history, humanity possesses the
knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of these people. The United States is
pre-eminent among nations in the development of industrial and scientific
techniques … our imponderable resources in technical knowledge are constantly
growing and are inexhaustible.’ And then the clincher: ‘We must embark on a
old new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and
industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped
areas … It must be a worldwide effort for the achievement of peace, plenty, and
freedom.’
Of course, there were no actual plans for such a programme – not even a single
document. It was included in the speech purely as a PR gimmick. And it worked.
The media went crazy – papers from the Washington Post to the New York Times
glowed with approval.1 Everyone was excited about Point Four, and the rest of
the speech was forgotten.
*
Why did Point Four so capture the public imagination? Because Truman gave
Americans a new and powerful way to think about the emerging international
order. The dust was settling after the Second World War, European imperialism
was collapsing and the world was beginning to take shape as a collection of
equal and independent nations. The only problem was that in reality they were
not equal at all: there were vast differences between them in terms of power and
wealth, with the countries of the global North enjoying a very high quality of life
while the global South – the majority of the world’s population – was mired in
debilitating poverty. As Americans peered beyond their borders and began to
notice the
utal fact of global inequality, they needed a way to make sense of it.
Point Four offered them a compelling na
ative. The rich countries of Europe
and North America were ‘developed’. They were ahead on the Great A
ow of
Progress. They were doing better because they were better – they were smarter,
more innovative and harder working. They had better values, better institutions
and better technology. By contrast, the countries of the global South were poo
ecause they hadn’t yet figured out the right values and policies yet. They were
still behind, ‘underdeveloped’ and struggling to catch up.
This story was deeply affirming for Americans; it made them feel good about
themselves, proud of their achievements and their place in the world. But
perhaps more importantly, it gave them a way to feel noble too – it gave them
access to a higher, almost cosmological purpose. The developed countries would
stand as beacons of hope, as saviours to the poor. They would reach out and give
generously of their riches to help the ‘primitive’ countries of the South follow
their path to success. They would become heroes, leading the way to a world of
unprecedented peace and prosperity.
In other words, Point Four explained the existence of global inequality and
offered a solution to it in one satisfying stroke. And for this reason it wasn’t long
efore it was picked up by the governments of Western Europe as well. As
Britain and France were withdrawing from their colonies, they needed a new
way of explaining the gross inequality that persisted between themselves and the
people they had ruled for so long. The story of development – that the nations of
the world were simply at different positions along the Great A
ow of Progress –
offered a convenient alibi. It allowed them to disavow responsibility for the
misery of the colonies, and it was more palatable than the explicit racial theories
they had relied on in the past. What is more, it allowed them to shift their role in
the eyes of the world: graciously relinquishing imperial power, they would turn
to aiding their fellow man.
It was an incredibly beguiling tale to Western ears. It wasn’t just another story –
it had all the elements of an epic myth. It provided a keystone around which
people could organise their ideas about the world, about human progress and
about our future.
The story of development remains a compelling force in our society to this day