Global Inequality

Since 2015, the Rapoport Center has been engaged in a multi-year ambitious project, funded by the Ford Foundation, on human rights and inequality.

The project began by exploring the use and potential of human rights law and discourse to address economic inequality and its structural causes. It then turned to a focus on two thematic areas, natural resource governance and labor and human rights. Building on insights about the inadequacy of the concept of inequality to capture historical patterns of racial, colonial, and gendered domination and subordination that characterize global capitalism, we began our newest initiative, Beyond the Future of Work.

We are grateful to our distinguished, international Advisory Board.

See below for our project components.

Beyond the Future of Work

The Rapoport Center’s Beyond the Future of Work initiative seeks to shift future of work discourses and imaginaries through collaborative research and advocacy.

Inequality & Human Rights: Conceptual Explorations

This initial phase of the Inequality Project considers how international human rights law, movements and discourses have, could or should engage with the problem of economic inequality nationally and internationally.

Natural Resource Governance, Inequality & Human Rights

This component of the Inequality Project examines the relationship between human rights and economic inequality though a detailed investigation of natural resource governance. It explores the human rights issues that arise in the context of natural resource extraction and governance, and how persistent inequalities between and within countries pose additional challenges for the realization of human rights in relation to natural resource extraction.

Labor, Human Rights & the Contestation of Inequality

This component of the Inequality Project considers the challenges and the possibilities of human rights for adequately combating problems faced by workers in a globalized and simultaneously fragmented market.