In 1981, with neoliberalism in the ascendancy, US President Ronald Reagan used his speech at the Cancún summit on development to exhort Third World leaders to embrace ‘the magic of the market’. Cancún has been described as the ‘death-knell of the NIEO’, the moment when it was finally displaced by the neoliberal counter-revolution in development theory. … At the same time, the human rights–based ‘critique of the atrocity, misrule and despotism of the state’ was wielded by both human rights advocates and neoliberals against the utopia envisaged by Third Worldists.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 422