The success of the NIEO, as Berger has noted, would have required the capacity to redistribute resources on a global scale. By the time the NIEO was calling for the extension of redistributive welfare policies to the global arena, these policies were in crisis. Anghie has argued that, given that the human rights movement of the 1970s shifted attention away from the structure of the global economy, it is 'surely not a coincidence' that this movement flourished alongside the imposition of neoliberal policies by the international financial institutions. I have suggested that there is more at stake in this 'non-coincidence' than a shift of optics. The activist humanitarians of MSF did not merely divert attention from global economic structures to individual rights violations on the part of states. Rather, their focus on human rights violations by postcolonial states was only one aspect of a concerted campaign against Third Worldism and the utopia embodied in the NIEO.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 427