In an article written with John O'Sullivan in 1977 – Moyn's human rights 'breakthrough' year – Bauer explicitly mobilised the language of human rights to contest the NIEO. Under the heading 'Human Rights in the Third World', Bauer and Sullivan contended: 'Western liberal opinion has been strangely and culpably blind to the extent of the persecution of economically productive, perhaps relatively well-off but politically unpopular, minorities'. This account of the human rights abuses carried out by postcolonial states merges cases of assault on classical civil and political liberties with violations of economic (or market) freedoms. Third World governments, they argued, had persecuted minorities, discriminated against them in employment, and conducted expulsions and 'even massacre'. They had suppressed freedom of the press, engaged in forced collectivisation of agriculture, restricted the inflow of foreign capital, established state monopolies and restrictive licensing of economic activities, and suppressed private firms. It was these human rights abuses, Bauer and O'Sullivan argued, that had resulted in the 'poverty and economic backwardness' of Third World societies.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 429