The publication of Tommy J. Curry's 2017 book, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood, was foundational for establishing Black Male Studies as a distinct area of study within disciplines like philosophy, history and sociology. In this conversation, Curry launches a stinging attack on the philosophical tendency toward abstractions and generalizations regarding matters that have profound social consequences, highlighting how philosophy's lack of accountability to the demographic or sociological realities of Black males has left it dealing with caricatures of Black men uncritically inherited from racist nineteenth-and twentiethcentury social science and ethnology.

TOMMY J. CURRY is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He holds a personal Chair in Africana Philosophy and Black Male Studies. His research interests are nineteenth-century ethnology, critical race theory and Black Male Studies.

DAVID LIVINGSTONE SMITH is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England. His current research is focused on dehumanization, race and propaganda . David Livingstone Smith (DLS): A little while ago you said to me, “I’m finished with the idea that one can just wake up in the morning and study race”. You said this in the context of discussing what you considered to be major methodological problems inherent in how philosophers go about writing on race. What are your worries in this area?

TOMMY J. CURRY (TJC): The problem is that philosophy doesn't take race to be a sophisticated field of study. We hire Black people to inform us about their experiences, but we don't expect them to contribute to innovations around method or debates concerning historiography in a way that we do with other scholars within the academy. The effect of this is that we end up using identity as a metric for how we ascertain whether statements being made are correct or not. So, to the extent that a Black philosopher says things that approximate the worldview of white liberals, that Black philosopher is accepted as being a rigorous and intelligent philosopher. Whereas to the extent that a Black philosopher raises questions related to disciplinarity, related to how we study and approach a problem, related to what constitutes evidence for the claims of certain fields, that Black philosopher is alienated.

Travis Holloway notes how people “talk casually about the end of the world”. We can distinguish an apocalyptic version of the end of the world from the more modest idea of the end of the world as we know it (or, more modestly still, as we want it). The West certainly finds itself at the end of Fukuyama's end of history, rudely awakened from a complacent belief in the inevitability of a global liberal democratic order. We are in a time of crisis, but still struggle to come up with fruitful ways to think and live our way through it.

“The Anthropocene” has emerged as the most potent western crisis narrative. As Dipesh Chakrabarty (as well as thinkers from many non-western traditions) has noted, we no longer live in a human world shaped by human agency; rather, we have always been geological, we have always been planetary. How long before this idea takes root in the western mind?

Living through crisis promises new forms of collectivity and solidarity: we are all in this together. Holloway considers the Anthropocene narrative to offer “a poetics that collectivizes and politicizes us”. A less optimistic interpretation is that our common Anthropocene inheritance will be little more than increasingly egalitarian exposure to forms of toxicity.

We must be careful when we talk of crises. As Kyle Whyte points out, perceived crises have historically precipitated kneejerk responses that betray ethics and justice. Furthermore, the presumption that the Anthropocene crisis is unprecedented blinds us to the lessons that Indigenous peoples have learned in responding to massive anthropogenic environmental change perpetrated by colonial regimes.

Modernity has been a permanent crisis for various populations, including Indigenous people, Black people in the United States, and non-human creatures. Part of what it means to live through crisis is to realize that some things will never change.

There is a widespread assumption that the continued deployment and incremental optimization of AI tools will ultimately benefit everyone in society. But perhaps it is time to critically interrogate the value and purpose of using AI in a given domain in the first place? In 2021, political philosopher Annette Zimmermann published an essay for Boston Review called “Stop Building Bad AI”. In this conversation with Boston Review editor Matt Lord, Zimmermann expands on many themes from this essay, offering a clear overview of the key social and political questions that philosophers are addressing in the face of AI-related problems, such as algorithmic injustice, lack of democratic accountability for powerful corporate agents, and the kind of learned helplessness that results from coming to see AI development as inevitable.

ANNETTE ZIMMERMANN is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Technology and Human Rights Fellow at Harvard University. Their research focuses on the ethics and politics of artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data.

MATT LORD is senior editor at Boston Review. He studied literature, mathematics, and philosophy at MIT and Harvard and is editor, most recently, of Thinking in a Pandemic: The Crisis of Science and Policy in the Age of COVID-19 (2020).

Matt Lord (ML): One way of telling the story of philosophy's long engagement with artificial intelligence is to see a transformation from an earlier focus on logical, epistemic and metaphysical questions – “What is AI? Is it even possible?” – to a growing discussion of ethical, political and social questions. To put it crudely, there was a time when the field was once little more than footnotes to John Searle's Chinese room argument. Now, following significant advances in machine learning and computing power over the last decade, we have this well-defined new subfield of philosophy, the “ethics of AI”, to which a lot of scholars, including you, are contributing. What explains the change? And what does it mean to think about AI from within the perspective of ethics and political philosophy, in particular?

Annette Zimmermann (AZ): One of the reasons for this is that there is a growing body of work, which is identifying problems of clear normative – not just technical – significance, coming from computer science and applied statistics, as well as applied mathematics.

Towards the end of 2020, The Philosopher published an issue asking, “What is We?” As part of a series of events to celebrate the launch of this issue, Luna Dolezal interviewed Dan Zahavi about the main themes in Zahavi's essay for that issue, “We and I”. They explore the ways in which “I”, “You” and “We” interact; the nature of selfhood; the politics of group identity; and the work of thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Buber. For Zahavi, if we wish to understand what it means to share a belief, an intention, an emotional experience or, more generally, a perspective with others, we also need to look at how we come to understand and relate to others in the first place.

DAN ZAHAVI is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. He is an authority on the work of Edmund Husserl and has written on numerous topics, including selfhood, subjectivity and empathy.

LUNA DOLEZAL is Lecturer in Medical Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Exeter. Her research is primarily in the areas of applied phenomenology, philosophy of embodiment, philosophy of medicine and medical humanities.

Luna Dolezal (LD): One of the most fundamental philosophical concepts related to the idea of “we” is collective intentionality. Could you tell us what philosophers generally mean when they use this term?

Dan Zahavi (DZ): A simple way of thinking about intentionality is that it amounts to object-directedness. Examples of individual intentionality include: I perceive a tree; I remember a summer vacation; I love somebody; I feel ashamed about something. This individual intentionality can also extend to actions: I move a chair; I bake a cake. And, crucially, it can also come in a collective form: we make food together; we move furniture together; parents love their children or feel ashamed about how they have treated them. In everyday life, there are many instances of shared emotions, shared experiences and shared actions. This is what is typically meant by collective intentionality.

LD: One way of interpreting this is that through having a collective, intentional experience, we are thereby constituted as a “we”, as a group subject. I was wondering whether you think of the “we” of collective intentionality as having primacy over the “I” of individual intentionality?

In 2020, Covid-19, the Australia bushfires, and other global threats served as vivid reminders that human and nonhuman fates are increasingly linked. Human use of nonhuman animals contributes to pandemics, climate change, and other global threats which, in turn, contribute to biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and nonhuman suffering. This conversation coincided with the publication of Jeff Sebo's book, Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves. The conversation foregrounds the incalculable harms we inflict on non-human animals by causing or allowing countless of them to suffer and die for our own benefit and by driving many species to extinction and many ecosystems to collapse. In so doing, we are also serving to endanger our own future on this planet.

JEFF SEBO is Clinical Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics and Philosophy, and Director of the Animal Studies MA Program at New York University. His research interests include moral philosophy, legal philosophy and philosophy of mind; animal minds, ethics and policy; AI minds, ethics and policy.

LAUREN VAN PATTER is the Kim & Stu Lang Professor in Community and Shelter Medicine in the Department of Clinical Studies at the Ontario Veterinary College, University of Guelph. She is an interdisciplinary animal studies scholar whose research focuses most broadly on questions of “living well” in multispecies communities.

Lauren Van Patter (LVP): There is a widespread feeling that we can do much better than we are currently doing in our relationships with non-human animals. At the same time, however, many of us feel overwhelmed by the complexity involved in thinking about our responsibility to other animals. For example, when thinking about climate change, the situation is not so clear-cut that we can unequivocally say that climate change is bad for other species, while rewilding is good, both at the individual and the species level. How can we get past some of this paralysis around the immense complexity of these issues?

Jeff Sebo (JS): There are two things that I think are true, but holding both in our heads at the same time is really difficult, because it creates a lot of tension. One is to accept that we have a responsibility to address factory farming, deforestation, the wildlife trade, and so on. We have to significantly regulate or abolish these industries that are causing so much harm to humans, to other animals, and to the climate.

Part of what it means to live in the end times is to realize that some things will never change. For Derrick Bell, we must acknowledge both that anti-Black racism in America is permanent, and that we all have a moral obligation to resist it. This paradoxical formulation lies at the heart of his influential and controversial thesis of “racial realism”. This conversation looks at Bell's thesis in the context of a supposedly post-racial America heralded by the election of Barack Obama as president. Critically engaging with the racial progress narrative, Golden argues that racism has in fact worsened since Obama's presidency, simmering away until unleashed by the Trump administration. As Timothy Golden concludes, the letter of the law may have changed in some domains, but there have not been corresponding changes to the hearts and minds of people.

TIMOTHY GOLDEN is Professor of Philosophy at Walla Walla University, Washington, USA. His areas of scholarly research include African American philosophy and critical race theory.

DARREN CHETTY is a teacher, doctoral researcher and writer with research interests in education, philosophy, racism, children's literature and hip hop culture.

Darren Chetty (DC): Who was Derrick Bell and what did he mean by “racial realism”?

Timothy Golden (TG): Derrick Bell was a legal scholar, activist and public intellectual who lived from 1930 to 2011. The expanse of Bell's oeuvre is truly impressive, worthy of extensive scholarly treatment in law, philosophy, social and political theory, and theology. In the current political climate, Bell is probably best known for being one of the originators of critical race theory. He advanced a trenchant critique of liberalism, seeing it as a handmaiden in maintaining the structural and material conditions of white supremacy, such that white supremacy is made “legal” through abstract notions of “rights” removed from the concrete political realities of Black life in America.

Turning to his thesis of “racial realism”, it can be summed up as follows: on the one hand, anti-Black racism in America is permanent, but, on the other hand, we all have a moral obligation to resist it. This is Bell's most controversial thesis – both during his lifetime and beyond. Bell's claim about the permanence of American anti-Black racism is an inductive, empirical claim.

Finding ourselves somewhere between the ideological extremes of techno-optimism and techno-pessimism, we are somewhat ambivalent and just a little confused.

Everyone is still on social media, but it seems that there is an emerging art of living with social media that involves something like: delete all your accounts right now! While social media giants stick by their stated ambition to unify the world, they are in fact, as Brad Evans and Chantal Meza point out, “creating islands of isolation, the likes of which we have never seen before”. Perhaps the art of resistance in the face of ever-more refined and numbing tech seductions is simply (to channel both Bartleby and Žižek) preferring not to?

Tech visionaries have a venerable history of cheque-inthe- mail promises: in the 1960s, Marvin Minsky promised us Hal-style robots “in a generation”; in 2005, Ray Kurzweil declared that “the singularity is near” (Kurzweil sets the date as 2045, which conveniently means he will probably have died shortly before he is proven wrong); prophecies of a forthcoming AI apocalypse get tongues wagging. The reality, however, is far more mundane. Even the LaMDA system that made global headlines last year when a Google engineer claimed it was sentient is, once the stardust settles, just an impressive text production programme. It seems that the art of living with technology is also the art of cultivating a good nose for bullshit.

Iris Murdoch noted that we are creatures who make pictures of ourselves, and then come to resemble that picture.4 Seemingly oblivious to the long history of using the latest technological innovations (from catapults to telephone switchboards) as a model for understanding the mind, the hypothesis driving most modern cognitive science these days is that our minds are literally computers or algorithms. The plausibility of the transhumanist dream of liberation from corporeality and finitude depends on this. But what do we give up and how do we distort our natures when we acquiesce to the powerful, gendered fantasies of a rather bloodless tribal creed?

Despite these misgivings, we all know that it is coming, no matter what …

We tend to think of the internet as an unprecedented and overwhelmingly positive achievement of modern human technology. But is it? This wide-ranging conversation coincided with the publication of Justin E. H. Smith's book The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is. It looks to Leibniz, transhumanism, and mycorrhizal fungus to help us better understand the part of the internet that is continuous with what we have always done and conducive to our thriving, and to fight back against the part that is a distortion of who we are and non-conducive to that aim.

JUSTIN E. H. SMITH is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Paris Cité University. His research interests include Leibniz, early modern philosophy, history and philosophy of biology, classical Indian philosophy, the history and philosophy of anthropology.

ALEXIS PAPAZOGLOU is an editor at the Institute of Art and Ideas. He hosts “The Philosopher & the News” podcast and writes on the intersection between philosophy, politics and current affairs.

Alexis Papazoglou (AP): What is the internet is and how have we got it wrong in the ways we think about it?

Justin E. H. Smith (JEHS): The internet is not nearly as newfangled as most people think. It does not represent a radical rupture with everything that came before, either in human history or in the vastly longer history of nature that precedes the first appearance of our species. As a result, we tend to overlook the natural analogy that thinks of the internet as being in continuity with the instantaneous transmission of signals across living nature. In other words, it is more productive to think about the internet as an outgrowth of a species-specific activity. Animal and plant signalling – for example, lima bean plants giving off methyl jasmonate that floats through the air across significant distances to their conspecifics; mycorrhizal fungus networks that attach to the roots of trees, enabling them to communicate with one another; sperm whales clicking; elephants stomping; – are true forms of telecommunication. Throughout the living world, telecommunication is more likely the norm than the exception. The main difference between these and our forms of telecommunication is that we haven't always been doing it.

Within all the various identity-related social justice movements representing marginalized and oppressed populations, the “Mad activism” movement represents an interesting anomaly on the grounds that hardly anyone knows it exists. In his 2019 book, Madness and the Demand for Recognition, Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed emerged as one of the only philosophers who has engaged closely with Mad activism and the politics of madness more generally. His conversation with Helen Spandler critically engages with our serious cultural impoverishment when it comes to mental health; with philosophy's history of excluding madness; with the politics of recognition; with the role of reconciliation in mental health services; and much more.

MOHAMMED ABOUELLEIL RASHED is a visiting lecturer in the department of philosophy at King's College, London, as well as an associate specialist in community psychiatry at Camden and Northwest London NHS Foundation Trust. His main research is in philosophy of psychiatry where he has examined a number of topics including the boundaries of illness, definitions of concepts of mental disorder and distress, and the diagnostic process in psychiatry.

HELEN SPANDLER is Professor of Mental Health Studies at the University of Central Lancashire. Her research expertise is in critical approaches to mental health, including the theory, practice, policy, history and politics of mental healthcare. She is also the managing editor of Asylum: The Magazine for Democratic Psychiatry.

Helen Spandler (HS): Where did your involvement in Mad Pride and Mad politics come from? It is certainly not a common thing for psychiatrists, or indeed philosophers, to get their hands dirty with the Mad movement and Mad activism. I am interested in why it influenced you so much and has had such a profound influence on your work.

Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed (MAR): When I was beginning to engage with problems in the philosophy of psychiatry, one of the first topics that I came across is the issue of the definition of mental disorder. If there is a defining topic for that field of study, that would be it. I was fascinated by the fact that culture was an exclusionary criterion from being considered to have a mental disorder.

Only a special kind of person would pick up and start reading a book on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Few people have ever heard of the goals and even fewer know much about them (Hudson et al. 2020; Tedeneke 2019).

This immediately points to a major challenge. The SDGs were launched as part of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015, accompanied by an official video entitled “We the People”. There are 17 goals of which the first, No Poverty, is the focus of this volume (Figure 1.1).

The agenda and video offered “a globally shared development program, involving the whole population in a common mission aimed to put an end to any form of poverty, to fight against inequalities and to face climate change” (Smaniotto et al. 2020: 2). The 2030 Agenda is approaching its halfway stage but, seemingly, without many of us – “we the people” – being aware of the need for our involvement.

The goals and 169 targets to be achieved by 2030 truly do present a “supremely ambitious and transformational vision”, one that is relevant and should be important to everyone. They aim:

Unlike the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that the SDGs replaced, they are “universal goals and targets which involve the entire world, developed and developing countries alike. They are integrated and indivisible and balance the three dimensions of sustainable development [economic, social, and environmental]” (UN 2015a: para. 4). Even so, each country is required to assume “primary responsibility for its own economic and social development” and each government must set “its own national targets guided by the global level of ambition but taking into account national circumstances” (UN 2015a: para. 55).

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) did not simply replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), they were a reaction to them.

The eight Millennium Development Goals (Table 2.1), introduced with the signing of the Millennium Declaration at the United Nations headquarters in September 2000 were described by some as being “revolutionary” (SDGF 2022). Supported by the leaders of 189 countries, the goals seemed to offer “a common language to reach global agreement”. Not only were the goals generally considered to be realistic, but they also came with an approved mechanism for measurement and monitoring. Moreover, by 2015, the world seemed to be inching towards attaining several of the goals; it was even possible to claim that the goal of halving extreme poverty had been achieved five years ahead of schedule. For 15 years, therefore, the MDGs helped keep poverty and world development, if not in the public eye, at least as a focus for potential global collaboration.

However, by 2011, when the planning for the SDGs began in earnest, a large body of opinion considered that the MDGs were too narrowly focused and had therefore prevented poverty from being tackled in the round (UNEP 2012; Ivanova & Escobar-Pemberthy 2016). Some even suggested that the goals were fundamentally flawed ignoring the underlying causes of global poverty (Bello 2013; McCloskey 2015). The SDGs were therefore intended to take forward the collective energy inspired by the MDGs but to rectify at least some of their deficiencies. Hence, to understand the SDGs it is necessary to understand the MDGs.

The origins of the MDGs and the thinking behind them are considered before examining the extent to which they were truly successful. Viewed as an example of global international governance built around consensus, they stand as beacons of hope given previous failures. However, when the focus shifts to performance in relation to targets, and beyond to consider the impact on individual lives and the well-being of communities, the achievements begin to look more mundane, if not truly disappointing.

A signature characteristic of the Covid-19 pandemic has been its unpredictability. While sophisticated epidemiological models have proved invaluable in short-term planning and national leaders have very publicly relied on “the science” to justify policy responses, politics has necessarily driven the choice and timing of interventions with less predictable outcomes. Moreover, the ability of the virus to mutate into more virulent and contagious variants has undermined the value of horizon projections of the diffusion of the disease. Furthermore, attempts to assess the likely economic impact of the pandemic have been hindered by the prevalence of equilibrium models used in forecasting and the difficulty of accounting for disruptive events such as a pandemic. This has left forecasters scrambling to draw lessons from previous economic shocks of equivalent scale and from earlier pandemics most of which occurred in a noticeably less integrated global economy.

Writing anything about the implications of the pandemic while it continues is, therefore, full of attendant risks. To accommodate the uncertainty, the chapter is divided into two sections with a brief postscript included in the conclusion. The intention is to assess the impact of the first two years of the pandemic, although many of the necessary facts are unavailable. The lack of evidence is mostly due to the inevitable delay in assembling comparable information necessary for global analysis but is sometimes a result of the pandemic disrupting the collection of reliable statistics. Even so, the accumulation of evidence points to the very inequitable impact of the pandemic discussed in the first section, and to a sizeable increase in poverty which is considered in the second.

Covid-19 and income inequality

From the very earliest days of the pandemic, the expectation was that it would most disadvantage people who were already poor. That, after all, was the experience with previous pandemics (Alfani 2020; Furceri et al. 2020).

The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, where the first cases appeared to be clustered, was frequented more by migrant workers than by Wuhanren with urban residency. The Wuhan lockdown initially hurt daily labourers, denying them income. Then, when the lockdown was quickly extended nationally in China, poorer migrant workers who were caught at home because of the New Year festival were prohibited from returning to work in the cities.

Reading this sentence from Transforming our World, the UN declaration announcing the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, one could be forgiven for assuming that they are simply the MDGs Mark 2 (UN 2015a: para. 16). The reality, however, is very different. While homage is paid to the MDGs, it is only as relics belonging to an earlier civilization. Although SDG1, like MDG1, relates to poverty, the real action in negotiating the SDGs took place elsewhere, leaving SDG1 poorly specified.

This situation arose for several reasons to be elucidated in the first part of this chapter. In summary, the momentum behind the SDGs came, not from the poverty lobby, but from environmentalists schooled in ideas of sustainable development. In addition, state actors from the Global South, reacting to the MDGs drawn up by donor countries, aspired to do things differently. However, governments of many OECD countries resisted fundamental change, making it remarkable that agreement was achieved and that outright confrontation between North and South was avoided. It is generally recognized that this was made possible by skilled leadership operating in a new consultative way that weakened pre-existing alliances and power structures. It must be noted, however, that this recognition rests heavily on the writings of the main protagonists who shaped the negotiations and brokered the outcome (Kamau et al. 2018).

The influence of the sustainability lobby is evident in the expansion of the goals to embrace environmental, economic and social objectives and in the emphasis given to the interconnectedness of goals. The SDGs also differ from the MDGs in that they include targets relating to the “means of implementation”. Given that these targets necessarily allude to resources, they emphasize the need for global partnership and transfers in cash and in kind to assist less developed nations.

The five substantive and two means of implementation targets associated with SDG1 are examined in the second section along with the most important of the 13 indicators. Taken together, the targets and indicators appear as casualties of the confusion between the different concepts of poverty discussed in Chapter 1.

While poverty is continuously being generated by the global economic system that simultaneously produces great wealth, the biblical notion that “the poor are always with you” does not need to be true. The world is rich enough to eradicate poverty and the policies introduced in Chapter 6 provide means of doing so.

Even so, the United Nations is correct to stress that the SDGs and eradication of poverty offers the world a “supremely ambitious and transformational vision” (UN 2015a: para. 39). They require national governments to accept “primary responsibility for [their] own economic and social development” but also call for “a global partnership” to “work in a spirit of global solidarity, in particular solidarity with the poorest”. Without the proactive support of richer nations, the least economically developed states will not attain SDG1 and eradicate extreme poverty, while some lower middle-income countries will have difficulty halving poverty with the threshold set at poverty US$3.20/day (Figure 7.1).

While the composition of any global partnership needs to be wide-ranging and to include civil society and representation from labour and employers, the scale of the venture, as explained in Chapter 6, needs to be driven by intergovernmental organizations. Only they have the resources and authority to support national governments and the ability to cajole or even to direct them. Moreover, as nation states were necessarily the sole signatories to 2030 Agenda, the United Nations General Assembly resolution establishing the SDGs in 2015, the required global partnership can only be achieved by national governments working together through existing intergovernmental organizations or ones that are specially created.

Returning to the metaphor of the national welfare state introduced in Chapter 6, there is no international equivalent to central governments with the authority to affect the primary distribution of incomes through market regulation or to influence the secondary distribution by means of taxation and spending. Insofar as the necessity of curbing the inequality generated through the symbiotic relationship between powerful firms, financial institutions and states is recognized, it falls to a host of international organizations to achieve it (Cimadamore 2016).

While books may end, history does not. Stories need to be continuously retold and often revised.

It was clear, even before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, that the chances of the world being able to eradicate poverty by 2030 were reducing by the minute. The pandemic added substantially to the challenge and underlined the difficulties that national governments confront in working together for the common good (Chapter 5; Case Study 8). Politicians feel compelled to serve their own populations first, others second if at all.

Then, in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine with yet incalculable consequences that include a possible tenfold increase in US5.50/day poverty in Ukraine during 2022, together with a 75 million increase in extreme (below US$1.90/day) poverty globally (World Bank 2022b). Although unexpected, the invasion is explicable in terms of a failure in statecraft and the impotence of the United Nations discussed in Chapter 7.

The origins of the war are traceable to euphoria in the 1990s concerning the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy that encouraged the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama to author The End of History and the Last Man (1992). In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia's pleas to join the European Union were rebuffed and the United States sought to contain the growth of a potential economic rival, financially supporting its former satellite countries at the expense of Russia (Walker 2022). With the eastwards expansion of NATO and with US bases in countries to its east, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, under pressure from failures in domestic policy, found reason to ignore international law and attempt a full takeover of Ukraine, having annexed Crimea in 2014.

While the invasion of Ukraine is understandable in terms of neorealist theories of international relations, they say little about how the world can lessen the consequences of the war for the world's most disadvantaged citizens. At the time of writing, it seems likely that global economic growth will collapse due to surging inflation, with rising energy and food prices directly attributable to the war compounding increases arising from economic dislocations following the pandemic.

Reading this sentence from Transforming our World, the UN declaration announcing the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, one could be forgiven for assuming that they are simply the MDGs Mark 2 (UN 2015a: para. 16). The reality, however, is very different. While homage is paid to the MDGs, it is only as relics belonging to an earlier civilization. Although SDG1, like MDG1, relates to poverty, the real action in negotiating the SDGs took place elsewhere, leaving SDG1 poorly specified.

This situation arose for several reasons to be elucidated in the first part of this chapter. In summary, the momentum behind the SDGs came, not from the poverty lobby, but from environmentalists schooled in ideas of sustainable development. In addition, state actors from the Global South, reacting to the MDGs drawn up by donor countries, aspired to do things differently. However, governments of many OECD countries resisted fundamental change, making it remarkable that agreement was achieved and that outright confrontation between North and South was avoided. It is generally recognized that this was made possible by skilled leadership operating in a new consultative way that weakened pre-existing alliances and power structures. It must be noted, however, that this recognition rests heavily on the writings of the main protagonists who shaped the negotiations and brokered the outcome (Kamau et al. 2018).

The influence of the sustainability lobby is evident in the expansion of the goals to embrace environmental, economic and social objectives and in the emphasis given to the interconnectedness of goals. The SDGs also differ from the MDGs in that they include targets relating to the “means of implementation”. Given that these targets necessarily allude to resources, they emphasize the need for global partnership and transfers in cash and in kind to assist less developed nations.

The five substantive and two means of implementation targets associated with SDG1 are examined in the second section along with the most important of the 13 indicators. Taken together, the targets and indicators appear as casualties of the confusion between the different concepts of poverty discussed in Chapter 1.