ABOUT THE BOOK

This book challenges dominant understandings of both economic inequality and the future of work. Leading scholars in law, social sciences, and the humanities consider the production and reproduction of global hierarchies by revisiting and deploying three critical approaches that emerged in the late twentieth century: racial capitalism, world-systems theory, and critical legal distributional analysis. They demonstrate that these methods—especially when brought together—offer new insights into the forces that entrench the asymmetries of power and wealth that are too often shorthanded as inequality. They also uncover elisions and erasures of the past and present in prevailing technological-determinist narratives about the future of work.

Hierarchies at Work features powerful, grounded studies of the dynamics of work and livelihood in sites ranging from garment factories in Jordan and palm oil fields in Colombia to dairy farms in the United States. These studies underscore the necessity of thinking about the future of work and livelihoods through their racialized past and present and recognizing the systemic role of law in unequal distribution. Highlighting alternative imaginaries that contest systems of domination and subordination, this timely book offers resources to spur more just futures across local and global levels.

EDITORS

Karen Engle is the Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law and Co-director of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a professor who writes on the interaction between social movements and law, particularly in the fields of international human rights law, international criminal law, and Latin American law. She is author of numerous scholarly articles and of Toward an Abolitionist Human Rights Court: Rethinking Responses to Gendered and Racialized Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2025) and as well as The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy (Duke University Press, 2010), which received the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association Section on Human Rights.

Neville Hoad is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin. He authored African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization (Minnesota, 2007) and co-edits (with Karen Martin and Graeme Reid) Sex & Politics in South Africa (Double Storey, 2005). Currently, he is in the process of writing a book on the literary and cultural representations of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa. Areas of research include African and Victorian literature, queer theory, and the history of sexuality.

DISCUSSANTS

• Vanja Hamzić, Professor of Law, History, and Anthropology, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.
• Giacomo Bruno, PhD researcher, Geneva Graduate Institute.

MODERATOR

 Davidzo Dhumbura, Research Assistant, Geneva Graduate Institute

This book launch is co-hosted by the Global Governance Centre and the International Law Department

This event is part of the ‘Law by Colour Code: Locating Race and Racism in International Law’ project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)

This book will be of great interest to researchers, students, and practitioners within law, international relations, political science, sociology and global studies who are keen to understand the impact of legal and economic structures on global hierarchies and how and how race and colonial histories shape contemporary labour and distribution systems.