As we enterthe new millennium, the Third World, far from disappearing, is becoming global.The dynamic of economic driven globalization is resulting in the globalreproduction of Third World problems. Growing inequality, risk and vulnerabilitycharacterize not simply the state system, but an emerging global social order.This is part of an historical process underway for five centuries: the expansionof capitalism across the globe. Technological developments speed up the process.The demise of the communist bloc and the associated rejection of ‘realexisting socialism’ as a mode of economic organization have provided aspecific additional fillip to the reconfiguration of the ‘ThirdWorld’. The 1980s, and more particularly the 1990s, have witnessed themainstreaming of liberal economic ideology via the Washington consensus. This approach to development has been legitimated in severalglobal conferences such as United Nations Conference on Environment andDevelopment (UNCED) and the Copenhagen Social Summit. It has been appliedpractically through institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF),the World Bank and World Trade Organization (WTO). In its wake we have seen adeepening of existing inequalities between and within states, with a resultingtension—contradiction even—between the development targets agreed bythe United Nations (UN), and the policies pursued by international organizationsand governments to facilitate such results.