Fairness in the Global Sovereign Borrowing Regime

Abstract

The chapter examines fairness in the global sovereign borrowing regime, arguing that poor-country debt relief, though morally overdetermined, reveals wider injustices. It reconstructs the regime’s fragmented, creditor-dominated procedures and core principles, especially permissive attribution and pacta sunt servanda, and surveys key criticisms of their procedural and distributive consequences. Questioning interpersonal and domestic-law analogies, it instead sketches an integrationist framework that situates debt within financial capitalism and evaluates it by its contribution to just global distributions of advantage and credit access.