Abstract
Treating the globe as one system and defining cleavages as oppositions at global rather than domestic level, the paper investigates how actors’ ideologies politicize different types of socio-economic, cultural and political inequalities. Theoretically, the paper offers a typology of politicization based on territorial and/or membership boundaries leading to four types: universal, functional, territorial and territorialized. Empirically, large language models are applied historically to text produced by global actors, including supra-national NGOs (Greenpeace and Amnesty International), transnational organizations (Socialist International, Fabian Society, Feminist Movement), economic cartels (East India Company, OPEC, World Bank), and national/regional actors (Bharatiya Janata Party, Kemalist movement, Muslim Brotherhood, Zionism). The analysis relies on category classification to test alternative hypotheses about whether the type of politicization depends on the unequally distributed rights and resources or on the actors’ ideology. Results point to the latter but also show that actors selectively emphasize different inequalities, leading to a long-term trend toward the de territorialization of cleavages.
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