Tax rules shape who gets to live with dignity and who is denied that right. In this edition of Key Voices, our series highlighting allies advancing economic justice and human rights, professor of law Steven Dean unpacks the racial and colonial foundations of the global tax system and explains why reclaiming taxing rights is essential to building a just world.
“If you think the Bahamas destroyed your global tax system, then you’ve got a pretty terrible global tax system.” So says Steven Dean, tax scholar, author, and CESR ally. For Steven, tax rules are not just technical instruments. They are deeply political tools that determine who has access to resources, and who does not. CESR has worked alongside Dean to challenge the dominant narratives shaping global tax policy, including through a joint civil society statement calling on the OECD to integrate human rights into its approach and in a UN submission to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) addressing how global tax rules reinforce racial injustice.
Dean, a professor at Boston University School of Law, has spent decades examining how tax law preserves and reinforces unequal distributions of power. His latest book, Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law: The Story of Global Jim Crow, explores how the global tax regime took shape as newly independent, majority-Black nations in Africa began to assert their right to tax multinationals. This shift threatened the power of wealthy states and helped cement the OECD’s dominance in global tax policy.
Tax rules as a tool of empire
In the book, Dean shows how the OECD became the informal hub of global tax policymaking, promoting rules that benefited wealthy states and sidelined postcolonial demands for fiscal sovereignty. “The OECD’s charter was signed in 1960 which, not coincidentally, was known as ‘The Year of Africa’ when more than a dozen new states achieved independence,” he explains. “The OECD took on that key role, displacing the United Nations, as decolonization threatened to grant emerging majority-Black states the power to tax multinationals to pay for the schools and hospitals colonial governments had long denied to so many.”
Dean calls this exclusionary system “Global Jim Crow.” The term “Jim Crow” refers to the racial caste system enforced in the United States from the late 19th century through the mid-20th century, in which laws and policies institutionalized racial segregation and economic disenfranchisement of Black Americans. By describing the international tax system in these terms, Dean highlights how postcolonial global governance replicated many of those same dynamics: maintaining control in the hands of a white minority while denying economic self-determination to Black and Brown nations.
Dean has worked with CESR to push for more just and inclusive approaches to tax and fiscal policy. “CESR has done so much to promote human rights by highlighting the connections between abstract economic issues like international taxation and things that matter to people (health, housing, and education),” he says. “CESR immediately recognized how the racism that has long been tolerated in international tax policy harms ordinary individuals by perpetuating an unequal distribution of taxing rights around the globe. We teamed up with a broad alliance of organizations committed to human rights to fight for a more just approach to global tax policy, in particular in the way we tax transnational corporations.”
Rewriting the story of tax and power
Dean’s own journey into this work began with the stories international tax experts tell. “The stories international tax experts tell about the world grabbed my attention and have never let me go,” he says. “They help determine, among other things, which countries have the power to tax transnational corporations. And they are often so silly! Sometimes narratives are complex, but they can also get reduced to improbably simple ideas like the tropical tax haven. I grew up in the Bahamas and I will always love those islands, but they just don’t matter that much. I like to say that if you think the Bahamas destroyed your global tax system, then you’ve got a pretty terrible global tax system. That such a fundamentally racist—and ridiculous—story of Black lawlessness could be successfully promoted to preserve the power of wealthy states to tax—and, often, to not tax—multinationals as they see fit is just incredible.”
Dean’s analysis also connects international tax policy to the Global South’s debt crisis. “After World War I, Europe had an opportunity to rebuild in part thanks to international tax rules that not only ensured that corporations could not avoid taxes but funneled the resulting revenues disproportionately towards poor countries,” he notes. “The scholar Madeline Woker noted that one expert joked that this very different approach made it possible for France ‘to collect enough to cover the World War I debt to the United States!’ A more just approach to global tax policy could certainly have helped the Global South repay its debts as France had. It would certainly have limited the need for Global South states to borrow.”
What kind of reform and where
For Dean, international financial institutions cannot be relied on to solve the very problems they helped create. “The OECD is dominated by the world’s wealthiest countries, home to its biggest corporations. The OECD has, quite remarkably, never had a majority-Black member!” he says. “The IMF and the World Bank have members from around the world, but not all members have the same rights. The story I tell in the book reveals the very real dangers for all of keeping power in the hands of a few.”
That’s why he supports proposals for a UN Tax Convention. “I’m cautiously optimistic about what the United Nations could accomplish if it resumed the role it played before Global Jim Crow,” he says. “So much time has passed and so much has happened that we can’t simply turn the clock back to 1960 and start again. Today’s global tax policies reflect a deeply entrenched corporate bias and a change in forum can only do so much to reverse that. That said, bringing fresh perspectives to longstanding problems is always helpful. Asking the OECD to solve the problems it helped create is not quite asking foxes to guard a henhouse, but it’s awfully close. At a minimum, the United Nations will bring new voices to the table and sometimes that makes all the difference.”
The role of narratives in changing the system
Dean urges scholars, activists, and communities, especially in the Global South, to interrogate the dominant narratives that justify economic injustice. “The book I wrote bears almost no resemblance to the one I originally planned to write about intellectual hubris resulting in corporate capture,” he says. “In fact, when I sent the full manuscript to Oxford, they initially seemed reluctant to publish it because it had changed so much from the proposal. But the conventional story I had planned to tell didn’t make sense when I tried to tell it simply, without all the jargon. The men held up as paragons of virtue and wisdom proved to be flawed in entirely predictable ways, always ambitious and sometimes petty and vindictive.”
He adds, “Scholars, activists, and communities in the Global South can’t assume that everything they are told is true. And even when it is, they should not assume that their unique perspective will not reveal new and important truths that can help everyone. We all deserve good schools and hospitals, but we’re only going to get them by challenging the stories that justify unequal distributions of power and resources.”
This insistence on questioning dominant narratives echoes CESR’s Shifting the Narrative report and toolkit. The report explores how economic myths have shaped public policy, often to the detriment of people’s rights and dignity. Like Dean, CESR argues that changing the stories we tell about the economy is essential to building structural alternatives. Narrative shift is not only about language. It is about reclaiming the power to imagine and demand a different economic future.
Our blog series Key Voices features testimony and analysis from CESR allies advancing a rights-based transformation of the economy. From different regions and experiences, they show that structural change is not only necessary: it is possible. The views expressed in Key Voices are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the positions or policies of CESR.