GROWING LEVELS of public and private borrowing have placed debt at the centre of scholarly and public debates in the twenty-first century. The concept, however, is notoriously ambivalent. Debt enables individuals and collectives to function and to expand their space of manoeuvre, but it also creates hierarchy and possibilities for domination. The negative aspects of our contemporary debt economy are well known: debt underpins wealth inequality, restricts the freedom of individuals, households, public institutions and struggling firms, stifles democracy and constrains the exercise of individual and collective self-responsibility. Under such conditions, and as ever-growing segments of the global population are drawn into the debt system through policies of ‘financial inclusion’, the creditor–debtor relation has become a key locus of social conflict. One of the characteristic features of this relation is that its inherent power asymmetries are reinforced by the way in which debt combines economic duty and moral blame.

Past and present resistance to oppressive debt relations includes the debtors’ movements that emerged in the context of the debt crisis of the 1970s and 1980s in the ‘Third World’, as it was called in Cold War parlance, and contemporary denunciations of unmanageable levels of personal debt, especially medical and student debt, in privatised welfare societies such as the United States. In both cases, scholars, activists and politicians have challenged the moral framing of debt by declaring that debts should not be paid if doing so leads to widespread human suffering. To support their argument they sometimes mobilise historical evidence of the relative sanctity of debt, invoking, for instance, the history of periodic debt cancellations in the ancient world and the biblical notion of debt forgiveness in the Jubilee year. With regard to international debts, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights established independent experts to assess the effects of foreign debt on human rights at the turn of the twenty-first century. In this period, Third World debt also took on another meaning with respect to climate change and the ecological overshoot by which humans in the present incur debts that will be transmitted to future humans as debts to the past, the causes and consequences of which are unevenly distributed between the Global South and the Global North, as the Third and First worlds are increasingly called today.