This article explores the implications of the Federal Reserve's shift to transparency for recent debates about neoliberalism and neoliberal policymaking. I argue that the evolution of US monetary ...policy represents a specific instance of what I term the "neoliberal dilemma." In the context of generally deteriorating economic conditions, policymakers are anxious to escape responsibility for economic outcomes, and yet markets require regulation to function in capitalist economies (Polanyi 2001). How policymakers negotiate these contradictory imperatives involves a continual process of institutional innovation in which functions are transferred to markets, but under the close control of the state. Thus, under transparency, Federal Reserve officials discovered innovations in the policy process that enabled "markets to do the Fed's work for it." These innovations enlisted market mechanisms, but did not represent a retreat from the state's active role in managing the economy.
This paper attempts to reveal the ways in which criminal courts in Israel constructed foreign workers brought to trial as 'others'. Individual foreign workers were framed as being irrelevant as ...bearers of rights while, in a parallel process, foreign workers as a group were constructed as symbolically relevant to discussions regarding the state governance of social risk. The study spans the years 1994-2011, when Israel adopted a new neo-liberal regime. The paper shows that the complex penal construction of the 'other' was used as a platform to justify and support the fuelling of the country's globalized neo-liberal economy with cheap migrant workers.
Violence and authoritarianism continue to resonate in Cambodia's post-transitional landscape, leading many scholars, journalists, international donors and non-governmental organisations alike to ...posit a 'culture of violence' as responsible for the country's democratic deficit and enduring violence. In contrast, this paper interprets the culture of violence thesis as a sweeping caricature shot through with Orientalist imaginaries, and a problematic discourse that underwrites the process of neoliberalisation. The culture of violence argument is considered to invoke particular imaginative geographies that problematically erase the contingency, fluidity and interconnectedness of the places in which violence occurs. While violence is certainly mediated through both culture and place, following Doreen Massey's re-conceptualisation of space and place, this paper understands place not as a confined and isolated unit, but as a relational constellation within the wider experiences of space. This reflection allows us to recognise that any seemingly local, direct or cultural expression of violence is necessarily imbricated in the wider, structural patterns of violence, which in the current moment of political economic orthodoxy increasingly suggests a relationship to neoliberalism. Through the adoption of the culture of violence discourse, neoliberalisation is argued to proceed in the Cambodian context as a 'civilising' enterprise, where Cambodians are subsequently imagined as 'savage others'.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, in the absence of active encouragement from the IMF's management or member states, the staff began to encourage the liberalization of capital controls as a norm. This ...behavior constitutes a puzzle for the conventional wisdom, which sees the "Wall Street-Treasury Complex" as responsible for the IMF's approach, as well as a blind spot for rationalist approaches, which offer little insight into processes that shape preference formation "from within" international organizations (IOs). In a context where the Fund's member states permitted the staff considerable discretion and autonomy, I argue the staff's initial adoption of the norm of capital freedom was largely shaped by three internal processes: administrative recruitment, adaptation, and learning. But norm adoption did not mean the end of internal discussion, and a vigorous debate emerged between "gradualists" and supporters of the "big bang" over how the norm should be interpreted and applied. In this "battle of ideas," I emphasize the critical role of internal entrepreneurship.
A neoliberal ideology that erodes national sovereignty and turns answerability into a bewildering transnational maze makes it easier for global corporations like Union Carbide to sustain an evasive ...geopolitics of deferral in matters of environmental injury, remediation, and redress. ... among the many merits of Sinha's novel is the way it gives imaginative definition to the occluded relationships that result both from what I call slow violence and from the geographies of concealment in a neoliberal age.3 Slow Violence, Chernobyl, and Environmental Time The role of what I call slow violence in the dynamics of concealment derives largely from the unequal power of spectacular and unspectacular time.
The world faces an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions. But much of the policy response has certainly not lacked for precedent. National governments and international organisations, ...including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have looked to crises of the past for solutions to the present -- and austerity has become a familiar theme. The inability to effectively resolve the current crisis, however, gives rise to the question: Is this time different? This article provides a broad overview to the origins and development of the recent economic crisis and the resort to policies of austerity. Although there is historical precedent for the resort to austerity -- such as the UK Treasury view during the 1920s and 1930sthis time, things are different. Many of the current problems are deeply rooted and reflect the impact of the shift towards free-market economics that started in the 1970s. Adapted from the source document.
Citizen science and sustainability science promise the more just and democratic production of environmental knowledge and politics. In this review, we evaluate these participatory traditions within ...the context of (a) our theorization of how the valuation and devaluation of nature, knowledge, and people help to produce socio-ecological hierarchies, the uneven distribution of harms and benefits, and inequitable engagement within environmental politics, and (b) our analysis of how neoliberalism is reworking science and environmental governance. We find that citizen and sustainability science often fall short of their transformative potential because they do not directly confront the production of environmental injustice and political exclusion, including the knowledge hierarchies that shape how the environment is understood and acted upon, by whom, and for what ends. To deepen participatory practice, we propose a heterodox ethicopolitical praxis based in Gramscian, feminist, and postcolonial theory and describe how we have pursued transformative praxis in southern Appalachia through the Coweeta Listening Project.
This essay explores the cultural meanings and implications of “activity” and “idleness” in order to interrogate the repercussions of the persistent stigmatization of inactive bodies that cannot or ...will not be properly activated, according to medical, political, economic, and gerontological discourses. Older bodies are especially at risk of censure within these discourses of activation, which privilege the imperatives of youthful vigor, activity, and speed. The essay concludes by looking to fictional treatments of old age that imagine alternative perspectives on the idleness associated with late-life impairment—in particular the filmThe Straight Story, directed by David Lynch, and Marilynne Robinson's novelGilead—proposing that such texts offer narratives of fullness and quietude that implicitly challenge the denigration of inactivity as unhealthy disengagement.
In this article, I consider how the Dubai government's shift in economic focus from maritime trade networks toward large-scale, Western-style multinational development projects threatened the forms ...of belonging that Indian merchants had carved out in the emirate during and after British colonialism in the region, and before the liberalization of India's economy, even as Indian merchants were to some extent participants in the production of Dubai as a "global city." I argue that Indian merchants were performing forms of substantive citizenship in Dubai that resemble forms of belonging among South Asian diasporas located in Western liberal democratic contexts. I explore how this was happening despite the lack of formal modes of citizenship and permanent belonging available to Indians in contemporary Dubai and in response to changes in Dubai's migration, economic, and political policies that reduced their privileged status in the country.
This paper argues that the Egyptian revolution of 25 January 2011 has to be understood in the context of neoliberal economic shift. The two decades of economic liberalisation policies were ...accompanied by authoritarianism while at the same time these policies opened up opportunities for crony capitalism. Post Mubarak Egypt has witnessed positive developments such as the rise of political parties, independent trade union federations and other social groups aiming to participate in rebuilding a democratic society. The paper explores the potentials for, and challenges against, building a democratic society in Egypt.
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