Untenable dichotomies: de-gendering political economy

Abstract: This radical new history and theory of counterinsurgency has major implications for social, political and international thought. Retrieving the older but surprisingly neglected language of household governance, Economy of Force shows how the techniques and domestic ideologies of household administration are highly portable and play a remarkably central role in international and imperial relations. In two late-colonial British emergencies in Malaya and Kenya, US counterinsurgency in Vietnam, and US-led campaigns in Afghanistan, and Iraq, armed social work was the continuation of oikonomia - not politics -by other means. Though never wholly succeeding, counterinsurgents drew on and innovated forms of household governance to create units of rule in which local populations were domesticated: through the selective delivery and withholding of humanitarian supplies and inside and through small-scale family homes, detention and concentration camps, depopulation and re-concentration in new villages and strategic hamlets, the creation or shaping of tribes and sectarian militias, and at the largest scale inside newly formed or reformed post-colonial and/or post-war national-states. Military strategists conceived population control as sociological warfare because the social realm itself and distinctly social thought are modern forms of oikonomikos, the art and science of household rule. There is an important story to be told of when and why the social realm first emerged as the domain through which human life could be intervened in and transformed. Economy of Force tells this story in terms of modern transformations in and violent crises of household forms of rule.

Abstract: Contemporary political economy is predicated on widely shared ideas and assumptions, some explicit but many implicit, about the past. Our aim in this Special Issue is to draw attention to, and to assess critically, these historical assumptions. In doing so, we hope to contribute to a political economy that is more attentive to the analytic assumptions on which it is premised, more aware of the potential oversights, biases, and omissions they contain, and more reflexive about the potential costs of these blind spots. This is an Introduction to one of two Special Issues that are being published simultaneously by New Political Economy and Review of International Political Economy reflecting on blind spots in international political economy. Together, these Special Issues seek to identify the key blind spots in the field and to make sense of how many scholars missed or misconstrued important dynamics that define contemporary capitalism and the other systems and sources of social inequality that characterise our present. This particular Special Issue pursues this goal by looking backwards, to the history of political economy and at the ways in which we have come to tell that history, in order to understand how we got to the present moment.

Abstract: Gendered global migrations have increasingly come to be seen through the lens of care and its associated theorisations of the care diamond and care chains. While this work has served to expand our understanding of the relationships between different parts of the world and how they are mediated by the embodied and affective work of care, particularly within the household, we have argued that theories of social reproduction offer a richer analysis of these movements. We suggest that using social reproduction includes a wider repertoire of activities, sites and sectors and leads to a recognition of spatial differentiation and dynamic variability that is often missed in the literature on care. We explored some of the ways in which social reproduction had been theorised but also outlined how the resurgence of interest in social reproduction offers new veins of analysis.

Abstract: Even as the market seems triumphant everywhere and its laws progressively and ineluctably impose themselves worldwide, we cannot fail to be struck by the lasting topicality of the following wellknown quotation from D. North: 'It is a peculiar fact that the literature on economics ... contains so little discussion of the central institution that underlies neoclassical economics-the market' (North, 1977).) How can this surprising shortcoming be explained? How can this self-proclaimed failure of economic theory be accounted for? By distinguishing the thing from the concept which refers to it, the marketplace from the market, the English language suggests a possible answer. While the market denotes the abstract mechanisms whereby supply and demand confront each other and adjust themselves in search of a compromise, the marketplace is far closer to ordinary experience and refers to the place in which exchange occurs. This distinction is, moreover, merely a particular case of a more general opposition, which the English language, once again, has the merit of conveying accurately: that between economics and economy, between theoretical and practical activity, in short, between economics as a discipline and economy as a thing. If economic theory knows so little about the marketplace, is it not simply because in striving to abstract and generalize it has ended up becoming detached from its object? Thus, the weakness of market theory may well be explained by its lack of interest in the marketplace. To remedy this shortcoming, economics would need only to return to its object, the economy, from which it never should have strayed in the first place. The matter, however, is not so simple. The danger of abstraction and unrealism which is supposed to threaten every academic discipline-and which time and again has been exposed and stigmatized,

Abstract: How might academic practices contribute to the exciting proliferation of economic experiments occurring worldwide in the current moment? In this paper we describe the work of a nascent research community of economic geographers and other scholars who are making the choice to bring marginalized, hidden and alternative economic activities to light in order to make them more real and more credible as objects of policy and activism. The diverse economies research program is, we argue, a performative ontological project that builds upon and draws forth a different kind of academic practice and subjectivity. Using contemporary examples, we illustrate the thinking practices of ontological reframing, re-reading for difference and cultivating creativity and we sketch out some of the productive lines of inquiry that emerge from an experimental, performative and ethical orientation to the world. The paper is accompanied by an electronic bibliography of diverse economies research with over 200 entries.

Abstract: * Foreword by Silvia Federici * Preface to the critique influence change edition * Introduction * 1. What is Feminism? * 2. Social Origins of the Sexual Division of Labour * 3. Colonization and Housewifization * 4. Housewifization International: Women and the International Division of Labour * 5. Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Primitive Accumulation of Capital * 6. National Liberation and Women's Liberation * 7. Towards a Feminist Perspective of a New Society

Abstract: This paper explores the implications for economic analysis, societal well-being, and public policy of the movement of care services (such as child and elder care) from home to market. A broad empirical overview sets the stage for the argument that this process cannot be properly evaluated using only a priori judgments about the suitability of marketization. The context in which markets operate is crucial, and while the growth of market provision poses some risks, it also offers some potential benefits.

Abstract: Amartya Sen's ideas constitute the core principles of a development approach that has evolved in the Human Development Reports. This approach is a "paradigm" based on the concept of well-being that can help define public policy, but does not embody a set of prescriptions. The current movement from an age of development planning to an age of globalization has meant an increasing attention to agency aspects of development. While earlier Human Development Reports emphasized measures such as the provision of public services, recent ones have focused more on people's political empowerment. This paper reflects on Sen's work in light of this shift in emphasis. Gender analysis has been central to the development of the new agency-driven paradigm, and gender equity is a core concern. A gender perspective has also helped highlight important aspects of this paradigm, such as the role of collective agency in promoting development.