Showing papers on "Underdevelopment published in 2015"

Degrowth : a vocabulary for a new era

Abstract: "We live in an era of stagnation, rapid impoverishment, rising inequalities, and socio-ecological disasters. In the dominant discourse, these are effects of economic crisis, lack of growth or underdevelopment. This book argues growth is the cause of these problems and that it has become uneconomic, ecologically unsustainable and intrinsically unjust. When the language in use is inadequate to articulate what begs to be articulated, then it is time for a new vocabulary. A movement of activists and intellectuals, first starting in France and then spreading to the rest of the word has called for the decolonization of public debate from the idiom of economism and the abolishment of economic growth as a social objective. "Degrowth" ("Decroissance") has come to signify for them the desired direction of societies that will use less natural resources and will organize to live radically differently. "Simplicity", "conviviality", "autonomy", "care", "the commons" and "depense", the social and ritual destruction of accumulated surplus, are some of the words that express what a degrowth society might look like. Degrowth A Vocabulary for a New Era is the first English language book to comprehensively cover the burgeoning literature on degrowth. It presents and explains the different lines of thought, imaginaries, and proposed courses of action that together complete the degrowth puzzle. The book brings together the top scholars writing in the field with young researchers who cultivate the research frontier and activists who practice degrowth on the ground. It will be an indispensable source of information and inspiration for all those who not only believe that another world is possible, but work and struggle to construct it right now. Join our book community at www.degrowthvocabulary.net for more material and conversations. "--

The Roots of Gender Inequality in Developing Countries

Abstract: Is the high degree of gender inequality in developing countries—in education, personal autonomy, and more—explained by underdevelopment itself? Or do the societies that are poor today hold certain cultural views that lead to gender inequality? This article discusses several mechanisms through which gender gaps narrow as countries grow. I argue that although much of the GDP/gender-inequality relationship can be explained by the process of development, society-specific factors are also at play: Many countries that are poor today have cultural norms that exacerbate favoritism toward males. Norms such as patrilocality and concern for women’s “purity” help explain the male-skewed sex ratio in India and China and low female employment in India, the Middle East, and North Africa, for example. I also discuss why the sex ratio has become more male-skewed with development. Finally, I lay out some policy approaches to address gender inequality.

Decoloniality as the Future of Africa

Abstract: Decoloniality is not only a long-standing political and epistemological movement aimed at liberation of (ex-) colonized peoples from global coloniality but also a way of thinking, knowing, and doing. It is part of marginalized but persistent movements that merged from struggles against the slave trade, imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, neo-colonialism, and underdevelopment as constitutive negative elements of Euro-North American-centric modernity. As an epistemological movement, it has always been overshadowed by hegemonic Euro-North American-centric intellectual thought and social theories. As a political movement, it has consistently been subjected to surveillance of global imperial designs and colonial matrices of power. But today, decoloniality is remerging at a time when the erstwhile hegemonic Euro-North American-centric modernity and its dominant epistemology are experiencing an epistemological break. This epistemic break highlights how Euro-North American-centric modernity has created modern problems of which it has no modern solutions and how theories/knowledges generated from a Euro-North American-centric context have become exhausted if not obstacles to the understanding of contemporary human issues. This essay introduces, defines, and explains the necessity for decoloniality as a liberatory language of the future for Africa.

Anatomy of Corruption: An Approach to the Political Economy of Underdevelopment

Abstract: An examination and critique of the functionalist literature on corruption in the political administration of less developed countries (LDCs) indicate that its claims are without empirical foundation. Its theses with regard to the political, economic and administrative effects in most LDCs contrast with the facts. No benefits for development from corruption are found; market corruption, for example, does not appear to improve allocative efficiency. The erosion in a government's capacity to formulate and implement policies making for economic growth is an obstacle to economic progress.

Corporate Social Responsibility and Entrepreneurship (CSRE): antidotes to poverty, insecurity and underdevelopment in Nigeria

Abstract: Purpose – This paper aims to examine the prospect of utilising corporate social responsibility and entrepreneurship (CSRE) as antidotes for mitigating the incidences of poverty, insecurity and underdevelopment in Nigeria. The paper derives its theoretical foundation from the stakeholder, instrumental and legitimacy theories, which all justify the use of CSRE for actualisation of Triple Bottom Line (i.e. the social, economic and environmental concerns of business organisations). Design/methodology/approach – The study used the quantitative research method relying on the use of secondary data published by institutional bodies. The quantitative method entail a systematic extraction of reliable data on corporate social responsibility (CSR), insecurity, poverty and development from the publications of Office of the Millennium Development Goals in Nigeria, CLEEN Foundation, National Bureau of Statistics and Central Bank of Nigeria, respectively. For missing years, the authors improvised using projections as wel...

Riding the tide: management in africa and the role of high-impact research

Abstract: The increased interest in the potential of African countries to rise from their current states of underdevelopment is matched by concern about the lack of scientific and technical knowledge. Given the role of management in national development and the contribution of high-impact research (HIR), we identify drivers, processes, and outcomes of HIR based on a broad definition of scholarly impact. Using management scholarship and management practice dimensions we also identify four types of HIR: autochthonous, heterochthonous, cosmopolitan, and global. We argue for autochthonous HIR as a source of competitive advantage as well as growth and identity of management in Africa.

Toward a New Economic Sociology of Development

Abstract: What explains the differential growth rates that foster international income inequality? The leading sociological answers have taken conflicting positions on the assumptions of self-interest and diminishing returns that are taken for granted in the neoclassical literature. While modernization theorists traced the periphery9s inability to take advantage of diminishing returns in the core to “traditional” values that allegedly militated against savings, investment, and growth, and thus denied the universality of self-interest, their neo-Marxist successors traced underdevelopment less to the values of the poor than to the “cumulative” advantages of the rich, and thus denied the inevitability of diminishing returns. The result is a two-front assault that suffers from a serious coordination problem, and I therefore take issue with both the neoclassical accounts and their critics by, first, calling the validity of their assumptions—self-interest and diminishing returns—into question and, second, defending an alternative approach that treats the subordination of self-interest to norms of fairness, trust, and cooperation in the short run as the sine qua non of increasing returns and growth over the long run. The research challenge, therefore, is to unearth the roots of collaborative social norms in particular historical contexts—a challenge that will prove more tractable if development sociologists not only abandon the assumptions of self-interest and diminishing returns but embrace the tools and insights of the new economic sociology.

China After the Reform Era

Abstract: China’s reform era is ending. Core factors that characterized it – political stability, ideological openness, and rapid economic growth – are unraveling.In part, this is the result of Beijing’s steadfast refusal to contemplate fundamental political reform. Since the early 1990s, this has fueled the rise of entrenched interests within the Communist Party itself. It has also contributed to the systematic underdevelopment of institutions of governance among state and society at large.Now, to address looming problems confronting the nation, Chinese leaders are progressively cannibalizing institutional norms and practices that have formed the bedrock of the regime's stability in the post-Mao era.

Backwardness revisited: time, space, and civilization in rural Eastern Europe

Abstract: Anthropology, the relativizing countercurrent to Enlightenment notions of civilization and progress, has long challenged notions of backwardness. By contrast, Marxist-Leninist regimes had no doubts about the world-historical backwardness of the largely agrarian societies in which they came to power, which they sought to transform through rapid industrialization. According to some indicators, this socialist civilizing mission was rather successful. Yet memories are mixed, and complicated by the reappearance of typical features of backwardness in the postsocialist era. This article explores changing political economies and the spatiotemporal imaginaries of elites and villagers in Hungary. Historical and theoretical insight is drawn from Ferenc Erdei (1910–1971), a left-leaning populist whose analysis of rural Hungary has more general relevance. Case materials are presented from a region of the Great Plain that in the longue duree exemplifies the “development of underdevelopment” on the margins of Western capitalism. Civilizational transformations were instigated from the east in the socialist decades, but their vehicle was a collectivist ideology that remained alien. The politics and economics of time now render villagers susceptible to populist imaginaries entirely different from those of Erdei.

"Under the Aegis of Man": The Right to Development and the Origins of the New International Economic Order

Abstract: On September 23, 1966, the Senegalese foreign minister Doudou Thiam gave an impassioned speech to fellow delegates assembled in New York for the opening of the 21st Session of the United Nations General Assembly.1 It began as a reflection on the preceding twenty years of UN history. Despite some modest progress that the UN had achieved in meeting its three primary objectives-the maintenance of peace; the liberation of colonized peoples; and the economic and social development of mankind-this period was more notably exemplified by failures and setbacks: the war in Southeast Asia; the failure of decolonization in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa; and the failure to meet the goals of the UN's first "Development Decade."2It was on this third point that Thiam ruminated for the remainder of his speech. The achievement of political and legal sovereignty by newly decolonized states did not resolve the existing imbalance of power between the developing and developed worlds. Thiam cited growing inequality in the share of global income between developed and underdeveloped countries: in 1938, the income disparity was 15:1; by 1966 it was 35:1, and projected to be 40:1 by 2000.Thiam insisted that this phenomenon of underdevelopment was not determined by geography or race; it was mobile, moving about in time and space. Western prosperity vis-a-vis the Middle East, India, and China was historically recent, and the socalled poor nations were not as poor as they were said to be: in 1963 they held 50 percent of the world's petroleum, nearly half the copper and manganese ore, and 70 percent of the world's diamonds. The same was true of their share of agricultural commodities.The problem, Thiam argued, lay in the inequitable international division of labor and deterioration in the terms of trade since 1950. In the postwar global economy, the underdeveloped countries had taken on the role of producers of raw materials and importers of finished goods: "In theory, the old colonial pact was doubtlessly abolished at the end of the last century, but in practice it has been maintained for a long time . . . An actual pillage of the developing countries has been organized on a worldwide scale."3Thiam called upon developing countries to act: the time had come to organize an "economic Bandung Conference"-a reference to the 1955 Afro-Asian summit that exemplified a newly emerging spirit of postcolonial unity and solidarity. The last part of Thiam's speech is worth reproducing in its entirety, for it introduced a novel and revolutionary concept:What is our task? We must lay the foundations for a new world society; we must bring about a new revolution; we must tear down all the practices, institutions and rules on which international economic relations are based, in so far as these practices, institutions and rules sanction injustice and exploitation and maintain the unjustified domination of a minority over the majority of men. Not only must we reaffirm our right to development, be we must also take the steps which will enable this right to become a reality. We must build a new system, based not only on the theoretical affirmation of the sacred rights of peoples and nations but on the actual enjoyment of these rights. The right of peoples to self-determination, the sovereign equality of peoples, international solidarity-all these will remain empty words, and, forgive me for saying so, hypocritical words, until relations between nations are viewed in the light of economic and social facts. From this point of view, the facts contradict the principles. The new world vision which the Charter of the United Nations held out to us is still only a vision. It has not yet become an international reality. The economic Bandung Conference that we are proposing should enable us to formulate a new world economic charter. We shall attend, not in order to present a list of complaints, but to demand and claim what is ours, or, more precisely, what is due to man, whatever his nationality, his race or his religion. …

Reframing Salvadoran Modernity: A Political and Cultural History of Power and the Dialetics of the Hegemonic Bloc in El Salvador, ca. 1850-1944

Abstract: Author(s): Moreno Campos, Raul Ernesto | Advisor(s): Rocco, Raymond A | Abstract: ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATIONReframing Salvadoran Modernity: A Political and Cultural History of Power and the Dialectics of the Hegemonic Bloc in El Salvador, ca. 1850-1944 byRaul Ernesto Moreno CamposDoctor of Philosophy in Political ScienceUniversity of California, Los Angeles, 2015Professor Raymond A. Rocco, Chair This dissertation analyzes the development, relationship, and intersection of the economic-political and cultural-intellectual axes that defined modernity in El Salvador roughly from the period of 1850 to the end of the General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez’s regime in 1944 and examines the manner in which this historical process shaped the contours of power in Salvadoran society. Using an interdisciplinary methodology and drawing from a variety of archival sources, my study frames the concept of modernity from the perspective of post-colonial societies and the Global South and reframes prevailing analyses of Salvadoran economic and political development by interrogating dominant narratives of underdevelopment, state violence, and facile understandings of political consent. Hence, the central problematic that organizes this study is explaining the process by which the constellation of leading classes within the axes of economic-political and cultural-intellectual activity, who were manifestly in tension by pitting the forces of modernization against the modernist movement, amalgamated into a coherent group under the leadership of the military regime in the 1930s. Its central question asks: how were these classes able to surmount their differences and transform from a loose coalition, whose interests were at times at odds, into a coherent, ruling group that went on to dominate Salvadoran politics for six decades and defined an enduring nexus of power and domination in El Salvador? Using a Gramscian theoretical framework, I advance three principal claims. First, I contend that despite the apparently incongruent aims espoused by the forces of economic and political modernization and the cultural movement of modernism, all of these processes were in fact premised upon a fundamental set of presuppositions that reified Western ideas of progress. Second, I posit that the manifest tension between these groups was in fact symptomatic of the dialectical unity between the state and the productive base or society, or what Gramsci termed the historic bloc, and that this dialectical relationship was a central component of the historical process of modernity along its economic and political vectors, and which were mediated by the cultural sphere. Third, the historical processes by which these forces and their representative classes amalgamated into a dominant group was facilitated by the consolidation of the Salvadoran military as a class in a position of leadership within the constellation of dominant classes. The process of hegemonic consolidation thus depended upon a careful balance of consent and coercion, and such a balance helps in part explain the extraordinary longevity and resilience of the Salvadoran military regime. My research reveals that civil organizations, such as the Salvadoran Athenaeum and the country’s theosophical lodges, were important interstitial institutions that forged links between the state and the civil sector, and served to legitimize and generate consent for the military regime. This project represents a contribution to both Gramscian theory, the critique of modernity from the perspective of coloniality, and the analysis of power in El Salvador along its economic, political, cultural, and intellectual vectors

From 'feral' markets to regimes of accumulation: the state and law in neoliberal capitalism

Abstract: The emergence between 1965 and 1973 of a crisis of over-accumulation and over-capacity, rooted in international manufacturing yet affecting the overall private business economies of the advanced capitalist countries, inaugurated a developmental context whose profound contradictions were brought home by the Great Recession of 2008-9 and the continuing Long Depression. The intervening period has seen profound economic, political and social crisis in the advanced capitalist world and has simultaneously been treacherous for under-developed economies forced to navigate rocketing energy costs and international commodity price and currency exchange rate turbulence under the continual threat of debt-levered expropriation. The struggle to locate the causes – proximate and ultimate – of the present crisis is at the same time a battle to map the basic economic and political coordinates of the continuing long downturn. In this connection it is contended that efforts have been undermined by the epistemological underdevelopment conditioned by a crisis of knowledge-formation which has unfolded in parallel with the long downturn. The dominance of neoclassical economics (‘unworldly’ since the marginal revolution) on the right and the displacement of Marxism on a structurally weakened and autodidactic left in the context of the ascent of postmodernism as an intellectual and cultural dominant has opened a space between the material and discursive realities of global capitalist development. This work is an attempt to deploy the method developed by the classical Marxist tradition to approach the significance of the state and law in the historically-conditioned reproduction of capitalist social relations. It is contended in the first place that the dualism which obtains between national and global spheres in much theorisation of neoliberal ‘globalisation’ obscures the dialectical interrerelation of state and world market – the institutional and regulatory environment of international trade, money and finance being both the creation of states and the developing context which frames their – necessarily path-dependent and reflexive – projects of domestic economy making. As against popular notions of state decline, following Gowan the state-political content of the centring of private financial markets in the mediation of international monetary relations is recalled, while the embeddedness of the state in circuits of capital accumulation is emphasised (Tony Smith), the concept of ‘regime of accumulation’ being deployed to capture the nexus of monetary, fiscal and regulatory policy which articulates historically-conditioned development strategies. In this respect, we depart from the work of the Bolshevik jurist Pashukanis, who despite significantly advancing the materialist analysis of the juridical form, identified in his most significant work a largely derivative role for the state. It is argued that the methodological weakness represented by Pashukanis’ disproportionate emphasis on commodity exchange – his failure to proceed from the basis of the capitalist economy as a contradictory unity of production and circulation – prevents him from fully apprehending the role of the state in the production and reproduction of capitalist social relations. As the discussion unfolds, there is developed in conversation principally with Gramsci an understanding of the state as the specific material condensation of a relationship of forces among classes and class fractions. Upholding the notion of the ‘integral state’ as a differentiated unity of civil society and political society upon which terrains the capitalist class forms alliances with proximate classes as the prerequisite for and correlate of its domination of labour, the developmental context represented by neoliberalism is conceived in terms of the transition of interest-bearing capital from leading to dominant fraction of the capitalist class in parallel with its tendential contradictory disaggregation from productive capital. Such a process has necessitated a transformation in the character of bourgeois political supremacy involving a dismantling of the civil rights and social protections accumulated during the period bookended by Americanism and the welfare state and increasing dependence upon an expanded machinery of coercion. Proceeding from this basis, it is considered how in specific developmental contexts the state by way of the legal form maps the social totality, achieving distinctive couplings (and de-couplings) of wealth production and social reproduction. There is asserted the second-order integration of public and private spheres in terms of the fundamental unity of capitalist reproduction, the first-order public/private metabolism being evaluated in view of the facilitation and rationalisation of social reproduction in the context of a productive economy structured around dissociated private producers. The legal form is further interrogated in view of its role in structuring the productive antagonism between capital and labour, a relation which on the basis of its form comes to expresses various contents – from consensual integration to casuistic assimilation – as domestic social relations are (in-)validated by the operation of the law of value at the level of the world market. In this connection, the unproductive theoretical polarisation obtaining between approaches which consider law to be epiphenomenal and those which pursue its relative autonomy is enriched by a historicised conception in terms of which law, concretising specific relationships of forces within particular regimes of accumulation, appears as ‘sword’, as ‘shield’ and as ‘fetter’. This framework is particularly useful for evaluating the opportunities for the deployment of legal strategies by labour and groups oppressed under capitalism – a question in relation to which Pashukanis, following Lenin, demonstrated a remarkable political astuteness.

Asset Price Keynesianism, Regional Imbalances and the Irish and Spanish Housing Booms and Busts

Abstract: Ireland and Spain were amongst the European countries which experienced the most severe economic and fiscal problems following the global financial crisis. The proximate causes of these economic crashes have been explored in-depth by researchers and governments, who have highlighted strong parallels between the policy, regulatory and economic factors which underpinned them. In both countries residential property price inflation increased dramatically from the late 1990s driven by increased availability of cheap mortgages but unusually was accompanied by marked growth in new house building. Thus, following the international credit crunch in 2008, a simultaneous contraction in both mortgage credit and house building occurred in Ireland and Spain, which precipitated a marked knock-on decline in the employment, tax revenue and consumer spending which the housing boom had underpinned. This paper argues that the Irish and Spanish housing booms and busts are similar not just in terms of scale and proximate causes but also in terms of fundamental causes. In both countries the housing boom/bust cycle was underpinned by a suite of macroeconomic policies which aimed to use asset price growth to underpin rising demand and economic growth, or in other words achieve what Robert Brenner (2006) terms ‘asset-price Keynesianism’. This approach was particularly attractive to the Irish and Spanish governments because it enabled them to resolve historical legacies of industrial underdevelopment and regional imbalances by generating construction jobs in underdeveloped areas. As a result of the latter, local/regional governments in both countries played a key role in facilitating the implementation of this policy.

Resource curse or resource blessing: the case of the Niger Delta ‘oil republic’ in Nigeria

Abstract: This paper explores the developmental outcome of resource abundance when the analytical focus shifts from the macro (national) to the micro (subnational) level, especially to areas where resource abundance is expected to have its greatest impact. It focuses on the Niger Delta, Nigeria's ‘oil republic’ whose resource curse has involved environmental devastation, relative deprivation, resource distribution injustices, political marginalisation and material underdevelopment. However, in spite of the huge resource flows to the core oil-producing states of the region and other political and social benefits, which were expected to obviate the curse, oil wealth has not made the region more developed than other parts of the country. This is due to the inability of subnational governments in the Niger Delta whose performances are crucial to this determination to translate the advantages to the benefit of citizens in the region and because the other material benefits from the national government have been monopolis...

Estudos organizacionais, (des)colonialidade e estudos da dependência: as contribuições da Cepal

Abstract: This article aims to (re)visit the concept of dependency as a category of investigation of (and from) Latin America, by means of a decolonial critical historical perspective, in order to increase space for debates on organization studies and promote alternatives to the neoliberal order. This essay will focus on dependency studies conducted by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) during the 1950s and early 1960s. The decolonial perspective is a theoretical construction by Latin American authors who deem themselves as heirs of the long-standing tradition of critical social thought in the region, where the dependency theory is situated. The proposals of dependency authors challenged the main orthodox theories from the North produced at that time. Through the concept of center-periphery, the denunciation of asymmetries in the relations between these regions, and the recognition of interdependency between development and underdevelopment, the concept of dependency was (re)elaborated along the 1950s and 1960s by many Latin American authors as a category of investigation of the reality of (and from) the region. These investigations aimed not only to formulate theoretical constructions, but also to transform reality by creating various organizations and institutions that might serve the purpose of overcoming underdevelopment. Denunciating the historicity of the underdevelopment situation has unveiled the neutrality nature of the economism of theories produced in the North and promoted a theoretical encounter between economics and politics that has much to contribute to the field of organization studies.

The new economic institutionalism in historical perspective

Abstract: The new institutionalism arose in the 1980s, in reaction to narrowly individualistic approaches in economics, political science, and sociology. The new institutionalists claim that rules, norms, and customs — often arbitrary and artificial — structure human interaction and can explain major macro‐outcomes and long‐term secular change. Consideration of how institutions influence individual behavior and collective action has a distinguished history. While earlier institutionalists flirted with the origins of order, secularism, and markets, the new economic institutionalists have fashioned a rigorous analytic approach to explain real world variation in the quality of institutions, state capacity, democracy, economic development, and the welfare state. This paper examines how the classical political economists provided the scaffolding necessary to address the puzzle of underdevelopment. They imagined new worlds where none had existed before, and outlined foundations for secular authority, liberalism and capitalism, despite the fact that religiously justified rule, disorder, absolutism, and illiberalism were the only game in town. While the most recent economic institutionalists stand on their shoulders, they use state‐of‐the art models and methods to explain why underdevelopment remains pervasive — despite the now widespread knowledge that institutions account for a large share of the variation in the outcomes that constitute development.

The triple causes of African underdevelopment: Colonial capitalism, state terrorism and racism

Abstract: The paper attempts to inform Africans and the world at large of the triple evils of colonial capitalism, state terrorism, and racism and of different forms of African resistance in order to search for new ways of implementing universal human rights laws and the rights of indigenous people. Most indigenous Africans are immensely underdeveloped and have suffered for more than five centuries because of these triple evils that have been imposed on them by European colonial powers, successive global powers, and their African collaborators. The European colonial powers, namely Spain, Portugal, England, Holland, France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy and their African collaborators terrorized, exterminated, abused, and misused indigenous Africans from the 16th to the first half of the 19th centuries, and consequently they have underdeveloped and impoverished the surviving African populations. The homelands and economic and natural resources of Africans were expropriated and transferred to European colonial settlers, their descendants and their African collaborators that have no interest to protect the political, economic, civil, and social rights of these people. Since most of these indigenous peoples are still not represented in government, academic, economic and media institutions of neo-colonial African states, their voices are muzzled and hidden and most people of the world are misinformed and know nothing or little about them. By degrading and erasing the cultures, histories, and humanity of indigenous Africans, the descendants of the settlers and their African collaborators have convinced themselves that they can continue to terrorize and dispossess the resources of these people without moral/ethical and political responsibilities with the help of powerful states of the West and that of China (Quan 2013) as well as global financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Key words: Colonial capitalism, terrorism, racism, underdevelopment, indigenous Africans, human rights, self- determination, democracy, and social injustice.

Will China's Development lead to Mexico's Underdevelopment?

Abstract: China has become an important global actor in the arenas of production, trade, and foreign investment. In 1948, China contributed slightly less than 1 percent to global exports; by 2013, it had grown to almost 12 percent. Has China's vertiginous trade growth come at the expense of other exporters or does it represent an expansion of new consumer markets? For policy makers in the so-called "emerging markets," this is most relevant since many have adopted the export-led model as their engine of development. The goal of this article is to add to the current literature on the effect of China's growth on Mexico. Combining elements of world-systems, race-to-the-bottom, and global commodity chain frameworks, I analyze the consequences of China's export growth in garlic. The evidence strongly suggests that China's entrance into this global market has had deleterious consequences for Mexico's production and exports.

China After the Reform Era

Abstract: China’s reform era is ending. Core factors that characterized it—political stability, ideological openness, and rapid economic growth—are unraveling. In part, this is the result of Beijing’s steadfast refusal to contemplate fundamental political reform. Since the early 1990s, this has fueled the rise of entrenched interests within the Communist Party itself. It has also contributed to the systematic underdevelopment of institutions of governance among state and society at large. Now, to address looming problems confronting the nation, Chinese leaders are progressively cannibalizing institutional norms and practices that have formed the bedrock of the regime’s stability in the post-Mao era.

Pan-Africanism, knowledge production and the third liberation of Africa

Abstract: Pan-Africanism as an ideological and philosophical force has defined the struggle to ensure the collective realisation of the destiny of the Black race across the Atlantic by political and intellectual leaders of African descent both at home and in the Diaspora. The struggle has passed through several phases such as ending obnoxious trade in human beings, colonialism and re-assertion of African identity and sense of being. The epistemological hegemony of the West on knowledge production in African studies and their Eurocentric view of what constitutes the history of Africa as well as what are the appropriate development strategies for the continent constitute another area of struggle for emancipation. Some have argued that a combination of Western reactionary and intellectual forces has kept Africa in chains of poverty and underdevelopment for decades. A counter argument is that Africa is her own worst enemy.The need for intellectual, socio-economic and political liberation of the continent is com...

Surplus citizens : struggles in the Greek crisis, 2010-2014

Abstract: This thesis analyses the social struggles that occurred between 2010 and 2014 during the crisis in Greece: labour struggles, the movement of the squares, demonstrations and riots, neighbourhood assemblies, solidarity projects and economies, local environmental struggles, and anti-fascist and migrants' struggles. It discusses their internal and external limits in the historical specificity of the contemporary crisis and class relation. Drawing critically on Theorie Communiste's periodising schema, these struggles are framed, first, through a shift in the dynamic of the class relation effected by the crisis and the restructuring, which is a continuation of the first phase of 'neoliberal' restructuring in the 1990s. This shift intensified a central capitalist contradiction: while the capital relation imposes most violently the absolute dependence of subsistence on the wage, the wage relation fails to guarantee subsistence and integrates proletarians as surplus to capitalist reproduction. Second, the struggles are framed through the deep political crisis of state sovereignty and the relation between state and civil society, caused by the relentless imposition of the restructuring in conjunction with supranational institutions. These historical transformations are traced through the mutual constitution of international tendencies and the development of class struggle in Greece, against theories of dependency and underdevelopment. Ideological responses to the financial crisis and the logic of the restructuring are interrogated by employing theories of value, fetishism, and the state influenced by the German 'value-form' debate. Foucault-influenced conceptions of governmentality and sovereignty are also deployed to examine the restructuring's forms of imposition and the biopolitical crisis-management strategies of the state, which reinforced the racialised and gendered constitution of civil society. The thesis argues that these two elements, the changing dynamic of the class relation and the crisis of the state and civil society, defined the struggles of this period, in which two core characteristics can be identified. First, labour struggles confronted the dilemma between the necessity and inadequacy of the wage through an ambivalence between their attachment to work and their estrangement from it. This ambivalence did not question the terms of the dilemma posed, which were only questioned fleetingly in riots that interrupted the normality of commodity exchange. Second, the deep political crisis provoked struggles defending democracy, with the disempowered 'Greek citizen' as their central subject, which constitutively excluded migrants. The splitting of these struggles between leftwing anti-imperialist and rightwing anti-immigration nationalism, and into a struggle between fascism and anti-fascism, were not able to challenge this constitutive exclusion, which was only questioned by migrants' own struggles. Nationalism and the drive to reinforce unsettled social hierarchies played into the governmental effort to contain the political crisis, through the state's biopolitical management of the migrant and marginal, racialised and gendered surplus populations produced in the crisis.

Cultural Hybridization in East Asia: Exploring an Alternative to the Global Democratization Thesis

Abstract: Is democracy emerging as the universally preferred political system, as advocates of the global democratization thesis claim? This paper seeks to explore this question in the context of East Asia, a region known for democratic underdevelopment. To this end, we first provide a critical review of how previous survey-based studies were conducted to estimate the relative preference of democracy as a political system. We then introduce hybridization as a new conceptual tool for ascertaining the emerging patterns of political orientations among citizens of authoritarian and post-authoritarian societies. Finally, we analyze the latest, third wave of the Asian Barometer surveys conducted in 11 East Asian countries conducted in 2010 and 2011. On the basis of this analysis, we argue that it is premature to claim that democracy is emerging as the universally preferred system.

Africa’s Leadership Challenges in the 21st Century: What Can Leaders Learn from Africa’s Pre-Colonial Leadership and Governance?

Abstract: Africa continues to face serious development challenges despite recent record growth rates. Such challenges as dependency, corruption, underdeveloped infrastructure and production sectors, and leadership and governance are some of the impediments to Africa’s quest for sustainable and equitable development. Explaining such development challenges has continued to elude scholars. To the radical leftist scholars, Africa’s underdevelopment can adequately be explained by its forceful and uneven integration into the global economic system. However, with over fifty years of independence, the debate is increasingly focusing on Africa’s leadership as good explanation for its poverty and underdevelopment. This paper argues that the current poverty and underdevelopment of Africa have much to do with enabling conditions created by African leaders and proposes that addressing this requires Africans to go back to pre-colonial history where they can tap good lessons rather than continuing importing Western based models which may not necessarily fit into Africa’s unique characteristics.

Securitizing instability: the US military and full spectrum operations:

Abstract: This paper examines the recent broadening of the US military’s overseas mission into what it calls ‘full spectrum operations’ and critiques how it is being enabled by what I term ‘full spectrum law’. The paper explores the important doctrinal shifts that took place in the US military from 2005, when it declared for the first time a commitment to ‘stability operations’ as a military responsibility equal in status to offense and deterrence. This, I argue, has reinforced an already dominant US national security discourse in which military and economic security interests are firmly bound. In particular, it has given the US military a broader role in the ‘correction’ of underdevelopment and the securitization of the legal and economic modalities necessary for a functioning neoliberal global economy. The paper reflects on the US military’s blending of security and development concerns and reveals how its legal framing of stability operations draws upon a ‘notional legal spectrum’ that allows for the securitization of the most broadly understood ‘instability’ and sanctions the interminable use of the US military in global interventions in an era ubiquitously cited as one of ‘persistent conflict’.

Trapping the Tigers: Regulation of Market Entry and the Rule of Law in SE Asia

Abstract: Recent research identifies high barriers to registering a business as critical impediments to economic development around the world. Similarly, the lack of credible commitment to the rule of law – especially in the areas of property rights and contract enforcement – is also connected to economic underdevelopment. Scholarship treats these factors as rival explanations for underdevelopment. However, I argue the rule of law is the causal mechanism through which barriers to entry in the marketplace influence economic outcomes. Specifically, I present evidence perceptions of the rule of law in Southeast Asia decline as the legal restrictions on registering a business increase because public officials use their gatekeeping positions to extract rents and raise the costs of formalizing private enterprises. High disincentives to register a business drive entrepreneurs underground, which in turn leaves them vulnerable to extortion or confiscation by public officials and undermines perceptions of the rule of law. I employ pooled cross-sectional time-series data for all countries in SE Asia between 1996 and 2010 to test my theoretical argument. I use Two-Stage Least Squares Instrumental Variables, Time Series, Cross-Sectional and OLS regression models to isolate causal mechanisms and causal directions among my variables. My analyses demonstrate the deleterious effect of legal barriers to entry on the rule of law and provides a new direction for scholarship on the topic.

Educating Britain? Political Literacy and the Construction of National History

Abstract: Despite the reflexive nature of historical enquiry and the degree of national interconnectness now theorized by historians in the United Kingdom, education debates over history teaching in Britain often yield a comforting defence of Britain's ‘island story’. The singular ‘island story’ is an economical narrative device favoured by politicians and further mediated through newspapers which profit from such national cryogenics. Maintenance of a currency, or crisis, of Britishness can also be contrasted with the relative absence of longitudinal or comparative enquiry into identity and school curricula. In addition, the teaching of states, connections and post-sovereign communities is largely under-theorized, potentially contributing to the sterility of future debates about citizenship, agency and Britain's wider political reach. It is argued here that the public framing of history as nationhood and the underdevelopment of children's political literacy are mutually reinforcing conditions by which the state has constructed a stabilizing, yet shifting presence of the ‘national’.

Development engagement with organised crime: a necessary shift or further securitisation?

Abstract: Organised crime is increasingly being recognised as a development problem as well as a security threat. Underdevelopment creates a conducive environment for crime, while illicit flows undermine development progress. In response, development actors have begun to consider organised crime in their programming. However, there remains a reluctance to directly engage with organised crime, as there are fears that development will be further securitised. This has parallels with the reluctance of development actors to engage with conflict in the 1990s. This article draws on emerging reports from development agencies that begin to consider how organised crime can be addressed in development programming, comparing it to Goodhand's earlier framework on development and conflict. It evaluates what the different levels of engagement—working around crime, working in crime(-affected countries) and working on crime mean for the securitisation of development, assessing whether development engagement with organised crime is ...