ABSTRACT Roughly one quarter of the world’s wild fish harvests are regulated through an individual quota system with some degree of tradability. Why have states in a huge variety of circumstances across the world chosen market-based solutions to challenges of resource administration? This article considers two case studies: post-communist Russia, where individual quotas allocated via auction were instituted in some of the country’s most valuable fisheries in the Far East in 2001 and post-authoritarian Peru that switched to a limited transferable individual quota system as a means of administering the anchoveta in 2008. While individual quota regimes are frequently touted for their economic efficiency, this was only one of many goals Russian and Peruvian leaders intended to achieve with their implementation, and not necessarily the primary one. Instead, individual quotas provided solutions to political problems such as recentralising power and responding to regulatory challenges in the context of a weak presidency. In both cases, the implementation of individual quotas was aided by the fact that they were framed in a technocratic language that suggested they were apolitical. This allowed state leaders to undertake new policies that extended state authority.

ABSTRACT This article examines the political economy of underdevelopment in Rojhelat (East Kurdistan), drawing on historical evidence including pre-modern policymaking and critical readings of state documents, development plans and statistical reports from 1954 to 2024. It argues that the Iranian state, through centralisation, resource extraction and Persian–Shi'a nationalist hegemony, has systematically relegated Kurdish regions to a peripheral status. The study shows how economic peripherality, environmental degradation and securitisation perpetuate systematic structural inequalities. Peripheral capitalism, as the dominant political-economic logic of Rojhelat, has two intertwined dimensions: first, an economic-material dimension comprising resource extraction, blocked accumulation and exploitative labour; second, a discursive-epistemological dimension in which Persian–Shi'a nationalism naturalises inequality as common sense. This article argues that underdevelopment in Rojhelat is not the result of accidental mismanagement but rather a deliberate product of centre–periphery relations. This relationship operates as a state-led project of internal colonialism, in which resource plunder sustains accumulation in the centre while obstructing local development.

ABSTRACT The rise of US asset management and the expansion of assetisation into essential sectors such as healthcare or housing have intensified political scrutiny and public backlash. Amid counter-mobilisations and calls for social values in capitalism, this study examines asset managers’ networks that serve as an infrastructure of interest defence. Empirically, we map executive and board members’ affiliations with policy organisations and philanthropic institutions, highlighting divisions within the industry. Our findings reveal that alternative asset managers rely less on traditional policy groups and think tanks than conventional asset managers, instead cultivating ties with more conservative organisations. Additionally, we explore the role of gender in leveraging interest defence networks. Our findings suggest that conventional asset managers may rely on women’s engagement with philanthropic causes to enhance their public legitimacy. By integrating perspectives on instrumental and symbolic power, this study contributes to debates on struggles within asset management, interest defence and the role of gender in political economy.

ABSTRACT Strong versions of financial structural power theory argue that in an era of financialisation financial market interests now dominate liberal capitalist states. This paper accepts that financial interests often get what they want from state actors. The question is, does this reflect finance’s structural power, or potentially, other mechanisms as well. While finance’s structural power can be important, the paper elaborates an expanded version of New Structural Power theory that offers a broader account of how states and finance interact, focussing on concepts of state-finance mutualism involving relations of ‘systematic luck’ and ‘structural constraint,’ neither of which necessarily entail coercive power on the part of finance and which accord an active role for the state.

ABSTRACT While there is much research examining assets that drive or are threatened by climate change, this paper highlights the dynamics surrounding a third type, climate-mitigating assets, which help alleviate climate change and may thus increase in value. I argue that these assets warrant closer attention, as meanings attached to them underpin distinct forms of power for different owners and interact with states’ climate mitigation strategies. Land can be a key mitigation asset, crucial for carbon sequestration and biodiversity. Examining Scotland’s land use-based mitigation strategy as an extreme case, the paper shows how concentrated private ownership and diverging land use interests generate governance challenges and intensify power struggles over assets. Established landowners gain control-based power from owning assets that are in high demand due to climate change. At the same time, Scotland’s reliance on private finance has drawn financial actors into the land market, whose capital mobility further expands their power related to climate-mitigating assets and who focus on competitive returns above all else, exposing mitigation efforts to market volatility. Adopting an asset-centred perspective, the paper conceptualises climate-mitigating assets, highlighting the renewed importance of control-based power, and proposes hypotheses on how different owners derive distinct power from the same asset.

ABSTRACT The proliferation of the asset form and its management through financial intermediaries has informed manifold transformations of contemporary capitalist societies. While scholarship acknowledges that these transformations are conflictuous, we currently lack a systematic understanding of the ways in which assets give rise to social conflicts. In this special issue, we introduce the notion of asset struggles to shed light on the various forms of conflicts that emerge around the asset form. Understanding assets as sites of value extraction, domination and contention, we identify three main forms of asset struggles. Contestation takes place between parties involved in the assetisation process, between social groups or factions owning or managing distinct forms of assets, and more broadly in societies where assetisation has reached such an extent that it transforms social structures and challenges the stability of political regimes. The contributions in this special issue shed light on various instances of such asset struggles, ranging from households to national economies, within and outside of the financial sector, with various forms of state involvement, and on topics as diverse as gender, climate change, housing, and infrastructure.

ABSTRACT Recent US election cycles have revealed a startling bifurcation in the political allegiances of finance capitalism. The current configuration of alliances places one faction of finance capital, consisting of private equity, hedge funds and venture capital, firmly on the side of the Trumpian GOP, while the other faction, extending to mutual and index fund managers, has become increasingly dependent on the Democrats' policy agenda. By tracing the evolution of New Deal securities law in the 1980s and beyond, this article seeks to explain how this organisational and factional divide fell into place and what it tells us about the evolving commitments of Democrats and Republicans respectively.

ABSTRACT This article examines the dynamics of industrial restructuring in the contemporary automotive GVC based on the Marxian critique of political economy. To do so, it firstly sketches out the main tenets of the theoretical approach, which, in a nutshell, establish how the system-wide ‘laws of production and appropriation of value’ become mediated through a stratified qualitative differentiation of individual capitals (i.e. firms) and a concomitant quantitative hierarchy of profitability. Subsequently, it examines through those lenses the recent trajectory of the automotive GVC, which is shown to revolve around the changing relationship between automakers and so-called ‘mega suppliers’ resulting from the twofold process of, on the one hand, vertical disintegration by means of outsourcing of the manufacturing of parts and components and, on the other, the growing concentration and centralisation of capital among first-tier suppliers. On these grounds, the article finally moves to its second focal point and key contribution, namely: the discussion of a methodologically-informed framework for the construction of quantitative metrics of profitability, which are then used to provide an analysis of profitability differentials between automakers and suppliers based on data obtained from the balance sheets of firms.

ABSTRACT Since 2009, the People’s Bank of China has created an expanding network of currency swaps around the world to facilitate renminbi internationalisation (RMBI). These lines present an attractive dollar alternative for many emerging and developing economies. (EMDEs) Despite these developments, I argue that while China's swap lines may play an important window-dressing role and may enable dollar access, the terms and operation of the RMB swap lines themselves constrain broader currency use by EMDEs. China’s currency swaps reflect and transmit, previously studied economic, political, and geopolitical impediments to RMBI. They provide RMB liquidity that is contingent and restricted, thereby undermining usability and consequently, their capacity to support sustained international RMB use in global financial markets. Drawing on qualitative evidence from elite interviews I evaluate my argument with three case studies on Indonesia, Argentina and Sri Lanka. My analyses illustrate the limits of China’s monetary expansion in the global South.

ABSTRACT Contemporary economic policies have become increasingly reliant on lending and guarantee instruments managed by public banks. Does this trend signal a return of the state, or rather the financialisation of public action? This article explores the long-term institutional transformations of public SME financing in France, analysing the evolving roles of finance, businesses and the state. Drawing on historical institutionalism and the political economy of financialisation, it examines both the creation and the gradual financialisation of the institutional arrangement governing public SME financing. Based on extensive sources – 108 archive boxes, additional historical materials, and ten semi-structured interviews – the study traces the emergence of a financialised institutional arrangement that has underpinned French economic policy since the late 1990s. Initially centred on public guarantees developed in the interwar period, the introduction of public loans in the 1980s produced a fragile arrangement that ultimately facilitated financialisation through the integration of financial devices and actors. This periodisation based on valuation powers helps to explain the recent conjunction of renewed public intervention and the consolidation of financialisation dynamics.