Contemporary Global Political Economy Research Articles

Editorial

How is progressive politics developing in the wake of the multiple global crises that we currently face? What does it mean to be politically progressive in contemporary politics? Is the electoral turn the only path for today’s progressive politics? This special issue seeks to explore the current range of opportunities and obstacles facing advocates of progressive politics following more than a decade of eventful developments since the 2008 global economic crisis. It focuses especially on two core themes which we consider to be central to the journal Global Political Economy. First, we explore the nature of the current crisis/crises in the contemporary global political economy. Second, we highlight the forms of progressive politics that we consider to have the potential to respond to that crisis. In doing so, we seek to delineate the scope for resistance, dissent and emancipation in the contemporary global political economy; and, in doing so, focus our attention on the contested nature of that global political economy, and the trajectories for change which instances of contestation have the potential to produce.

Weak progressive politics and resistance without guarantees in the post-pandemic global political economy: a broadly Marxist account

There have been historically high levels of social contestation throughout the contemporary global political economy for over a decade now. Nevertheless, there are no obvious signs of a post-neoliberal global order on the horizon. In seeking to address this puzzle, this article presents a broadly Marxist framework through which to understand the contemporary global political economy, its contestation, corresponding political articulations, and shifting processes of institutionalisation. In adopting this framework, the article argues that the configuration of pressures in today’s global political economy are such that, at best, we can expect and hope for a form of ‘weak’ progressivism, as the systemic obstacles to more substantially emancipatory outcomes are greater than our current global neoliberal (alienated) society is equipped to challenge. This, however, should not necessarily be a cause for (only) pessimism.

Strategic Performance Measurement and Management: The Distinctive Nature of the Public Sector and Implications on Performance Measures

Purpose : Strategic performance measurement and management (SPMM) as a subject has come over increased research radar over the last four or so decades. The so-called “performance measurement revolution” of the 1980s to 1990s concentrated on the private sector. “Business managerialism” and “accountingisation” kicked-in into the public sector with transplanting of hitherto private sector management techniques under New Public Management (NPM) and other administrative reform programmes by various governments internationally. Specifically, the 1990s saw the implementation of modern multi-dimensional SPMM systems originally in the private sector. Considering the nuanced nature of the public sector, the transfer of SPMM systems from the private to the public sector has not been straightforward due to technical, conceptual and behavioral factors. This paper contrasts the features of the private and public sectors and investigates the implication of the distinctive nature of the public sector on the application of SPMM in the public sector. This will augment our perceptions and comprehension of existing public sector SPMM theory and practice. Design/Methodology/Approach: The study adopted a systematic literature review (SLR), a mode of research which has been widely adopted and strongly justified for adoption in business and management research since the turn of the 21st century. The study conducted a content and thematic analysis on the commonalities and differences between private and public sectors and implication of the differences on public sector strategic performance measurement and management. The study itself covered 233 published and unpublished documents covering the seven decades to 2023 which to our knowledge constitutes the most comprehensive update on the public-private debate trends to date. Findings: The study thoroughly interrogated the literature perspectives or models on the commonalities and differences between the public and private sectors. The study then deep-dived into the underlying characteristics which differentiate the public and private sectors producing one of the most detailed side-by-side analyses of public-private differentiation based on organisational characteristics, dimension, or concept of all time. The systematic review further identified and derived several thematic areas related to public-private differences and went on to establish the implications of the public-private divergences from an SPMM perspective especially as it relates to the derivation and application of public sector performance measures. These findings are critical for both practitioners and academics as they explore the subject of transplanting private sector SPMM practices into the public sector which is another overripe area for research. The findings provide public managers with a comprehensive and critical cog in their management toolbox as they navigate the practical realities and difficulties of implementing SPMM in the public sector’s unique and complex environment. Research Limitations: The main challenge with conducting a comprehensive research of this magnitude relates mainly to the broad range of literature covered, the unwieldy and onerous analysis and lots of judgement calls which could impact bias and replicability. Practical Implications - This paper conducts a comparative analysis of the key features of the private and public sectors found in the literature and evaluates how they drive attendant management practices in the two sectors and specifically how the public sector’s distinctive nature impacts on the measures of performance. Originality/value - Studying the differences and how they impact the choice of public sector KPIs is crucial in attempting to address the myriad of challenges and potential hindrances to future institutionalisation of SPMM in contemporary PSOs. Exploring and understanding the differences and similarities between public and private sectors is a beneficial springboard to cultivate erudition, cross-pollination and facilitation of knowledge transfer between the two sectors of the contemporary global political economy. Keywords: Strategic, performance management, performance measurement, performance measures, key performance indicators, public-private differences DOI: 10.7176/PPAR/13-2-03 Publication date: March 31 st 2023

Amity and Enmity in Regional Integration; the East African Community (EAC) Experience

East African Community from a traditional three states to the current six states has undergone different experiences in her cooperation and integration process from the pre-independence, the independence era, and post-independence era which suits the definition of the contemporary era. The context of the contemporary global political economy revolves around a post-tripartite trading block among neighboring states, shaped by empirical theory (what is the question) as opposed to the normative theory of “what ought to be”. Such realities are relationships based in forms of amity and enmity in the process of competition between citizens/states over policy preferences and interests. The resultant effects lead to; first, shifts in patterns of cooperation and integration, and secondly, the existence of durability and endurability in cooperation and integration. After examination and assessment of the effects respectively in relation to the East African experience, this article/presentation proposes a need to transcend the above enmity for amity in East African Community Cooperation and Integration process. Underscoring the existence of amity and enmity in state cooperation and integration in a region such as EAC defines a Regional Security Complex due to socio-eco-political beneficial security interdependences and existing vs potential conflicts. The need for a unified developmental-centric approach through cooperation and integration by EAC from the foregoing prompts the need for the application of Regional Security Complex Theory (RSCT) by Buzan and Waver.

Global Inequality, Mobility Regimes and Transnational Capital: The Post-Graduation Plans of African Student Migrants

Employing a theoretical framework that draws on the concept of global regimes of mobility and Bourdieu’s theory of practice, this article seeks to analyse how African student migrants in China navigate global structural inequalities in planning for post-graduation mobility, while strategising to overcome barriers to mobility and capital accumulation. It argues that China’s position within the contemporary global political economy is reflected in the ways these student migrants navigate intersecting global mobility regimes. Moving beyond the ‘stay/return’ binary common in student mobility research, the article delineates three post-study trajectories: returnees, deterred by structural barriers from staying in the host country; those who stay in China, overcoming these barriers by opening businesses, with plans to return home later; and those who plan to accumulate capital in China to meet the requirements of more stringent mobility regimes in the Global North.

The Belt and Road Initiative as Ten Commandments: Revisiting Xi’s Launch Speeches and the Washington Consensus

In 2019 Foreign Policy described China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as “the most talked about and least defined buzzword of this decade”. Given that confusion and the importance of leader political speeches in China - especially those of current President Xi Jinping - it is surprising that the BRI literature has little studied the two launch speeches of 2013. This article seeks to fill that gap, with study of those speeches and focus on the five cooperation-oriented areas announced in each. In comparative context those ten pillars appear not to be descended from new heaven but rather demonstrate overlap with the ten pillars of what was once relatively mainstream macroeconomic development policy, the Washington Consensus. In forward context of contemporary global political economy tensions, the need to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, the G7’s Build Back Better and the European Union’s Global Gateway ambitions also, this article may offer a timely fresh and comparative lens on the BRI.

AFRICA AND THE ‘GLOBALIZATION BARGAIN’: TOWARDS A COLLECTIVE ECONOMIC SOVEREIGNTY

Africa’s existential situation in the prevailing global order is such that no state thereof can afford to take national sovereignty too seriously. Apart from the myriad of structural challenges imposed on the continent by globalization, Africa is faced with a gamut of political and economic problems that can only be meaningfully addressed through some form of strategic multilateral collaboration. Africa’s aspiration to economic sovereignty has been constrained by the structural conditionalities of globalization, which have kept the continent overly weak, dependent and underdeveloped. The constraint is so immanent that individual African states can hardly afford even the relative sovereignty to harness a strategic balance in the fast ossifying asymmetries of interdependence that characterize the contemporary global political economy. It is posited in this paper that the remedy for Africa lies in the ability of her states to transcend their disempowering territorial-cum-nationalistic divides and capitalize on the existing continental multilateral mechanisms towards mainstreaming collective sovereignty, based on the principle of pan-African supranationalism. To that end, leveraging and maximizing the gains and prospects of extant regional and continental supranational organisms would become both salient and expedient.

#MeToo, white feminism and taking everyday politics seriously in the global political economy

ABSTRACTThis paper examines social media movements, specifically #MeToo, in relation to the politics of feminism and white privilege in the contemporary global political economy. Analysis of social media movements is located as a key part of the intricate web of practices that enable certain types of gendered identity and socioeconomic privilege to intersect, in powerful ways and to potent effect. The paper argues that, while scholarship on the global political economy has not often taken seriously popular culture sources in and across world politics, and needs to do better in this regard, investigating the politics of popular culture, race and socioeconomic privilege in contemporary world politics is important. This is because such analysis foregrounds everyday, cultural practices of knowledge formation, building space for emphasising relations of power but also highlighting the possibilities of and for resistance, agency and avenues for creative thinking and doing in world politics.

Developing Disaster: Power, Structural Violence, Insurance-Linked Securities, and the International Political Economy of the Disaster Politics Nexus

Abstract This article presents an alternative framing of disasters as a form of structural violence resulting from the unequal distribution of structural power between various groups, organizations, institutions, and states in the contemporary global political economy. The article utilizes a theoretical framework that combines Johan Galtung’s typology of violence and Susan Strange’s conceptualization of structural power to open up new space for analysis in the disaster politics nexus. The article applies its framework to explore how an understanding of disasters as a form of violence problematizes trends within mainstream disaster risk reduction (DRR) policies. Specifically, the article examines the integration of financial risk-sharing mechanisms into the disaster politics nexus through new public–private partnerships between insurance and reinsurance firms, international financial institutions, and governments to transfer catastrophic risk to global capital markets. The article seeks to repoliticize these changes and bring questions of power back into the larger conversation surrounding DRR policies.

Protest as Polyphony: An Interview with Raqs Media Collective

Protest as Polyphony:An Interview with Raqs Media Collective Melissa Karmen Lee, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta (bio) The practice of curation amounts to a gathering of forces. A host unto itself, Raqs Media Collective is already one such gathering. Bringing together the artists JEEBESH BAGCHI, MONICA NARULA, and SHUDDHABRATA SENGUPTA, Raqs is a Delhi-based collective that has produced contemporary art, edited books, curated exhibitions, and staged situations since making its international debut in 2002. Together, these artists have interrogated totalitarian systems and evaluated epicenters of transformation with an active and relentless questioning. Founded in 1992 in New Delhi—a year after the group had studied documentary filmmaking together—Raqs Media Collective has produced a body of Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Raqs Media Collective (left to right): Shuddhabrata Sengupt, Jeebesh Bagchi, and Monica Narula. Photograph by Amalia Jyran Dasgupta. [End Page 187] artwork that includes multimedia installations, documentary films, edited books of poetry, an online app for invitations to participatory revolt, and numerous curatorial projects and exhibitions. The collective has also collaborated with a wide range of cultural workers, including architects, computer programmers, writers, and theater directors. In 2001, Raqs co-founded Sarai, the interdisciplinary and incubatory space at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. Here, it initiated cultural practices and processes that have left a deep impact on contemporary Southeast Asia. Raqs's dialectical engagement with history interrogates the legacy of colonialism by refusing to limit the story of postcolonial cultural "development" either to patriarchal storytelling or to capitalist, neoliberal socioeconomic models; its institutional work, like its artistic and curatorial projects, draws upon new ways of understanding the past in order to take action in the present. Raqs has always been interested in breaching hegemony and power; its means of doing so often involve gathering together and presenting new genealogies of radical thought. Its 2010 installation, The Capital of Accumulation, a video diptych that "trawls through a haunting, dreamlike landscape straddling Warsaw, Berlin, and Bombay/Mumbai" to critique the contemporary global political economy, features Rosa Luxemburg's 1913 text "The Accumulation of Capital" as its centerpiece, along with Luxemburg's botanical notebooks.1 Raqs discusses its dialectical recourses to such texts in this interview, referring to them as "detours" that derail the constituted power and patriarchal dominance over culture, economy, traditions, and social norms. Another pertinent example of such postcolonial engagement with the dominant historical narrative of "development" is Coronation Park, a suite of nine fiberglass sculptures on coated wooden pedestals that was produced for the 56th Venice Biennale. These were fragments of ceremonial regalia that referenced the Delhi site that hosted the coronation of King George and Queen Mary as emperor and empress of India in 1911. In this interview, Raqs discusses how its work seeks to redefine commonplace notions of both time and space. Its work addresses "threshold time" (which Raqs defines in shorthand as "the future-in-the-present") as well as the space [End Page 188] of art's performance—namely, biennales and national exhibitions increasingly located in Asia but focusing on a polyphony of world voices. Both domains involve intervening in evolving definitions of art within institutional frameworks that are under pressure from new technologies, a pressure that unfolds into protests against colonialism, capitalism, and political systems. An example of artwork that interrogates patriarchal systems as well as racial and historical legacies in the U.S. is Art in the Age of Collective Intelligence, which featured an indoor installation of photographs and books addressing the problematic issue of dealing with the history of wealth displacement in World's Fairs and, in particular, the reductive view of race they have tended to display as capitalist spectacles. Similarly, Raqs's outdoor exhibition, If the World is a Fair Place, Then (2015)—a participatory artwork that gathered and repurposed over five hundred individual responses in Laumeier Sculpture Park—examined the ideas of "fairness" and "unfairness," signifiers most commonly associated with issues of race and class. Its The Great Bare Map App was an immersive artist book project created with a team for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; the project interspersed archival stories...

Negotiating Neoliberalism: Informalisation and Reformalisation of Industrial Relations in Norway's Agricultural Industry in the 21st Century

AbstractThe flow of flexible and inexpensive low‐skilled manual labour across national borders has become a defining feature of the contemporary global political economy, often accompanied by neoliberalist labour market reforms and growth in the informalisation of labour relations in receiving economies. As a result, immigrant workers experience precarious and deteriorating wage and work arrangements. I discuss whether these are inevitable processes by analysing one particular case, that of the Norwegian agricultural industry since the turn of the century. In the first years after 2000, a growing number of low‐skilled Eastern European immigrants in Norway's agricultural industry faced precarious work arrangements as the industry drifted toward informalisation. Yet labour relations in Norwegian agriculture have since seen signs of reformalisation, resulting in higher wages and improved working conditions. I examine the characteristics of Norwegian society and its agricultural industry that have facilitated the reformalisation process. Important is the presence of strong and long‐lasting institutionalised structures of cooperation and negotiation between state agents and representatives of labour and capital, which promote more than economic rationalities among the industry's employers. The analysis builds on a mixed methods approach that addresses both macro and micro levels, as well as both institutionalised ‘objective facts’ and actors' subjective interpretations, by use of various quantitative and qualitative materials. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Power and inequality in the global political economy

Inequality in all its forms is the defining global problem and increasingly the defining political problem of our age. A monumental body of scholarly research seeks to understand the drivers behind the vast and accelerating patterns of socio-economic inequality in the global political economy. This article, an adapted version of the 2016 Martin Wight Memorial Lecture, contributes to this effort by focusing on a dimension of the picture which has received surprisingly little attention, namely, the implications for socio-economic inequality of the particular form of industrial organization that has come to underpin the contemporary global economy—one organized around global value chains and global production networks. It proposes an approach which sees inequality as arising at the intersections of three dimensions of asymmetry—asymmetries of market power, asymmetries of social power and asymmetries of political power—which underpin and crystallize around global value chains. It explores these dynamics in the particular arena of labour and labour exploitation in global value chains, as a means of shedding a valuable wide-angle beam on the big questions of power and inequality in the contemporary global political economy.

Intersectionality and Primary Accumulation: Caste and Gender in India under the Sign of Monopoly-Finance Capital

The overarching goal of this article is to explain how the relations between capitalist imperialism, primary accumulation—often misleadingly called "primitive accumulation"—and intersectionality operate in contemporary global political economy. From many recent studies, it is clear that certain populations are more vulnerable to processes of primary accumulation than others, and that many people in the global South now experience the dispossession and displacement caused by primary accumulation without any subsequent incorporation into waged work. Understanding how ethnicity, gender, and class intersect within contemporary patterns of global accumulation is important in order to develop clear political strategies against ongoing dispossessions.… To do so, imperialism, primary accumulation, and intersectionality all need to be rethought, especially in relation to each other.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

China’s ‘New Silk Roads’: sub-national regions and networks of global political economy

This paper argues that the Chinese government’s ‘belt and road’ initiative – the Silk Roads vision of land and maritime logistics and communications networks connecting Asia, Europe and Africa – has its roots in sub-national ideas and practices, and that it reflects their elevation to the national level more than the creation of substantially new policy content. Further, the spatial paradigms inherent in the Silk Roads vision reveal the reproduction of capitalist developmental ideas expressed particularly in the form of networks, which themselves have become a feature of contemporary global political economy. In other words, the Silk Roads vision is more of a ‘spatial fix’ than a geopolitical manoeuvre.

Crisis, Austerity and Gendered Governance: A Feminist Perspective

Feminist scholars have been highly attentive to the ways that crises have become an everyday technique of global governance. They are particularly sensitive to the mechanisms through which ‘crisis management’ entrenches the power of particular economic orders and constrains the possibilities, and space, for contestation and critique. This paper seeks to contribute to but also to extend existing feminist research on financial crisis by arguing that, over the course of what has commonly been labelled the ‘global financial crisis’, the emergence of ‘crisis governance feminism’ has enabled existing structures and mechanisms of gendered privilege, such as the global financial industry, to suppress calls for their overhaul and to re-entrench their power in the global political economy. Adopting a discursive approach to gender and governance that situates gender centrally in understanding governance discourses and their reproduction of common sense (about what people do, how they labour, where they invest and so on), this paper argues that the governance of crisis in the contemporary era, in particular the various actors, institutions, policies and ideas that have sought to describe and ‘contain’ the global financial crisis, are gendered. Gender has become, in the contemporary global political economy, a technique of governance, and with deleterious effects. Despite inciting more discussion of ‘gender’ in economic systems than ever before (particularly in terms of discussions of ‘economic competitiveness’), this paper argues that the ‘global financial crisis’ has precipitated and continues to reproduce techniques of governance that trivialise feminist concerns while further embedding a masculinised, white and elitist culture of global financial privilege.

Diploma Serves Diplomacy: China’s “Donor Logic” in Educational Aid

engagement in Africa is an increasingly popular topic in the 21st century. However, not much attention has been paid in the field of education and little evidence can be seen in what actually happens on the ground. This article aims to explore China’s educational aid to Africa, from both textual and fieldwork sources. It will focus on three parts: first, the existing recognition of Chinese distinctions in foreign aid and China’s donor logic based on “win-win” strategies; second, an argument that China’s donor logic in educational aid might be informed by producing soft power through “public diplomacy”; third, a discussion of people’s perception collected in Tanzania, including voices from officials and returning African students. The article will take China’s main educational approach, the Government Scholarship Scheme as an example, and look at how this educational practice has been processed in a “diplomatic” way. It is concluded that China’s educational aid and its features in practice, based upon diplomatic policies and China’s distinctive donor logic of foreign aid, is serving bilateral relations rather than orthodox aid relations. If quality transformation and communication can be maintained in the Chinese universities, education would contribute to a lasting and cooperative relationship between China and Africa. It may add more complexities to “soft power” within broader conceptions under the contemporary global political economy.

The Russian State, Eurasianism, and Civilisations in the Contemporary Global Political Economy

This article demonstrates the emerging significance of concepts pertaining to culture and civilisation in imagining the global political economy (GPE). It focuses on how certain Russian thinkers and officials employ such concepts to critique American hegemony, to consolidate and defend Russia's statist political apparatus, and to obtain legitimacy for Russian state conduct both at home and abroad. Russian debates over Eurasianism, civilisational difference and geopolitical identity were common in the 1990s and have filtered into Putin era Russian state discourse about Eurasian political and economic integration initiatives. Historicist analysis of world orders, a method inspired by the work of Robert Cox, is employed here to understand how intersubjective ideas derived from previous epochs are mobilised and transformed by social and political actors for contemporary political projects. Organic intellectuals of the Russian state articulate and legitimise state-sanctioned difference in an era in which once widely presumed integrative globalisation and American hegemony are being questioned.

“THE WORLD IS WATCHING”

The concept of mediation is crucial to the structure of cosmopolitanism understood as a perspective whereby one sees oneself as a member of a world. This article examines the mediatic structure of cosmopolitanism by discussing two different philosophical models of this structure in Kant's and Hegel's philosophies of world history. It then considers what happens to this structure in contemporary global political economy by looking at a series of news events concerning the People's Republic of China in 2008 (the riots in Tibet, the Sichuan earthquake and the various events surrounding the Beijing Olympics). It concludes with some thoughts on the virtualization of power and the role of business journalism, as illustrated by the assessment of US sovereign credit by ratings agencies in 2011.

“Over There”

In Vietnam, international remittances from the diaspora are a significant input into the national economy. Yet beyond capital transfer, remittance economies are also key social nodes offering insight into the extension of imaginations, expectations, and desires that accompany them. This article examines the role of gifting remittances in reestablishing, maintaining, and straining kinship networks disrupted by refugee exile, and catalyzing shifting aspirations and mobile horizons. Drawing on fieldwork from Vietnam's southern and central coast regions, this essay interrogates the anthropological question of the mediatory role of gifts in social exchange relations. It argues that the long-distance nature of remittance exchanges in the contemporary global political economy juxtaposes the mobility and exchangeable value of money and its senders against the experiences of local bodies confined within the nation state. This contradiction reveals a liminal space for emergent social imaginaries in which the characteristics of the gifting medium itself come to partially affect and embody the relationships between and identities among givers and receivers. Such imaginaries draw awareness to spatial and ontological margins, borders, and horizons associated with migratory and financial flows and opportunities and are displaced into diverse sociocultural forms reflecting phenomenological degrees of aspiration, realization, and frustration.

The Reproduction of Neoliberalism and the Global Capitalist Crisis

The paper attempts to contribute to a critical reading of contemporary global political economy. It provides an analysis through an empirical exposition of the latent and manifest ways neoliberalism is being reproduced institutionally and relationally despite and because of the ongoing global capitalist crisis. To this end, three interrelated themes are highlighted here: first, the constitutive role and functional character of crises in the evolution of capitalism and the reproduction of its current neoliberal configuration; second, the continuity of long-held ideas of groups ranging from multilateral organizations to global justice movements – hence, the absence of relatively new perspectives – as evident in their respective policy prescriptions and crisis responses that effectively perpetuate the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism; and third, the emergence of the political-economic regime of authoritarian liberalism in East and Southeast Asia as a perceptible consequence of the intensifying crisis.