Critical Political Economy Approach Research Articles

Public Service Media in Northern Ireland: Prominence and Vulnerability in a Small Media System

Public Service Media remains at the centre of the public sphere in Northern Ireland. Public Service Media organisations such as the BBC broadcast in a society that remains politically and culturally divided. This has been the case for decades, even if the worst of the violence in Northern Ireland has now dissipated. The Northern Ireland media system includes local media provision, along with provision from the rest of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. This article identifies Northern Ireland’s media system as sharing characteristics with what Puppis (2009) defines as a small media system, under slightly different conditions. This article takes a Critical Political Economy approach to Public Service Media organisations operating in Northern Ireland, in order to argue that while there is prominence in the place of PSM in the media system, there is also vulnerability inherent.

Diversifying News Sources as Multicultural News Production: Critical Political Economy Approach to Sourcing Practices in Ethiopian Mainstream TV Channels

This study examines the diversity of news sourcing in Ethiopian TV channels, utilizing Critical Political Economy approach. It analyses 1167 news stories from 2019 to 2021 and interviews with 25 journalists. The study reveals disparity in the representation of peripheral communities, despite the utilization of various news sources. This indicates that diversifying news sources alone does not guarantee equal representation of diverse voices. Economic limitations, editorial decisions, and language barriers confine news gathering to specific geographic regions. Journalists’ limited autonomy and newsroom culture contribute to prioritizing government affairs thereby limiting diversity of voices. The study suggests collaborative efforts among news editors, managers, and political authorities, and policy framework for multicultural news production, to achieve content and voice diversity. It emphasizes the need to combine normative principles with real-world practices and the impact of resource constraints on media reception and viewer choices in future research.

Negotiating the public: re-municipalization, water politics and social reproduction

ABSTRACT In the context of the global wave of privatization of local public services, re-municipalization has emerged as a viable policy alternative, broadly understood as the return to public management. The paper examines its transformative potential by analysing what ‘public’ means in practice with a particular focus on governance and decision-making. To do so, the paper investigates the re-municipalization of urban water services in Naples (Italy) and Paris (France) by utilizing qualitative methods. Through a critical political economy approach, informed by social reproduction theory and political ecology, I argue that re-municipalization should be seen as a process that different social forces continuously try to shape. The findings not only contribute to the specific literature on water services, but also to that on re-municipalization, within the debate about public versus private provision. More broadly, the research enhances the understanding of water through the lenses of critical political economy.

The political economy of land acquisition for development in the public interest: The case of Indonesia

The public interest doctrine has been deployed by successive state regimes in Indonesia to legitimise the forcible acquisition of land for the state and private interests since the colonial period. This article examines how the government of Indonesia during the Jokowi presidency, has redefined the meaning and scope of ‘public interest’ in the context of land governance in Indonesia, resulting in an escalation in social conflict and contestation over rights to use and access land. We employ a critical political economy approach to demonstrate how this redefinition of the ‘public interest’ has provided legitimacy for the national government’s actions in forcibly acquiring land using a comparative case study of tourism development in East Nusa Tenggara and a dam construction project in Central Java in Indonesia. While the national government has argued that these ‘development’ projects benefit local communities, the empirical evidence challenges these claims. This article contributes to the land governance literature by examining the specific role of state institutions. In contrast to the liberal conception of the state as a neutral agent whose function is to balance diverse and conflicting interests over land in society to achieve common goals, the experience in Indonesia shows that the state is in fact the largest and most powerful procurer of land for capital investment in the country. Instead of benefiting the local communities, these state-sponsored development projects are more likely to serve the interests of politico-business elites.

After “BAT,” What? Reimagining the internet for social development in post-crisis China

Taking the critical political economy approach, this paper continues Dallas Smythe’s and Yuezhi Zhao’s inquiries into technological development in contemporary China. It examines the trends and struggles of the “BAT” model—named after the three most influential Internet companies in the country, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent—in China’s digital expansion, which has been intimately connected to transnational financial capitalism in the past decade. Reflecting on this expansion’s all-encompassing socio-political consequences, a blind spot in the successful BAT story, the paper examines whether the BAT model is sustainable for China’s social development and, if not, the opportunities and alternatives lie ahead. The paper argues, in view of BAT’s financial and infrastructural turn, that how China’s ICT sector could move beyond a capital-driven mode of growth and reorient technologies for public and social development is a critical epistemological question.

Platformization of the Korean Wave: a critical perspective

ABSTRACT By employing the platformization of cultural production from a critical political economy approach, this article analyzes the transition of the Korean cultural industries to the platform-driven phase of Hallyu. By discussing the highly transnationalized and platformized Korean Wave in the shifting global media environment, it examines how Netflix platformizes and appropriates the Korean broadcasting industry through various strategies, such as investing in original content creation, licensing Korean content, and subcontractualization of Korean production. These strategies reveal that Korean cultural industry firms have become subordinated to, and rely on, global OTT platforms. In light of the growing influences of Netflix and other global platforms, the article explores the implications of the platformization of cultural production for the transnational cultural flows of Hallyu.

The Hierarchies of Global Finance: An Anti-Disciplinary Research Agenda

ABSTRACT This article critically assesses the economics discipline’s capacity to capture the structural features and political economy implications of contemporary financial processes in the global South, with a particular focus on South Africa. Delving into the complexities of financial processes in South Africa, the article proposes an alternative, anti-disciplinary framework for understanding drivers and impacts of financial processes. We show how such an approach cannot simply be about adding social or political perspectives to mainstream economics, but rather about interrogating how we think about economic systems themselves, drawing on a variety of theoretical and disciplinary insights. This is about taking an open and holistic approach that centers history, power, structures, and social relations. With an issue such as finance, critical political economy approaches from a variety of disciplines allow us to see that finance cannot be separated from the wider economy or from the social relations it forms part of today and historically. This becomes particularly clear when considering how racial, gender and class relations both impact and are impacted by financial processes in South Africa. We conclude with recommendations for studies of changing financial processes globally and in the global South.

Policy-related Homelessness Discourses in Canada: Implications for Nursing Research, Practice, and Advocacy

Despite Canada’s commitment to several international human rights instruments recognizing the right to housing, homelessness remains widespread nationwide. Informed by critical political economy theory and critical discourse studies, we examined relevant literature focusing on homelessness policy-related documents in the Canadian context. The findings demonstrate interrelated homelessness policy discourses: 1) emergency shelters, 2) housing first, 3) social determinants of health, 4) human rights, and 5) political economy approach. We conclude that a critical political economy approach offers the most helpful way of understanding and responding to the homelessness crisis in Canada. Homelessness is a socioeconomic and political problem requiring nurses and health professionals to take sociopolitical actions. As nurses and health justice advocates, we stand in solidarity with labour movements to protect public health. This study can be adopted in local, national, and global settings.

Netflix’s effects on the Korean Wave: power relations between local cultural industries and global OTT platforms

ABSTRACT This article discusses how Netflix has influenced the local cultural industries in terms of the shift of cultural genres and the industry structure. By employing the convergence of critical political economy and sociocultural approach, it articulates whether Netflix has inroaded Korea due to the Korean Wave. It discusses whether local cultural industries firms change their norms in production to comply with Netflix's orientation and argues the ways in which the shift in the standard of cultural production has changed the cultural text in genres to determine whether global platforms arguably destroy local specificities and identities. Finally, it interrogates shifting power relationships between a global OTT platform and local players, including cultural creators and platform users, and its implications in the Korean cultural industries.

Welfare within planetary limits: deep transformation requires holistic approaches

In January 2023, Anders Rhiger Hansen visited Lund University to talk to Max Koch about sustainable welfare, human needs, social inequality and a little bit about Bourdieu. The message from Max was clear: politicians need to drop the idea of green growth and instead define a safe and just operating space to determine what can be done within this space. His sociological approach combines Marxian and Bourdieusean traditions, and he recommends that the Consumption and Society community investigates consumption in combination with processes of production, for example by engaging with critical political economy approaches such as the French regulation school or the Frankfurt School. According to Koch, the survival of the planet requires holistic approaches that would transform society and its exchanges with nature, based on principles of degrowth and on a scale that we have not yet seen.

The “Wolf Warrior Cycle”: Chinese Blockbusters in the Age of the Belt and Road Initiative

AbstractThis article concentrates on four Chinese blockbuster movies, Wolf Warrior (2015), Operation Mekong (2016), Wolf Warrior 2 (2017) and Operation Red Sea (2018), referring to them collectively as the “wolf warrior cycle” on the basis of their shared themes of China's overseas military actions. To understand why films addressing this topic have emerged since the mid-2010s, the article employs a critical political economy approach and situates the wolf warrior cycle in China's transforming foreign policies. It argues that the Belt and Road Initiative, one of the state's prominent foreign policies and global strategies in this period, played a crucial role in shaping the production of the wolf warrior cycle films under a trend of the politicization of commercial blockbusters in the Chinese film industry. In turn, these films contributed to the formation of the “wolf warrior diplomacy” image by reinforcing the proactiveness of China's diplomacy and nationalistic stereotypes in Chinese society towards international relations.

Whose system, what change? A critical political economy approach to the UK climate movement

ABSTRACT Demands of system change are common in the climate movement but there is little agreement on what this entails or how it might be achieved. This has contributed to discord and division between seemingly allied positions, each seeking to address the climate crisis through alternative strategies for change. We argue that these strategic differences also reflect, and for that reason can be better understood in terms of, alternative stances towards capitalism. Adopting a critical political economy approach, we assess a number of these debates and divisions as they have played out in the UK environmentalist movement. We highlight both the connections between alternative strategic positions within these debates and the broader stances towards capitalism that underpin them, and offer a critical evaluation of their likely limitations. In doing so, we identify potential points of overlap and cooperation between those holding seemingly contrasting positions in ongoing debates within climate politics.

Revolution, Change, and Democratic Transition in Egypt Since 2011: A Critical Political Economy Approach

The causes, consequences, and trajectory of the 2011 uprising in Egypt have been and continue to be a subject of scholarly debate. This article is situated within this debate with a particular focus on the role of political economy factors in engendering democracy and democratic transition. The key research objectives are to address why the Egyptian people came together in 2011 in an unprecedented show of solidarity to overthrow the Hosni Mubarak regime, to evaluate the interpretive frames for this uprising from two overlapping but fundamentally opposed perspectives—liberal democracy and radical democracy; to assess the extent to which the adoption of neoliberalism, accompanied by poverty and inequality, played a role in fomenting the countermovement against the regime; and to identify the underlying structures and process that links the 2011 uprising to the regime of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. The article concludes that the imposition of a neoliberal regime of capital accumulation, with dispossession and upward wealth redistribution at its heart, created the conditions for the rise of radical democratic mass movements that overthrew both Mubarak and Mohammed Morsi. The article further underlines that the regime of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi not only halted the democratic reforms demanded by the Egyptian people but continues, at a faster pace, to impose the same neoliberal economic restructuring that catalyzed the uprising in the first place.

International Organizations and World Making Practices: Some Notes on Method

Abstract In 2013, the International Law Commission (ilc) embarked on a codification project on identification of customary international law, including the role that international organizations (ios) might play in the formation of customary norms. Parallel discussions in the international law academy surrounding the role of ios reflected similar disciplinary anxieties as older debates on ios and law making. In this piece, I argue that the path to understanding ios’ governance passes neither doctrines of ios’ powers nor restrictive categories such as law making. A shift to ‘worldmaking practices’ and alternative approaches can help us diversify our subjects of enquiry and the ways in which we understand the ‘institutional’ dimension of international law. Here, I specifically focus on International Relations constructivism, Foucauldian ‘governmentality’, and critical political economy approaches. I then conclude with a discussion of international institutional law, interdisciplinarity and critique.

The challenge of the cloud: between transnational capitalism and data sovereignty

ABSTRACT The rise of transnational cloud platforms poses challenges to cross-border data governance, an understudied area in mainstream global Internet governance studies. Another gap is a critical political economy approach that contributes to a more historical, contextual and dialectical understanding of policy frameworks and their enacting actors, the state. Filling these gaps, this article uses the cloud computing development in China as an example to unpack the geopolitics of the cloud and tensions in data governance models. It argues that the state, neither obsolete nor irrelevant, is the core architect of the varying approaches that reflect the changing dynamics in information geopolitics.

Digital Era Governance and the Political Economy of Digital Communication Control in Tanzania

The advent of digital era governance which encapsulates both the enhanced role of digital technologies and non-state actors in governance processes in the 21st century has raised hopes for a more open government that caters for the interests of all groups. While this has been a mainstay for cyberlibertarians, critical political economists have demonstrated that digital technology is path dependent meaning that it is conditioned by traditional power structures that had kept the marginalized outside the political sphere. This paper revisits this debate by exploring the motives of digital communication control in Tanzania in the context of New Public Governance. It deploys the critical political economy approach to explore the experience of engagement in governance processes by two CSOs i.e., Twaweza and JamiiForums in Tanzania. The paper concludes that digital communication can temporarily transform dominant power structures that had traditionally kept the disempowered groups out of the public sphere and thus threatening the political and economic interests of elites. On the long run, however, the elites through the state are capable of controlling the transformative potential of digital communication to protect their political and economic interests like it had been the case for traditional media.

Fighting the beast of the apocalypse: three fundamental reasons for a Critical Political Economy approach to Global Political Economy

Critical Political Economy (CPE) has a long-standing pre-disciplinary tradition that can also be understood as a post-disciplinary or a trans-disciplinary approach. The central argument of this article is that CPE represents a proper basis for Global Political Economy (GPE). This is for three fundamental reasons: first, CPE’s purpose and perspective but also its ethical foundations, and its siding with the exploited and the oppressed make it extremely useful for the study of the GPE. While CPE is based on the tradition of Marx, it also allows for integrating insights from other approaches, disciplines and fields. Second, the dialectical methodology of CPE that starts with the analysis of concrete reality that provides the basis to systematically integrate different perspectives without falling into the trap of tracing causality to simplified and reified abstract concepts in GPE. Third, building the analysis on a materialist ground is essential for GPE. The merits of a materialist foundation become particularly obvious in view of the global ecological crisis and highlight important contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. It is concluded that rooting GPE in a tradition of CPE understood along these lines is crucial for a proper understanding and for systematically reflecting the challenges of today and tomorrow and emancipatory progressive strategies and struggles.

Continuing to fight the beast of the apocalypse: final reasons for a Critical Political Economy approach to Global Political Economy

Critical Political Economy is a transdisciplinary field of enquiry that is gaining ever more popularity among scholars and activists alike. In addition to analysing social power relations that revolve around how humans collectively organise production and social reproduction over time and space, Critical Political Economy also problematises the resulting social inequalities and asymmetrical manifestations in private and public (state-)institutional settings. Particularly the various forms of exploitation that are constitutive to the continuation of global capitalism are brought into question rather than accepted as givens. Critical Political Economy not only offers a particular way of understanding the world, but also seeks to produce knowledge that allows for social emancipation and that ultimately contributes to the politicisation and the resilience of social struggles. Thus, while giving ontological primacy to the negative, Critical Political Economy is essentially committed to a positive ontology by animating and awakening radical imagination about alternative futures.

Crisis Upon Crisis: Refugee Education Responses Amid COVID-19

ABSTRACT This study applies a critical political economy approach to understand the tensions, contradictions, and inequities that emerged when COVID-19 altered narratives and practices in education in emergencies, at the global policy level and within the local context of Syria refugee education in Lebanon. Through a vertical case study methodology, our research offers insights into a setting in which global organizations and actors sought to address the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on schooling, but under a significant broader context of multiple crises. Drawn from interviews conducted between October 2020 and February 2021, our data captures notions of “rupture” and “continuity,” underscoring amplifications in terms of systemic educational inequities. We focus on three key global narratives that emerged from the study, which when analyzed alongside insights from Lebanon, appear to be disconnected from how local actors experienced the pandemic. Our findings suggest that global narratives do not adequately account for the complexities of countries experiencing multiple crises, evoking questions around the capacity of international actors to understand and address multi-crisis environments in education. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding and addressing power and equity in refugee education.

Cultural Continuities and Skateboarding in Transition: In the Case of China’s Skateboarding Culture and Industry

Previous research on skateboarding has been conducted largely under the lens of cultural studies. Recently, there has been growing recognition of skateboarding as an industry under capitalist structures. Nonetheless, the transition of skateboarding from a subculture to a global multi-billion dollar industry is still left untheorized. There are two primary aims of this study. First is to evaluate the implication of the theoretical transition in existing literature from the subcultural theories and the critical political economy approach in examining subcultures and cultural industries. The second is to contextualize key concepts such as authenticity and cultural intermediaries in the empirical understanding of the dynamics of distinction in the Chinese skateboarding community and industry. The evidence presented in the qualitative investigation of key members of the Chinese skateboarding community suggests that an ambivalent sociality has been neglected in previous discussions on authenticity and the precariousness of skateboarding careers. Borrowing perspectives from cultural sociology and organizational sociology, the finding on the prevalence of the Chinese concept guanxi suggests relevant implications for future research.