Abstract In sociology, aesthetics have become an important lens for exploring the sensory dimensions of political and economic processes, with research on urban aesthetics contributing significantly to this field. However, much of this work focuses on how aesthetic forms serve the interests of political and economic elites, portraying aesthetic value as a direct product of political ideologies. While these approaches have shown that urban aesthetics are shaped by power struggles, they pay limited theoretical attention to less straightforward aspects of aesthetic politics—such as cases where clashing values, imperatives, and commitments meet. This gap is particularly pronounced in places shaped by violent histories, where the value of urban beauty might be inevitably entangled with loss, ambivalence, and co-existence with unwanted materialities. This article proposes an approach that foregrounds the dilemmas and compromises inherent in urban aesthetic politics, focusing on the varied practices through which people negotiate how to care for urban aesthetic value over time. I develop this approach through a case study of Klaipėda, Lithuania—a city shaped by layered aesthetic transformations, from state annexation to socialist modernisation to post-Soviet nation-building and Europeanisation. Using mixed-methods research, the article highlights differences in how people articulate what counts as good and bad aesthetics and which forms of material care—or neglect—are “appropriate” to sustain the city’s desirable aesthetic appeal. In doing so, the article reveals complex gradations of value underlying seemingly coherent aesthetic ideals of Europeanness.

The article examines the adaptation strategies of the upper subgroup of the Russian business elite (billionaires) in the context of the current geopolitical crisis and foreign restrictions. Using a specially collected empirical database, we analysed their composition and the actions they took with their available assets from February 2022 to January 2025. The results demonstrate how sanctions pressure initiated by various countries (the US, EU, UK, Japan, Australia, etc.) influences the group structure and behavioural strategies of the Russian business elite. The study's results suggest a high degree of resilience and adaptability of the Russian business elite (the "ultra-top" in the wealth model of social structure) to external institutional shocks. It was found that the reproducibility of the studied group in annual rankings ranged from 70% in the most volatile period from 2022 to 2023 up to 91% as they adapt to new institutional conditions in 2023–2024. Despite the restrictive economic measures introduced by the United States and a number of other countries, the number of billionaires in Russia not only has not decreased, but has actually reached record levels: in 2025, the Russian Forbes rating included 146 dollar billionaires, and their combined capital exceeded pre-crisis levels. High variability and differentiation in the behavioural strategies of Russian billionaires has been revealed, including investing in domestic assets, complicating the ownership structure, acquiring/selling assets abroad, repatriating property, renouncing Russian citizenship, etc., depending, inter alia, on the nature of restrictions and the amount of available capital. Representatives of the top 20 on the Forbes list demonstrated the greatest activity relative to other billionaires, including in foreign jurisdictions, while the remaining participants on the Russian list, often less burdened by foreign restrictions, focused on strengthening their domestic positions. This study contributes to our understanding of the resilience of Russian economic elites in the face of institutional upheaval and offers an empirically substantiated classification of adaptation strategies for a little-studied but fundamentally important for economic stratification group of billionaires.

Since the 1980s, neoliberal influences have pushed the privatization of social services, including long-term care (LTC), that has made financialization particularly possible in an expansion of the financial capital in everyday life. Research has shown that the interactive process of privatization and financialization has emerged through public-private partnerships. This partnership has undeniably created a penetration of private investment into LTC sector under the facade of expanding supportive housing and care for seniors and residents. This penetration means that financialized care providers as corporations are regularly making compromises for profit-maximization at the expense of the provision of care. It intensifies devaluation of care through exploitation of the caregiving workforce dominated by racialized and female workers, who are frequently casualized and underpaid. It has also made care more than ever as commodified personal services to shore up health systems that deprive Indigenous peoples and the disadvantaged of quality, trauma-informed care. This devaluation is premised on neoliberal economics which regards care as personal services, or “nurturance” of a feminine virtue, that is valued when it involves transactions. This has contributed to government policies, including Ontario’s Bill 7, the “More Beds, Better Care Act, 2022,” favoring privatization and urban bias. This legislation allows hospitals to charge Alternative Level of Care patients $400 a day for refusing to move to a LTC home of not their choosing albeit it is up to 70km away from their preferred location in southern Ontario, mostly urban, and 150km in the north, mostly rural. Also, it permits more beds to corporate care operators regardless of legal challenges and criticism for their poor care and COVID-19 related death. Bill 7 may serve the interests of political and economic elites in profitability in Ontario, where there are widespread experiences with trauma that is intergenerational due to colonialism giving rise to oppressions, systemic racism, violence, discrimination and marginalization. Indigenous peoples, who have experienced historical trauma, value care as a collective effort that is accessible equitably for all. For Indigenous peoples, care is social by nature because it is relational and is oriented towards healing among members of the community that exercise self-determination to achieve well-being in all dimensions from physical, emotional, to mental, psychological, social and spiritual. Building on this perspective, trauma-informed care, emphasizing healing as individuals and as the (First Nation) community, is the Indigenous meaning of quality care, also known as wrap-around care. It entails community-oriented, team-based services, involving multi-sectors, in response to comprehensive and wholistic needs. This study adopts feminist political economy in a historical analysis of financialized LTC. It is distinct from, but in dialogue with, existing research on LTC and financialization as it explicitly brings in the Indigenous perspective of care in discussions of health financing and delivery, city development and planning, and municipal governance. This Indigenous perspective that is oriented towards wholistic healing helps envision a wide range of policy changes to achieve long-term trauma-informed care as a social responsibility and a political practice. LTC as a social responsibility leads to a sharp critique of financialization but a support to the promise of LTC as public good that cannot be fulfilled without eliminating its reliance on the devaluation and deprivation of care and financing through mortgage debt. As public good LTC can be cost-shared among different levels of the government and managed locally by municipalities and communities collectively. Thus, definancialized LTC is a political practice, rather than a market service, whereby Indigenous and racialized communities are centred and participate in the negotiation of delivery of quality care together with caregivers’ associations and unions at the community level. It is the exercise of self-determination by citizens’ groups at the community level that can democratically decide on the health needs and the delivery of quality care. This practice overcomes urban bias in access to care in metropolitan versus rural areas at the core of urban-rural and intra-urban spatial justice discourse. It upholds the right to age in place and in one’s own community in a two-pronged strategy. The paper recommends the two-pronged strategy to enhance city development and planning of the essential social infrastructure such as the definancialized LTC and to promote the definancialized and municipally and community-led LTC model as a precondition for just, inclusive and age-friendly living. This strategy begins with LTC as a pillar of inclusive city development and insists that LTC facilities and their financing are essential social infrastructure in city-region planning (alongside housing, transit and so on). The case study of Cassellholme that functions as regional care infrastructure for Nipissing District and reduces pressure on hospitals and urban systems points to the need to strengthen regional planning, municipal finance, and city-region resilience. The case study as a concrete illustration of definancialized LTC promotes cross-municipal governance and public accountability including investing in quality care, contributing to broader community services, and servicing Indigenous communities.

ABSTRACT This article examines the structural disconnection between surplus capture and productive investment in the contemporary Chilean economy, contributing empirical evidence to debates on rentier capitalism. Drawing on heterodox political economy, we define rents as persistent surplus profits derived from private control over scarce and strategic assets rather than from value-creating activities. Using firm-level financial data for Chile's largest companies between 2013 and 2023, we identify a systematic concentration of profits among small business groups whose returns consistently exceed sectoral benchmarks, constituting sustained rents. To evaluate whether these rents foster productive upgrading, we complement the firm-level analysis with cross-national evidence on elite investment patterns in Chile and selected Asian economies. Across indicators—private fixed capital formation, R&D spending, and long-term investment—Chile lags significantly behind, suggesting that its accumulation regime is structurally rent-extractive, and weakly oriented toward innovation. Our findings advance research on rentier capitalism by proposing an empirical framework to measure rents and by highlighting the developmental implications of persistent rent extraction in peripheral economies. The article calls for renewed debate on economic elites and the widening disconnection between appropriation and accumulation in the context of current discussions on structural transformation and the future of capitalism in the Global South.

Introduction: Land inequality remains a major challenge in developing nations, particularly in Indonesia and Nigeria, where unequal land distribution has deep social and economic implications. Both countries have undertaken land law reforms to promote fair access and sustainable resource management. Understanding how these reforms operate within distinct legal and historical contexts is essential for achieving equitable agrarian governance.Purposes of the Research: Analyze and compare the land law reform processes in Indonesia and Nigeria to assess their contribution to achieving justice in agrarian governance. It seeks to identify key similarities and differences in reform approaches, evaluate their socio-legal impacts, and explore policy strategies that strengthen land rights, social inclusion, and rural welfare.Methods of the Research: A qualitative comparative legal analysis was employed, focusing on legal frameworks, policy implementation, and institutional mechanisms in both countries. Data were collected through literature review, document analysis, and secondary sources such as academic journals and government reports. The comparative framework allows examination of each country’s reform trajectory and its effectiveness in promoting fair and sustainable agrarian governance.Results Main Findings of the Research: The findings reveal that although both countries differ in their historical and legal contexts, they face similar challenges namely, land ownership concentration among economic elites and weak protection of indigenous and smallholder farmers’ rights. Indonesia has shown progress through land redistribution and asset legalization programs, while Nigeria emphasizes decentralized land management and community-based access policies. The study concludes that achieving equitable agrarian governance depends on the integration of legal reform, public participation, and policy transparency.

The Moksha Region was a significant region for the Golden Horde. There was a city that arose in the 13th century – Mohshi (Naruchal), which was the main “beled” for the entire area. In the last third of the 14th century, the administration of the region moved lower along the Moksha to a site that referred to in archaeology as Ityakovo settlement. It is possible that it was called Temnikov since the last third of the 14th century. The presence of archaeological sites shows that the region was inhabited primarily by the Mordovians, who retained the primacy as the most numerous ethnic group of the Moksha Region during the Golden Horde period. A phenomenon characteristic of the Middle Ages is evident, where the managerial and economic elite is formed from one ethnic group, and the dependent population from another. Since the 14th century, the advancement of the Russians in the Moksha Region was noted.

The study examines how a set of ideas for eliminating the “bottlenecks” in the Stalinist economic model came about. The goal is to find out the factors responsible for the “maturation” of recognition by the political elite, public opinion and the scientific community that a market transformation of the economy was necessary. The authors chose to avoid analyzing the features of the Kosygin reform itself and instead focus on the logic behind the ways in which contemporaries addressed the need to improve the national economy’s efficiency. The research methodology is chronological and tracks the changes in positions on issues that determined the underpinnings of the Soviet economy. A comparative method was also used to distinguish the positions of reformers on the main issues: a planned or market economy, forms of ownership, the role of money, price and wage policy, structural policy, social aspects of the economy, etc. The authors employed an interdisciplinary approach that incorporated research from economic, historical, sociological and other social studies along with a concentration on research that probed the basic institutions of the Soviet economy. The study provides a fresh consideration of the issues raised among the political and economic elites and also connects them with extensive material on Soviet economic theory and prevailing public awareness and psychology. The study concludes that improving economic efficiency was a central concern of reformers throughout the Soviet period. The empirical material clearly demonstrates a growing demand for strengthening the role of “economic levers” in the planned economy. The sources examined, including both published and unpublished archival materials from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History and the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, support the conclusion that the same Soviet society that had defended the country’s sovereignty in World War II gradually abandoned the messianic ideal of a new, unprecedented global victory for “social justice” and turned towards the consumer society that characterized the West. Although it had already become clear that the growing economic problems could not be solved without a radical change in the very foundations of the economy, an analysis of the late Soviet stage of reform reveals a number of factors that prevented all agents in the process from taking their rethinking of the socialist economy to its logical conclusion. In many ways, this paralysis predetermined the collapse of the economy and the difficult initial conditions under which post-Soviet states were forced to adopt market economic principles.

Abstract Political and economic elites often warn that taxes on the rich impair economic growth. Although such warnings have a long tradition in elite discourse, what the public believes about the effects of progressive taxation remains surprisingly understudied. This omission limits our understanding of a basic democratic mechanism, the congruence of elite and public opinion. To close this gap, we employ a conjoint experiment during the 2021 German national election on a representative quota sample. Participants compare policy packages that entail changes in income, inheritance, and corporate taxes and evaluate their impact on equality and growth. We find no evidence that the public believes that progressive taxes promote equality at the expense of growth. Instead, participants believe that progressive taxes are doubly beneficial, promoting both outcomes. Furthermore, such beliefs do not vary by ideology or economic status. Our findings suggest a more consensual view of progressive taxation that emphasizes positive synergies between economic growth and greater equality.

This essay stretches Antonio Gramsci’s core concept of the integral state to explain an enigma in contemporary Lebanon: why the massive collapse after the October 2019 protests failed to generate commensurate political, ideological, and organizational responses. It retheorizes the post-civil war state in Lebanon as a different kind of integral state, one that reflects an alternative process of state formation and historical trajectory in the Global South producing different state forms, class fractions, and social formations than those in Europe. In this case, private elite interests expressing different class fractions operate not by defining the ethical content of the state in civil society, nor by organizing consent on the cultural front of civil society, but overlap directly with state structures. Stretching Gramsci’s conceptual toolkit dissolves the differences between the state and society, and captures analytically how the postwar political economic elite representing an alliance of class fractions placed the state’s fiscal and monetary policies at the service of capital accumulation, but also to integrate substantial social constituencies into the postwar order along strictly sectarian clientelist incentives. This disaggregated cross-sectarian class interests and provided the material conditions to secure a level of sectarian ideological consent that precluded the emergence of viable political alternatives in the postwar era. The operations of the postwar integral state also truncated the terrain of civil society on which alternative organizational formations could organize in the long war of position to subvert the ideological hold of the sectarian system. The anatomy of this postwar integral state is examined as expressed in the political economy of cartels.

This paper aims to explore how money politics undermines democratic choice and representation in Korea. Starting during authoritarian rule, when major political figures had financial dealings with chaebol groups, these relationships established enduring dependencies that remain today. Based on a qualitative case-study approach, the authors of this study identify three channels by which money affects electoral process: influence voting systems, leave politicians open to bribery and corrupt influences, and taint what should be a fair way of doing things. The study explains how these channels heighten routine electoral slam dunks, make policy biased towards the economic elite and attract public blaming and distrust. It also scrutinizes post-crisis reforms since 1997—from stronger audit controls for campaign finance laws to more openness in government-as well as their results on balance points out positive as well as negative factors. Finally, the paper suggests policy interventions, for example, tougher rules for donations declaration of assets by politicians, and campaign funding in support of under-represented candidates. Emerging from these findings is the need for deep-rooted democratic change in order to make sure voter-privileged fully represented us citizens and public reliance on political power.Future research will utilize new methods of data collection for deeper understanding of this phenomenon. Evaluation and enforcement enhanced campaign finance regulation, in particular, must be independently examined by specialists.The South Korean Press will find freedom from the power wielded by a few elite companies, which diverse opinions now compete in great numbers.

This article analyses how forms of private cooperation between East and West were reshaped during the late Cold War and beyond. It does so by studying an elitist East–West club, called the International Vienna Council, which brings together leaders of multinational companies and leaders of the planned economy. While the permeability of the iron curtain has been well documented, little is known about the evolution of East–West circulation patterns during that time or the role played by economic elites. The International Vienna Council, initially a forum for ‘parallel diplomacy’, gradually became a platform for concrete business cooperation. The club’s activities continued after 1989, but it struggled with the transition from an East–West club to an interest group within the European Union. These dynamics shed light on the gradual autonomy of a private East–West cooperation group and its contribution to defining a pan-European economic space since the 1970s.

Abstract States increasingly confront security threats from exiled economic elites who retain power through offshore wealth, political influence, and informational leverage. This paper introduces the concept of weaponised legal dependence to explain why and how states file commercial lawsuits against their own citizens in foreign courts – particularly in global legal hubs like London – to neutralise these transnational plutocratic threats. While conventional tools of transnational repression (e.g., extradition, abduction, information warfare) target dissidents’ legitimacy or messaging power, only foreign litigation can directly constrain the material assets that underpin a plutocrat’s influence. However, initiating extraterritorial claims is costly, risky, and entails a partial surrender of sovereignty to liberal jurisdictions. I argue that states resort to these legal strategies when they face power parity with plutocrats – situations where neither side has hierarchical control, prompting political conflict to spill into foreign legal systems under the guise of commercial dispute. Drawing on 60 interviews with legal practitioners and case studies from Russia and Kazakhstan, this paper shows how states instrumentalise the credibility of liberal legal institutions to reclaim offshore assets and delegitimise their rivals. In doing so, illiberal regimes exploit liberal infrastructure, turning courts meant to enforce commercial norms into battlegrounds of domestic power politics.

Abstract Neoliberal political economy, which places entrepreneurship at the centre of human well-being, sees the potential of young people as self-reliant entrepreneurs capable of relieving the capital and state of the burden of social welfare. This paper examines the process of the establishment of young entrepreneurs in Slovenia during the neoliberal economic and political transition, and as a reaction to the 2010s economic crisis. The paper shows how economic elites deployed a wide range of public and private institutions at the transnational and national levels. These then worked in synergy to provide a model self-performance for young Slovenes. Early career entrepreneurs were widely considered to be socially beneficial and viewed themselves as such as well. The media promoted them as such, thereby normalising entrepreneurship as a career option and reeling more young people in. The resulting social consensus on the benefits of youth entrepreneurship, consolidated as a hegemony, came to exert an increasingly pervasive influence over Slovenian youth. This paper frames the said hegemony as a process of mediating consent through the use of models and reviews it in the context of social innovation. Since, in Slovenia, incentivising young people to pursue entrepreneurial careers was a novelty, hegemony is examined as a process of aligning society with social innovation in the interest of the elites. The paper examines how hegemony produces and relies on “positive” models that project the positivity of the hegemony and thereby secure hegemonic consent.

In 1924, the Italian ship Regia Nave Italia visited twenty-eight ports in thirteen Latin American states. Initially conceived as a commercial venture, it became a tool of Mussolini’s foreign policy led by Giovanni Giurati, a cabinet minister appointed as extraordinary ambassador. This article uncovers the colonial agenda of this voyage, arguing that a racialised vision of the Italian diaspora in Latin America shaped strategic alignments between the fascist government and Italian economic elites. It shows how ideas of race, migration, and Latinity configured discursive strategies designed to materialise fascism’s project of demographic imperialism through engagement with local authorities and their population policies. Within a longer genealogy of colonial practice, the Regia Nave Italia illustrates how Italy’s informal empire intersected with fascist ambitions across the Atlantic.

This study investigates the academic challenge of reconciling economic development with ecological sustainability in the context of coastal reclamation in Tapakerbau, Sumenep, Indonesia—a process that has generated social conflict, environmental degradation, and distributive injustice. Utilizing the maqāṣid framework, the research employs a qualitative socio-legal methodology, incorporating in-depth interviews, field observations, and analysis of legal documents alongside a review of literature on Islamic environmental jurisprudence (fiqh al-bī'ah). The findings reveal that, despite the brief duration of the reclamation project, it resulted in initial ecological damage, restricted fishermen’s access to coastal resources, and reinforced the dominance of local political and economic elites. This study emphasizes the significance of environmental preservation (ḥifẓ al-bī'ah) as a fundamental objective within the framework of maqāṣid discourse, particularly in the context of contemporary ecological challenges. It highlights the imperative for coastal development models that are inclusive, participatory, and ecologically equitable. Practically, the Tapakerbau case provides a crucial lesson for environmental conservation in Indonesia, emphasizing the importance of addressing sustainable development and environmental justice issues.

This article argues that during the unipolar era, capitalist expansionism created its own geopolitical rivals, which led to the emergence of the current multipolar era. It further suggests that the Ukraine conflict—framed as a proxy war between the West and Russia—constitutes the first major war of this multipolar era. While geopolitical and economic interests are ultimately intertwined, the article examines the distinct roles each played in the lead up to the conflict. The capitalist expansionism of the unipolar period (and its associated security coverage by NATO) is identified as the primary driving force behind the West’s support for Ukraine. The neoliberal turn in the political economy of the U.S. resulted in its foreign policy being increasingly dominated by economic elites that pursued profit-driven expansionism in East Asia and Eastern Europe—thereby sidelining traditional geopolitical considerations. This dynamic led to Russia’s response in Ukraine and facilitated the strengthening of its strategic alignment with China, thereby reinforcing the multipolar character of the current international system. By analytically distinguishing between economic and geopolitical interests, the article aims to offer a heuristic framework for fusing critical approaches with political realism to understand the political economy of international security. Specifically, the article proposes that there is an oscillating logic that underlies the tension between capital’s short-term profit imperatives and the long-term strategic calculations required by statecraft—a dynamic that shifts across bipolarity, unipolarity, and multipolarity.

Regulatory reform in Indonesia has become an important effort to simplify overlapping regulations and support economic growth. However, this policy is often questioned as to whether it prioritizes the interests of political and economic elites over the interests of the broader public. This article aims to analyze the role of legal politics in regulatory reform, focusing on how decision-making in policy formation is influenced by certain interests. The method used in this paper is a literature review and qualitative analysis of the existing legal political dynamics. The main findings indicate that legal politics often creates an imbalance between the interests of elites and the public, potentially undermining social justice in the regulatory process. Regulatory reforms aimed at accelerating economic development may, in fact, worsen social inequalities and strengthen the dominance of certain groups. The impact of this imbalance is the potential decline in social legitimacy of the policies enacted, as well as the emergence of distrust in the existing legal system. Therefore, it is crucial to consider aspects of social justice and transparency in every step of legal reform taken by the government to ensure that the policies generated can create inclusive and sustainable development.

ABSTRACT Politics is a mechanism that is of interest both at the national and local levels as a place for individuals to discuss country problems, find solutions, gain material or spiritual benefits, expand their social and friend circles, and realize themselves in the political arena. Therefore, many people strive to be active and effective in the political arena. However, it is seen that the expectations of people involved in the political arena are often not fully realized or partially realized. There are many factors that affect this process that produces positive or negative results. These include factors such as the person's level of education, financial situation, personal characteristics, and communication skills. In this study, the effect of elitism on individuals' participation in politics at the local level will be examined through capital. In theories of elitism, the first classical elitism theorists Mosca and Pareto's explanations come to mind. In this study, Pareto's hypothesis that economic elites among elite groups in the social sphere are effective in local politics will be tested by starting from Mosca's concept of the ruling elite. In this context, it has been tried to find answers to the questions of how much the political visibility of the wealthy corresponds to the represented base, how the presence of the wealthy on the lists during the process of determining the MPs has an effect, whether the visibility of the wealthy in politics is effective in terms of political financing and causes an effective hegemony of the wealthy, how much the professions of local MPs are effective on the hegemony of the wealthy in regional politics around the example of Gaziantep province. In the study, a document-based analysis will be made by applying the historical and descriptive research type, and in line with this method, firstly the concepts of politics and elitism will be briefly mentioned and then an examination will be made on the professions of the MPs in Gaziantep province between the 22nd and 28th parliamentary terms according to the TBMM records. While conducting this examination, especially the capital and finance owners who were elected as MPs in the industrial sector in the example of Gaziantep province were accepted as wealthy.

The study aims to interpret the developments of the period through the behaviour of the economic elite in the century and a half preceding collectivisation. During this time, the image of the countryside in the minds of the actors under study changed radically. This was closely linked to the drive towards intensification of land use. The path of development is reconstructed on the basis of the economic elite members’ writings and activities of uncovered during historical research. The change in the image of the countryside and rural areas is perceived as a long-term process that captures the structural transformation of the century and a half under examination, both in terms of the spatial economy and in terms of thinking about human resources and the pursuit of symbolic capital accumulation. Altogether, it is to presume that the Hungarian economic elite was initially unable to reduce the regional inequalities of the period due to a lack of comprehensive, country-wide, detailed knowledge about development and development potential, and from the second half of the period under review, due to its pursuit of rapid industrial development.

ABSTRACTHow does an authoritarian regime incorporate economic elites during market transitions while retaining political control? This article analyzes the strategies of China's United Front Work Department (UFWD) in politically integrating private business elites amid the shift to a socialist market economy. Based on 56 in‐depth interviews and a biographical data set of the top 500 Chinese billionaires, the study shows how the UFWD acts as an adaptive institutional mechanism—deploying recognition, intermediaries, appointments, and training—to embed entrepreneurs into Party‐sanctioned roles. The findings reveal a structured co‐optation process rooted in utility, loyalty, and representativeness, enabling the CCP to leverage elite resources while minimizing political risk. By illuminating how the Party incorporates powerful actors without relinquishing control, the paper contributes to broader debates on authoritarian resilience, elite co‐optation, and institutional adaptation under nondemocratic regimes.