Authoritarian Neoliberalism Research Articles

You Can’t Handicraft the Apocalypse: The Invidious Consequences of “Opting Out“

ABSTRACTFor subjects of neoliberal authoritarianism, the precariousness of everyday life is amplified in the face of catastrophic climate change. Rather than build networks of solidarity to shape a new world, authoritarian neoliberalism encourages antisocial individualistic schemes to weather the storm by valorizing individuals who can prepare themselves for the worst. This essay extends Thorstein Veblen’s critique of the Handicraft Movement of the early twentieth century to explain the appeal of prepping, as well as its inadequacy in the face of catastrophe. Veblen shows how the Handicraft Movement was merely another way to conspicuously consume. This essay echoes that critique and recasts prepping as handicrafting the apocalypse, conspicuously consuming even at the end of the world. It shows the inadequacy in the face of an existential threat and concludes with a dialogue between Veblen and Bogdanov to theorize consciously directing industrial production toward democratic ends.

Neoliberalizing football and fandom: the authoritarian e-ticketing system in Turkish stadiums

ABSTRACTLaunched in 2014 in Turkey, the Passolig e-ticketing card has been accused of commodifying football fans, favouring the ruling-class, and being an authoritarian state tool to protect stadiums from increasing political opposition. This criticism recalls the practice of neoliberalism. Therefore, the study poses the following question: According to the empirical analysis of fan opinions, is there any evidence of neoliberal involvement in the Passolig? With an analytical discussion on the axis of neoliberalism, the study argues that Turkish football has been woven into the development of neoliberalism in the country. Data from focus group interviews also show convincing evidence that the Passolig system involves neoliberalism, both in economic and socio-political terms. Fan opinions are aligned with the neoliberal outcomes of the Passolig: the financial sector was strengthened through the creation of new bank customers and new transactions, and commodified fans have turned into overspending football consumers; therefore, a more commercialized football market in the competitive global football sphere has developed. Most of the fans evaluate the new system as a tool for blacklisting opposing fans and reducing stadium protests against the government. These fan opinions align with the concept of authoritarian neoliberalism, as the emerging literature suggests. The data also show that the Passolig can be considered a tool for the gentrification of the fan profile, which is now more controlled by the authoritarian neoliberal state.

On Authoritarian Neoliberalism and Poetic Epistemology

ABSTRACTAs one response to the secular crisis of capitalism, higher education is being proletarianised. Its academics and students are shorn of autonomy beyond the sale of their labour-power. One heuristic for analysing this response is authoritarian neoliberalism, imposed as a means of enacting disciplinary practices in the name of the market with an anti-democratic rationale. This has a distinctly technocratic focus, rooted in techniques of performativity, including audits and assessments of teaching, research and scholarship, grounded in productivity, the management of time and value-creation. However, there are a range of intersectional and geographical responses to such an imposition, through which it is possible to describe alternatives to these architectures of subsumption. In particular, a second heuristic emerges which challenges the restructuring of the University in the Global North, erupting from struggles for decolonisation. Here, Audre Lorde’s invocation to an integrated, poetic existence that situates bodies in places, and respects feelings and emotions as the site of epistemological development and understanding, underpins the possibility for dismantling hegemonic knowledge production. The article examines whether humanist narratives of solidarity, in particular from marginalised voices, might help academics and students to analyse their alienated labour and to imagine that another world is possible.

The potentials and challenges of left populism in Turkey: the case of the peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP)

ABSTRACTIn spring 2015, Turkey witnessed the unexpected rise of the HDP, founded by the Kurdish Liberation Movement together with the Turkish radical left, against President Erdoğan’s authoritarian rule. In this article, I will employ contemporary literature on left populism to explain the HDP’s rise as an alternative left hegemonic project against the neoliberal authoritarianism that Erdoğan represents. After discussing the historical context from which the HDP emerged and grew, I will evaluate its discourse and strategies based on a conceptualization of left-wing populism. Lastly, I will discuss the challenges that the HDP confronted after the June 2015 elections and the differences between the Turkish and Western European contexts for a left-wing populist strategy.

Trumpism and the Dialectic of Neoliberal Reason

Guided by the thesis that fascism was the outcome of a dialectic of instrumental reason, I argue that Trumpism is the result of a dialectic of neoliberal reason. The 2008 crisis revealed that widely distributed consumption could no longer be sustained through escalating debt, as it had been since neoliberalizing reforms in the 1970s. Economic crisis has been interpreted through a culture market in which pseudo-individual consumers choose what hyperreal public they prefer and participate in pseudo-activity through social media. Retreat into insular hyperrealities and hostility to dissonant alternatives reinforce each other in an escalating logic generating partisan incivility and fake news. The de-democratization of the state through subservience to private interests and political dysfunction has combined with the consumer’s uncompromising mentality as a dissatisfied customer to channel politicization into populism. It aggregates negatively through shared dissatisfaction, driving escalating antagonism between technocratic responsibility and populist responsiveness. These escalating economic, cultural, and political contradictions heighten negative “freedom from” restraints while subverting positive “freedom to” relate meaningfully to the world. This intensifies anxieties and receptivity to authoritarianism as a self-defeating escape from neoliberal freedom. Trumpism exploits precarity, corrupts democratic norms, and licenses misdirected aggression. This neoliberal authoritarianism is inverted fascism. Trump’s presidency is more effect than cause.

Authoritarian Neoliberalism in AKP’s Turkey: An Industrial Relations Perspective

Authoritarian neoliberal governance of industrial relations is on the rise around the world, displaying remarkable similarities across countries with similar democratic political structures. However, despite a certain degree of resemblance, countries have been following divergent paths rendering each case unique in terms of its experience. This article explains the specific path through which authoritarian neoliberalism was materialised in the governance of Turkey's industrial relations under AKP rule. It is purported that AKP's pursuit of authoritarian neoliberalism in its governance of industrial relations shares certain similarities with the emerging market economies, which have a less democratic political system. However, it is contended that the governance of Turkey's industrial relations under AKP leadership embodies spatially and temporally distinct characteristics integrating long‐established authoritarian institutional structures and practices with neoliberal ideology, powerful political alliances, Islamic values, repressive practices and mounting resistance, thus rendering it a unique form of authoritarian neoliberalism.

Authoritarian neoliberalism in AKP's Turkey: an industrial relations perspective

AbstractAuthoritarian neoliberal governance of industrial relations is on the rise around the world, displaying remarkable similarities across countries with similar democratic political structures. However, despite a certain degree of resemblance, countries have been following divergent paths rendering each case unique in terms of its experience. This article explains the specific path through which authoritarian neoliberalism was materialised in the governance of Turkey's industrial relations under AKP rule. It is purported that AKP's pursuit of authoritarian neoliberalism in its governance of industrial relations shares certain similarities with the emerging market economies, which have a less democratic political system. However, it is contended that the governance of Turkey's industrial relations under AKP leadership embodies spatially and temporally distinct characteristics integrating long‐established authoritarian institutional structures and practices with neoliberal ideology, powerful political alliances, Islamic values, repressive practices and mounting resistance, thus rendering it a unique form of authoritarian neoliberalism.

Placing Refugees in Authoritarian Neoliberalism: Reflections from Berlin and Paris

In 2015, a large influx of people forcibly displaced into Europe culminated in what has often been referred to by the media, government officials, and policymakers as the refugee crisis. This trope typically describes the tension between, on the one hand, a general willingness of many European countries to resettle refugees, and fiscal constraints allegedly beyond the control of governments, on the other. In the bounds of this apolitical and ahistorical storyline, refugees are blamed for increased homelessness and affordable housing shortages, despite deepening neoliberal practices that predate their arrival. With the goal of decentering this trope, we explore the lived experiences of refugees in their quest for stable housing in two major host cities: Berlin and Paris. In contrast to the refugee crisis narrative, we present a twofold argument. First, we suggest that authoritarian neoliberalism in Berlin and Paris have played a central—yet variegated—role in creating nondemocratic conditions that have led to rental housing insecurity for vulnerable populations, including refugees. Second, we suggest that the refugee crisis trope itself may be understood as an integral feature of authoritarian neoliberalism, as it actively erases the history, politics, and social context that have led to the construction of shelter insecurity.

Book Review: States of Discipline. Authoritarian Neoliberalism and the Contested Reproduction of Capitalist Order by Cemal Burak Tansel (ed.)

Book Review: <i>States of Discipline. Authoritarian Neoliberalism and the Contested Reproduction of Capitalist Order</i> by Cemal Burak Tansel (ed.)

Neoliberalizing Authoritarian Environmental Governance in (Post)Socialist Laos

The (post)socialist nation of Laos has pursued neoliberal economic reforms over the past decade that have facilitated the concession of state lands to foreign resource investors for mining, hydropower, and plantation projects. Five percent of the national territory has been ceded and tens of thousands of peasants have been displaced from their customary lands. In this article, I argue that the development of the resource sector has been facilitated by a political–economic regime of neoliberal authoritarianism. Resource extraction is driven by neoliberal economic policies that prize rapid gross domestic product growth, foreign resource investment, and wage-based rural development. This emerging neoliberalism, however, is matched with and dependent on state authoritarianism. The state seeks to assert control over rural lands throughout the country and often peasants are displaced from using these lands when heavy-handed state coercion and repression of peasant resistance are applied. This is particularly apparent in the establishment of industrial tree plantation territories in southern Laos. Efforts by civil society organizations to highlight these injustices and protect rural land rights are often silenced by the state. Fissures in the neoliberalization of authoritarian development are being exposed, however, due to new forms of resistance among the peasantry that threaten its future viability. Key Words: authoritarianism, Laos, neoliberalism, postsocialism, resource extraction.

A Gathering Storm

A Gathering Storm

Introduction to special issue on ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’

This article introduces readers to the special issue on ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’. It charts the origins of the concept and summarizes the central arguments of the individual contributions to the special issue.

Neoliberalism, crisis and authoritarian–ethnicist reaction: The ascendancy of the Orbán regime

This paper analyses the seemingly contradictory fusion between authoritarianism and neoliberalism in Hungary under the Orbán regime. Since coming into power in 2010 on a popular backlash against austerity, the hard-right Fidesz–KDNP government, led by Viktor Orbán, has carried out a root-and-branch transformation of Hungarian society. While officially proposing a break with neoliberalism at home and abroad, the paper argues that the Orbán regime has rather deepened it, producing a specific variety of ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’, which skilfully combines some of the central tenets of neoliberalism (maintenance of a balanced budget, introduction of a flat tax system and the pursuit of regressive social policies) with ‘ethnicist–populist’ measures that seek to co-opt, coerce or manufacture consensus among subaltern groups in society against alleged ‘enemies’ of the Hungarian nation. While Orbán’s ‘illiberal’ politics have been strongly criticized by neoliberal institutions, such as the IMF and the EU, they have taken little concrete action against the Hungarian government. We argue that the reason for this is pragmatic: the Orbán regime has not only been a model for neoliberal austerity in Europe since the 2008 crisis, but also its authoritarian and xenophobic policies are not that different from other EU states.

Authoritarian Neoliberalism: Its Ideological Antecedents and Policy Manifestations from Carl Schmitt’s Political Economy of Governance

The regime of authoritarian neoliberalism is underway. In contemporary political economy of governance, this regime has been construed as a crisis response of the capitalist class to manage the conflict-ridden consequences of economic globalization; and, as an ideological project of a section of the ruling elites to justify the embedding of market-oriented development processes in a politically repressive government institution. To contribute to recent scholarship attempts at defining the character and tendencies of this emergent regime, the article traces one of its key ideological antecedents from Carl Schmitt’s earlier formulation for a “strong state, free economy”. It then presents a survey of how this concept articulating the compatibility of authoritarianism and capitalism has manifested in related theories and actual policies since the long twentieth century – notably in: German ordoliberalism, Thatcherism and Reaganomics, the Kirkpatrick Doctrine and Political Development Theory, the Asian Values discourse, and the Effective State and Good Governance agendas. The governing authority in this regime can be called an authoritarian-neoliberal state.

‘Authoritarian neoliberalism’ and the Australian border-industrial complex

What functions do the securitization and the militarization of the border serve under ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ in Australia? Having pursued the policy of mandatory detention of all undocumented migrants since 1992, the Australian government has also increasingly sought to outsource, privatize, and offshore the construction and operation of its immigration detention facilities, whilst simultaneously engaging in increasingly authoritarian interventions via the militarization of border control. This article seeks to problematize these developments by constructing an emergent cartography of the various links between the ongoing processes of neoliberal structural adjustment, and the intensification of the policing and punitive apparatuses of the Australian border-industrial complex. Accordingly, using theoretical insights gleaned from emergent work on ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ and from race critical theory as a cue, I outline in this article three functions of the border within punitive approaches to immigration control under neoliberal structural adjustment in Australia: first, as an apparatus of ongoing colonial power; second, as a technology of racial differentiation through its functioning as a ‘filter’ that privileges certain migrant bodies over others, and as an ‘insulator’ against popular dissent; third, as a site of profit and accumulation for transnational capital.

Governing neoliberal authoritarian citizenship: theorizing hukou and the changing mobility regime in China

ABSTRACTDrawing on insights from critical citizenship studies and governmentality studies, this article explores and theorizes the changing mobility regime in China and its centerpiece, the household registration (hukou) system, from a global comparative perspective. First, we conceptualize the hukou system within the broader problematique of the spatiality of social citizenship and show how it enables processes of boundary-making that are comparable to the policing of the migrant poor in pre-welfare-state Europe and the subordination of international migrant labor in the contemporary world. Second, we argue that the shifting mobility regime envisaged by the current hukou reforms and new urbanization, which moves away from the dualistic structure of inclusion/exclusion to a multiplication of legal statuses and boundaries of citizenship, embodies a neoliberal-authoritarian rationality of government. Engaging with the debate on the hybrid governmentalities of post-socialist China, we focus particularly on new techniques of mobility management in China’s first-tier cities, whose national positioning resembles that of Northern countries in the global hierarchy of power. Through examples of the point-based system and the strategy of functional dispersal, we demonstrate how these globalizing cities actively engineer a highly polarized mobility regime in their pursuit of generating globally competitive spaces. The article contributes to the critique of methodological nationalism by denaturalizing national citizenship as a pre-given point of departure in examining mobility and socio-spatial boundaries. It also offers new insights into the converging trends of neoliberal authoritarianism and authoritarian neoliberalism in governing the ‘glocal’ hierarchies of citizenship and mobility.

State Power, the Politics of Debt and Confronting Neoliberal Authoritarianism

As an intellectual, economic, political and legal project, neoliberalism is not directed towards the rolling back of the state as an aim in itself. While its deregulatory tendencies, its commodification of public services and the undermining of systems of social welfare superficially suggest a generalised reduction in state power, it has been clear from the early 1980s that one of neoliberalism’s primary concerns has been the authoritarian reshaping of state power to engineer particular social outcomes, whether in criminal justice, the disciplining of organised labour, the militarisation of national territory and migration, or the extension and deepening of regimes of austerity. This article introduces the recent work of Maurizio Lazzarato, who has argued that the asymmetrical creditor-debtor relationship is now the archetype of contemporary, neoliberal social relations. Ultimately, Lazzarato’s perspective tends to exaggerate the totalising powers of finance capital and leads him to endorse a form of political voluntarism, which fails to address the role of the neoliberal state as a site for forms of authoritarianism which are not solely generated by the debt relation. As a response, it will be suggested that aspects of Nicos Poulantzas’s concept of ‘authoritarian statism’ can be used to both strengthen our understanding of the authoritarian characteristics of the neoliberal state, and to imagine possibilities for resisting its expressions of power.

Monetary integration in the Eurozone and the rise of transnational authoritarian statism

The negotiations over the Eurozone crisis have increasingly come to reflect Poulantzas’ idea of ‘authoritarian statism’, i.e., a decline in the relevance of democratic institutions and a shift in political power towards technical state apparatuses. Yet, scholarly approaches to transnational integration have provided little guidance as to why monetary relations have become such a pronounced point of condensation for the contradictions inherent in European integration. While mainstream theories of monetary unions such as optimal currency area theory neglect the impact of state power and class interests on monetary politics, more critical perspectives on transnational integration have paid insufficient attention to monetary governance and its role in the mediation of international relations. The present paper brings heterodox theories of international relations and monetary integration to bear on the increasingly authoritarian dynamics of Eurozone governance. Reflecting on Bruff’s discussion of authoritarian neoliberalism, we proceed to examine how the circumvention of democratic institutions via Eurozone monetary governance is more precisely captured through the notion of transnational authoritarian statism. We develop this concept in relation to two historical periods of European integration: the formation of the Economic and Monetary Union and the recent extension of the European Central Bank’s scope of monetary governance.

Is Europe Cascading into Fascism? Addressing Key Concepts including Gender and Violence

Is Europe cascading into fascism? The answer to this question matters for understanding the opposition to gender equality projects in Europe. The article addresses some of the key concepts needed to answer this question. Is ‘fascism’ or ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ or just ‘neoliberalism’ the most appropriate concept to capture the turn to the right? The article compares the extent to which these concepts encompass ‘violence’ and ‘gender’. ‘Fascism’ is an important benchmark from European history, but Europe has not yet reached its levels of violence. The qualifier ‘authoritarian’ is not needed for ‘neoliberalism’ since it generates a trajectory towards violence. Some conceptual work is required in order to develop ‘neoliberalism’ to encompass ‘gender’ and ‘violence’, but there are bodies of work that support such a development. Including gender in analyses of the macro level changes occurring in Europe requires the concept of ‘varieties of gender regime’, which enables the conceptualisation of neoliberalism as gendered.

Interrogating ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’: The problem of periodization

From the legislated ‘embedding’ of neoliberalism as seen with constitutional debt ceilings, through sweeping free trade agreements, to the direct, violent suppression of political freedoms; democracy today seems to be under siege from all sides. In response to these troubling developments, Ian Bruff (2014) recently introduced the concept of ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ to understand increasingly undemocratic forms of state and state action in the current conjuncture. This article argues that although ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ presents a useful development in our understanding of these processes, the concept faces several challenges – in particular, that of obscuring a broader history of authoritarianism and its contradictions, by separating neoliberalism into distinct phases. This article considers two moments of authoritarianism within the history of neoliberalism: the United Kingdom under Margaret Thatcher, and the Greek experience of mandated austerity within the strictures of the European Monetary Union (EMU). Through these examples, the article will engage with claims that the ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ of the post-2007 context is somehow ‘qualitatively distinct’ from earlier forms. It is argued that an enforced separation between these two cases is unhelpful, and that more fruitful directions for this emerging research agenda lie not in a conceptual separation of the past, but rather a consideration of the durability of authoritarian state forms.