Neoliberal State Research Articles

The State of Uberisation: Neoliberalism, Smart Urbanism, and the Regulated Deregulation of Toronto's Taxi‐cum‐Ridehail Market

AbstractIn 2016, the City of Toronto legalised the ridehail giant Uber under a particularly Uber‐friendly regulatory regime. Rather than understanding this interim outcome along the lines of now widespread narratives of corporate “disruption”, in this article I take up Manuel B. Aalbers’ notion of “regulated deregulation” in order to foreground the state's role as a manically prolific facilitator of early Uberisation. Based on ethnographic research in Toronto, I argue that the three longer‐standing state spatial strategies of (1) the common‐sense neoliberal state, (2) the labour‐averse competition state, and (3) the tech‐infatuated smart state were paramount in creating those “on‐the‐ground” conditions—social, legal, spatial, and other—on which Uber has been able to thrive in many cities across the North American continent.

Captive maternals and democracy as Hegelian Sittlichkeit: the case of the undocumented, incarcerated, and racialized in the United States and India

ABSTRACT This paper attempts to theorise the labour and corporeal carcerability of the non-citizen non-subjects in contemporary democracies of the United States and India. I reappropriate Joy James’ framework of ‘Captive Maternals’ to understand the relationality between the undocumented, racialised, or incarcerated with the neo-liberal states that they inhabit and serve but where they do not belong. James describes Captive Maternals as those bodies subject to consumption by the democratic order in the tradition of slavery. I expand upon her framework to argue that the dehumanisation of illegal ‘aliens’ and racially policed bodies not only challenges the notion of freedom in the modern democratic social organisation but rather manifests the fundamental correlation between democratic sovereignty and its exclusionary violence. This phenomenon internal to the workings of democracies challenges Hegel’s idealisation of the modern rational state as the most advanced form of government characterised primarily by freedom. Democracy also constitutes the exercise of necropolitical sovereignty which I interpret not as the right to kill but as the right to police and incarcerate. Against the Hegelian struggle for recognition (Anerkennung), I deliberate on the possibility of transcending to a less than fully-determined Sittlichkeit that does not rely upon reciprocal recognition.

Carceral connections: The role of policing in the management of public housing in New York City

Between 2006 and 2022, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) attempted to address the fiscal and infrastructural crises in public housing through a number of controversial privatisation strategies. This contested push occurred alongside the pervasive role of policing in public housing. The New York City Police Department utilises several policing strategies specific to NYCHA communities, collaborating with the housing authority in the management of public housing residents. This article draws on qualitative content analysis of local policing strategies and public housing policy reforms in New York City to investigate how the state facilitates the displacement of disproportionately poor, non-white, public housing tenants while simultaneously sponsoring privatised redevelopment in their communities in ways that mirror gentrification processes usually studied in private housing. I focus on the content of and linkages between public housing-specific policing strategies and privatising public housing redevelopment plans. By examining police as collaborators within public housing policy, I uncover the entanglement of law enforcement in urban development, as well as the underlying roles and relationships between the state, capital and police in contemporary urban development and gentrification. The findings illuminate the processes of carceral urbanism, where the logics of the carceral state emerge as priorities throughout the urban governance of the contemporary neoliberal state in general, and public housing policy reform in particular.

Ask forgiveness, not permission: Busking, community and contempt

Who would choose to be a busker and why? How are buskers positioned by, and in relation to, state, commercial and social formations that configure public spaces and public selves? I approach busking through the concept of micropolitics, developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, which argues that life and politics are immanent: inseparable from and coextensive with one another. I take Zygmunt Bauman’s pessimistic vision of ‘liquid modernity’ – a chimeric analysis that maps the coercive and alienating conditions of postmodernism and neo-liberalism – as a fitting backdrop for highlighting the significance of street music. To facilitate this discussion, I draw on memories of my background as a busker, documentary sources and autoethnographic fieldwork conducted in ten locations across regional New South Wales (Australia) between June and August 2022. I adopt a storytelling approach, foregrounding the experience of busking for the busker, and combine this with documentary analysis of regulatory frameworks and quantitative analysis of my busking sessions and earnings in different locations. In contrast to recent studies that applaud the efficacy of regulations, and that represent buskers as rational agents pursuing commercial and artistic interests, I argue that busking, as a way of life, makes little sense except as micropolitical resistance to the alienating conditions of liquid modernity. Moreover, expressions of state, economic and social power frequently manifest contempt for buskers and busking, sometimes to the point of precluding buskers from effectively conducting their livelihoods within the scope of the law. I draw on Macalester Bell’s theorization of contempt as an indispensable ethical position that manifests disregard for its object, to consider the ways in which busking appeals to the humanity of state, commercial and social agents. ‘Ask forgiveness, not permission’ is an idiom of conventional wisdom for buskers, signalling, on the one hand, an internalization of the contempt they are accustomed to receiving from those in a position to facilitate ‘permission’ and, on the other, the ideal that, if things go well, they might inspire human agents to condemn the regulatory pedantry that would proscribe their livelihoods.

Busking in the neo-liberal city: A critical inventory of a selection of street art ordinances in Austria

The conditions under which buskers pursue their art have never been easy, but their situation has become even more complicated recently, as public spaces worldwide have been transformed under rampant neo-liberal conditions. Street music today often takes place against the backdrop of globally oriented urban planning, which is frequently shaped by neo-liberal considerations that ascribe specific qualities and functions to public outdoor places and spaces. By subjecting these spaces, which remain central for street music activities even in the digital age, to increasing official control and regulation, street musicians are often exposed to a regulatory frenzy – enacted by local politics and executed by local authorities – that makes it difficult or even impossible for many of them to perform in public in a manner of their choosing. Moreover, under such conditions the creative potential of street music is not allowed to unfold in its breadth and heterogeneity, but only in a limited manner. An analysis of the street art ordinances of the cities of Vienna, Salzburg and Innsbruck exemplifies the status quo in Austria in this regard and demonstrates how different the political strategies for dealing with street music are in this self-proclaimed country of music. Rather than being seen as a nuisance to be controlled, it is argued that a rich and diverse street music landscape has a significant democratic potential, which would flourish under a more sensitive approach to public spaces on the part of politics and city planning.

More debtfare than healthcare: business as usual in the Multilateral Development Banks’ COVID-19 response in India

Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) have been a vital source of funds for the global South in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in the healthcare sector. Prior to the pandemic, the big MDBs’ approach to healthcare reflected the post-Washington Consensus, that is a largely neoliberal agenda perpetuating the expansion of private healthcare markets through financialization mechanisms, though with some emphasis on a minimal level of universal healthcare. We studied the MDBs’ approaches to healthcare in India to evaluate whether the pandemic resulted in: (a) a re-evaluation of their healthcare models to ensure they were fit for a pandemic; (b) a business-as-usual approach; or (c) a disaster capitalism response exploiting the current socio-economic milieu to further neoliberalization processes. We found that the MDBs adopted an inadequate business-as-usual approach that is intensifying the financialization of healthcare in projects using interventions at the micro through to the macro level. This path dependent approach emphasizing multi-scalar financialization has long-term implications for human well-being. Further, we contend that MDB lending is deepening ‘debtfare’ through its healthcare and other support, a term Susanne Soederberg (2014, p. 3) conceived to describe the way neoliberal states ‘mediate, normalise and discipline the monetised relations that inhabit the poverty industry.’

EXPLAINING THE RISE OF ALTERNATIVE FÜR DEUTSCHLAND (AFD) IN GERMANY WITH FAILED PROMISES OF UNIFICATION

The purpose of this paper is to explain the rise of a far-right political party, Alternative Für Deutschland (AfD), particularly in the eastern part of Germany, in relation to the failed promises of Unification in 1990. Despite the fact that a plethora of literature has primarily focused on the social consequences of immigration and populist rhetoric for the rise of the AfD in German politics since 2013, the paper critically questions why the AfD has a particularly stronghold in Germany's Neuen Länder (New States). The paper suggests, based on a political economy analysis that incorporates Durkheim's theory of anomie, that the gradual withdrawal of early euphoria in German Unification and its transformation into economic grievance and political distrust under neoliberalism has created anomic tensions in society, a condition that far-right politics can exploit. In other words, while German unification created euphoric expectations for the future, these expectations were not met under neoliberal conditions. It is, therefore, concluded that the persistence of unequal economic power between East and West Germany, as well as political underrepresentation of Eastern Germans, has exacerbated anomic tensions. As a result, the rise of the AfD is not a pathological issue, but rather can be explained in terms of unmet social demands among Germans.

Social Entrepreneurship in Times of Precarity and the Neoliberal State: The Catalan Case Under Anthropological Scrutiny

As in many other developed countries, social entrepreneurship in Catalonia (Spain) is booming. It represents an alternative, revolutionary way of doing business that intends to make economic and social aims compatible – thus, profit is not the only goal. As such, it is a desirable and advantageous option for (neoliberal) states, since it targets and solves both social and environmental problems and contributes to job creation and tax revenues, while at the same time enriching and diversifying the local economic fabric. During the last two financial crises (2008 and post-pandemic), this line of business has attracted an increasing number of post-materialist entrepreneurs in Catalonia, i.e., those whose objectives, beyond earning an income, focus on self-realization, social transformation, and ecological impact reduction. These initiatives have proved to be initially resilient to the economic crisis. Over time, however, many social enterprises are being pushed by the logic of the market and forced to reconvert themselves into commercial companies to survive, so that social or environmental objectives take a back seat. Based on far-reaching empirical research, this paper describes the emergence of this form of entrepreneurship and its principal traits, raising some critical issues.

Neoliberal State and the Rise of Environmental Institutionality in Chile

Objective: This paper analyzes the emergence of Chilean environmental institutions (1994) within the framework of the neoliberal model established in the civic-military dictatorship (1973-1989). Although said environmental institutionality arises in "democracy", its legal bases must be sustained on a series of legal norms that shaped the neoliberal state founded on dictatorship. Theoretical framework: The Governmentality Approach affirms that there is a complex network of power relations, supported by political economy as primordial knowledge, which allows this power to be exercised to guide the behavior of the population, through different mechanisms and concrete and practical devices. Method: Through a discourse analysis of a legal and political documentary corpus, it is evident that the bases of the neoliberal state operate as a condition of possibility for the establishment of an environmental institutionalism that through its discursive practices operates as an adequate device for the principles of the neoliberal model. Results and conclusions: It is concluded that, in the environmental institutions created in the 1990s, a series of discursive objects, created previously, are reformulated, which encourage the neoliberal treatment of the environmental issue, specifically through new legal tools such as LGBMA. (19,300) and the environmental evaluation regulation (1997). Research implications: Identifies the limitations and contradictions of the State's environmental management; within the framework of a neoliberal political economic model like the Chilean one. Originality/value: Contributes to the use of discursive historical analysis methodologies through specific fields such as the environment, through archival material that allows us to understand the specific practices of the State from the perspective of a history of the present of neoliberal governmentality.

What kind of innovation state matters for social justice? Learning from Poulantzas and going beyond

In the twenty-first century, the notion of the state and its role in innovation and development have become dominant topics of theoretical and empirical inquiry. Although contemporary innovation theorists clearly unpack the myth of market fundamentalism in industrial policy and practice of neo-liberal states, they do not seem to explain precisely how come such states have been justified to play extensive roles in the economy. This paper provides a theoretical explanation by drawing lessons from Poulantzas’ approach to the state and going beyond it to consider alternatives. Accordingly, it conceives the innovation state as a result of the social division of labour and as a condensation of conflicting social relations which have their own materiality. The paper argues that whatever form the innovation state has taken in the western world since the industrial revolution, this has remained predominantly capitalist. Thus, it reproduces the social division of labour that is exploitative and unjust, delivering most benefits of innovation to dominant classes and excluding the very poor and the marginalised. The kind of innovation state that matters for social justice is a non-capitalist one, promoting pluralism of societies of equals through innovation.

Off-the-Cuff Law-Making: Policing Pandemic Dispossession in Spain

This article presents a discussion concerning the role of police rationale(s) in Spain within the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, where exceptionalist strategies aimed at curtailing the spread of the virus came to dramatically strengthen existing social divisions. In line with some authors who have already approached this phenomenon from different disciplines, our premise is that most serious emergencies boosted by Covid-19 were not a mere matter of public health, but rather a particularly harmful expression of accumulation by dispossession. Thus, rather than a flaw in the system produced by an exceptional friction between public security and public health, securitarian performances deployed by neoliberal states can be read as symbiotic strategies, from both law and order and business as usual approaches, to manage the social “externalities” of capitalist predatory strategies. As we will argue, phenomena such as the reinforcement of the policing consensus, police production of law, or the authoritarian turn favored by the Covid-19 health crisis must all be analyzed in this context.

Becoming-Mineral: Desert Timescapes and Post-Neoliberal Geontopower in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega

Abstract In the age of the Anthropocene, capitalism’s expansion and damage to the planet can ultimately be seen as “becoming extinction” (McBrien). This essay discusses post-neoliberal structurations of space, time, and consciousness by examining the “desert timescapes” featured in Don DeLillo’s philosophical novel, Point Omega (2010). The desert, placed at the novel’s heart, is analyzed as a prominent religious, aesthetic, and philosophical topos of the crisis of human subjectivity. Furthermore, the investigation of the conceptions in the novel of the “Omega Point” (as the ultimate point of consciousness toward which the universe is heading) reveals an interplay of transcendence and immanence about matter and human evolution and offers a geological perspective of “becoming-mineral.” Finally, this paper claims that the “desert timescapes” polychronic perspective challenges anthropocentrism and the ontopolitics of the neoliberal state, and paves the way for reflection on “geontopower” (Povinelli), Life and NonLife in a geophilosophical mode of planetary thinking. (PK)

The contested status of theory/theorizing and humanism/posthumanism in Olga Petrovskaya's Nursing theory, postmodernism, poststructualism, and Foucault.

The contested status of theory/theorizing and humanism/posthumanism in Olga Petrovskaya's Nursing theory, postmodernism, poststructualism, and Foucault.

Activating Citizenship through NGO-Led Litigation: Shaping the Neoliberal State to Eradicate Manual Scavenging in India

Abstract Sanitation work in India is largely carried out by the historically marginalized Dalits, formerly known as untouchables, without proper devices or safety gear, as so-called ‘manual scavenging’. To counter manual scavenging, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have turned to courts and litigation as a form of resistance. This brought about some successes: manual scavenging was repeatedly outlawed, and several high-profile court cases have ordered local governments to take very explicit steps to eradicate it. However, manual scavenging persists rampantly, leading several authors to argue that litigation has failed in its purpose. We critically evaluate this claim by examining the underlying root question: what purpose do NGOs ascribe to litigation in their efforts to eradicate manual scavenging in the first place? Our analysis is based on a multi-method, qualitative research approach combining analysis of documents of, and interviews with, a total of 23 NGOs. Using the lens of active citizenship, we conclude that NGOs seek to shift responsibility to the government, of which it has absolved itself under neoliberalism, remind the government of its duty to serve its citizens, and overall participate politically. Specific features of courts, such as mandamus and a mediation-oriented approach, were mentioned as uniquely enabling petitioners to exercise active citizenship and force government officials to at least consider manual scavengers’ interests.

Neoliberal Penal Policy and Prison Privatization

The paper analyzes the relationship between neoliberal penalty transformation and prison privatization as part of neoliberal market reform. The neoliberal political and economic project characterized by deregulation, individualization, privatization, and commodification has introduced competition, entrepreneurship, and economic efficiency in areas that previously belonged exclusively to the public sector. The alleged need for greater efficiency has led to an increase in private prisons, and the results of this transformation have shown that it is more about achieving economic efficiency at the expense of quality, competencies, and outcomes of services provided in this sector. In this paper, the starting assumption is that the increase in the number of private prisons does not imply the withdrawal of the state concerning the market. In contrast, it raises the question of the regulatory role of the neoliberal state that enables the market of new fields for profit. As a consequence of the tightening of penal policy, mass incarceration is a mechanism for resolving social conflicts caused by the transformation of social policy. Therefore, private prisons are aimed at making a profit by reflecting the spread of neoliberal rationality throughout society. Withdrawal of assistance and support from the social sector and transfer of exclusive responsibility from the social to the individual responsibility of prisoners as rational neoliberal subjects lead to a reduction of rehabilitation goals. In the context of prison privatization, this transformation leads to turning prisoners into a means of earning or cheap labor.

Utopia as Akairological Rupture

ABSTRACT This article argues for a reconceptualization of utopia as akairological rupture. Its central thesis disputes the conventional reading of utopia as a teleological goal to be realized by a social collective. Thus rather than viewing the potentiality of utopia as a prescribed ideal commonwealth whose inhabitants live in harmony, I argue that it should be seen as an akairological rupture, manifested through a determinately negative, individual, approach. In this reading, utopia is primarily a social condition within culture, and perennially opposed to any ideal telos. This temporal and qualitative reconceptualization of utopia as disruptive is anathema to the positive reading that sees it as feasible through social reform and rational discourse. This reconceptualization argues for the importance of developing a reading of utopia that can transcend any reified, fixed conception that seeks to domesticate it in the service of a contingent political aspiration, however noble and humanitarian it may appear to be. Herein lies its critical potentiality under neoliberal conditions.

Chakachua Pharmaceuticals and Fugitive Science.

Chakachua Pharmaceuticals and Fugitive Science.

Neoliberal state and criminal activities in Nigeria

ABSTRACT This paper argues that the failure of neoliberal economic policies in Nigeria leads to increasing spate of criminal activities in the country. It explains how such neoliberal economic policies like privatisation, removal of state subsidies and deregulation cripple pre-existing substructure of the Nigerian economy; thereby increasing criminal activities everywhere in Nigeria. While criminal activities are closely associated with neoliberal states, privatisation and deregulation have facilitated the creation of huge unemployed labour by crippling existing industries and local ingenuity which explains the level of economic marginalisation and the stagnant pool characterised by abject poverty in Nigeria. While the state and its allies struggle to maintain their unpopular economic policies by all means, the victims and the unemployed find expression in criminal activities. The study uses mixed methods of data collection and analysis made up of descriptive statistics and content analysis.

Curating Video-on-Demand: Silences and Interruptions by a Neo-Liberal State

The platform phenomenon could be apprehended as an evolutionary process, one that re-institutionalises legacy market systems. This article delves into one such site of media platformisation in India that of the Video-on-Demand (VoD) market. I demonstrate this market being curated by “digital dislocations” in the legacy video business, but equally to involve and impart “digital dependencies” of various sorts in the online media economy. Rather than viewing these twin dynamics as organic developments, I explain their particular renditions in India stemming from the state’s regulatory composition of the VoD business. Here, I view regulation more broadly in terms of the silences, refractions, and interruptions of the state in the digital economy, or in short, its “digital orchestration.” While regulatory omissions testify to the VoD market being grounded in laissez-faire, the interruptions fortify the state’s own ideological and mercantile interests in and through the VoD business.

From food access to food sovereignty: Striving to meet university student needs

The ongoing neoliberalization of higher education has meant that college and university students at state institutions face declining state support for their education, increasing debt, precarious post-graduation job opportunities, and a dominant cul­tural emphasis on personal responsibility rather than collective care. These neoliberal conditions exacerbate structural inequities (along various axes, including race, economic status, disability, etc.) within student populations. This paper explores two aspects of inequity in food insecurity among students: specific challenges and inequities students face by virtue of their position as college students, and intersectional inequities faced by some stu­dents by virtue of other identities to which they belong. This paper presents findings from two research efforts at Western Washington University, a public university in the USA Pacific Northwest. First, we share findings from a 2018 qualitative, interview-based study of food-insecure students on the campus. We then draw from our experiences as practitioners and present critical reflections on our own campus food security efforts, differentiating between those that address food security (access), food justice, and food sovereignty. Our findings from the qualitative study suggest that students feel a sense of personal responsibility for their food insecurity, and that food-insecure students both rely on social networks for support and feel stigma­tized by their food insecurity. Our critical reflec­tions on campus programs reveal that most of the traditional food security efforts (e.g. emergency aid, food pantries) neglect to either effectively support BIPOC students and others most affected by food insecurity, or provide a sustained community-support mechanism for food-insecure students in general. We position food sovereignty-oriented programs as a way forward in addressing the inter­sectional inequities faced by students, and also in bolstering communities of support.