Neoliberal State Research Articles

Dorian Unmaking Space: Policy, Place and Dislocation

Within an autoethnographic approach, this paper employs concepts such as spatial and climate (in)justice and structural and slow violence to explore disaster capitalism that results from a neoliberal state and its desire to dispose of people it deems as being less worthy. Focusing on the impacts of Hurricane Dorian on Abaco and the fallout, this work builds on other disasters in the region and attempts to draw parallels between the Bahamian government’s response to Hurricane Dorian and the similarity this response shares with other regional reactions to natural disasters.

The “Pull Factor” Problematization in the Emergence of Everyday Bordering in the UK Welfare State

The “everyday bordering” concept has provided key insights into the effects of diverse bordering practices upon social life, placing the bordering of the welfare state among wider state interventions in an autochthonous politics of belonging. Sociological contributions have also introduced new explanations as to why states pursue such measures, positing that neoliberal states seek legitimacy through increasing activities to (re)affirm borders within this politics of belonging, compensating for a failure to govern the economy in the interests of citizens. To what extent is this visible in the state-led emergence of (everyday) borders around welfare in the United Kingdom, often cited as a key national case? This article draws from 20 elite interviews to contribute to genealogical accounts of the emergence of everyday bordering through identifying the developing “problematizations” connected to this kind of bordering activity, as the British state began to distinctly involve welfare-state actors in bordering policies in the 1990s and early 2000s. This evidence underlines how these policies were tied to a “pull factor” problematization of control failure, where the state needed to reduce various “pull factors” purportedly attracting unwanted migrants in order to control immigration per se, with little evidence that legitimacy issues tied to perceived declining economic governability informed these developments in this period. These findings can inform future genealogical analyses that trace the emergence of everyday bordering.

Beyond the Hegemony of Neoliberal Ideas: Ideational Diversity and Policy Variegation in the Neoliberal State

Sociologists commonly adopt a bifurcated understanding of the neoliberal state, showing how neoliberalism’s advance coincides with the growing authority of specific actors and ideas inside the bureaucratic state as others’ authority declines. This article complicates this view by probing the dynamics of non-neoliberal action inside the state, demonstrating the ways even demoted state actors can strategically muster power resources to forward distinct policy agendas. Taking a long-term perspective on social policy developments since the early 2000s, this article reviews the case of Israel, where neoliberal policies' new hegemony and adverse outcomes triggered counter-actions inside the state, ultimately leading to policy change. Paying particular attention to the role of ideas, this article argues that by rearticulating their policy mission to align with market conventions, non-neoliberal actors were able to persuade neoliberal actors to support their policy proposals, succeeding to advance creative policy alternatives under hostile political conditions. Highlighting this strategic capacity and ideational resilience and acumen in adapting to neoliberal critique reveals how demoted state actors can manage to sustain entrenched organizational goals and institutional motivations even as they help ease the adaptation of their historical mission to the neoliberal zeitgeist.

“Fests of Vests”: The Politics of Participation in Neoliberal Peacebuilding in Colombia

AbstractThe Colombian Peace Agreement signed in 2016 was saluted internationally by scholars, policy makers and practitioners for encompassing the concept of territorial peace as a means of ensuring local participation in the strengthening of state institutions. Based on engaged research conducted in the Department of Cauca and Bogotá between 2017 and 2020, we critically analyse territorial peace, exploring its ideation, implementation, and subsequent decline in favour of security and stabilisation. We argue that the government’s peacebuilding rationale and mechanisms sought to reinforce the neoliberal state through a constrained participation model, which marginalised the progressive struggles of local communities living in former conflict affected areas. Without a radical breakdown of pre‐existing power structures of exploitation and domination, community participation in peacebuilding runs the risk of legitimising state‐led initiatives that ensure the political rule of capital, strengthen the bureaucracies of the centralised state, and create new violent disputes without resolving existing ones.

Can economic development policy trigger gentrification? Assessing and anatomising the mechanisms of state-led gentrification

This paper aims to bridge universality – as gentrification stands as a global threat to vulnerable communities – and local circumstances and geographies, by investigating structural factors, such as deindustrialisation and land rent gaps, as well as local political economies and socio-spatial structures, which are all common in the Global South. We conducted research in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, to investigate whether a neoliberal economic development policy acted as a trigger for gentrification, relying on mixed methods research to analyse evidence of economic restructuring, land rent creation, changes in resident profiles and major urban development trends in the region. Findings indicate evidence of economic restructuring and that the policy triggered higher land values. However, we did not observe evidence of gentrification in the area and attribute this to a still-relevant manufacturing sector, the extensive presence of large informal settlements, the growing numbers of suburban gated communities, the low proportion of renters, and the fact that local elites are moving southwards while the policy took place in the northern peripheries of the metropolis. Federal policies such as minimum wage increases and housing programs partially contradicted neoliberal state policies. This case study offers a lens to investigate gentrification in different latitudes and illustrates how social policies may prevent gentrification processes.

Foucault against the Foucauldians? On the problem of the neoliberal state

The survival of neoliberal forms of governance after their apparent repudiation during the Global Financial Crisis is a problem that continues to generate significant scholarly controversy. One of the most influential accounts of the survival of neoliberalism in the crisis draws on Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics to claim that states intervening to support financial markets during the crisis was simply the neoliberal system working as expected. Returning to Foucault’s original text, I argue this account constitutes a systematic misreading because it treats Foucault as having developed an instrumentalist theory of the neoliberal state, a possibility Foucault explicitly rejected. I suggest that the reasons that led Foucault to reject an instrumentalist theory of the state remain just as relevant today, and accordingly argue for a return to Foucault’s methodological decision to treat neoliberalism not as a theory of state but as a discourse which constructs a novel bio-political governmentality.

Democratic citizenship, critical literacy and educational policy in England: a conceptual paradox?

ABSTRACT This article identifies a conceptual paradox between recent educational policy in England and a social-democratic understanding of critical literacy. Recent political events including Brexit, the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, and the Coronavirus Pandemic reiterate the need for pedagogies that equip students to critique information circulated online. After setting out critical literacy’s genealogy as a democratic educational model, the authors situate these theoretical approaches within the context of English secondary education reform. The article then draws on teacher agency research to consider the practical barriers to implementing a critical literacy pedagogy capable of navigating the present political landscape. Addressing gaps within literary education and digital media research, the overall argument is that educational policy in England since 2010 has served the priorities of a neoliberal state system. In this context, enacting the democratic, social-justice orientated critical literacy demanded by the challenges of communicating in the twenty-first-century is both daunting and urgent.

The ‘feminisation’ of psychiatric discourse: A Marxist analysis of women’s roles in neoliberal society

In analysing the increasing rates of female ‘mental illness’ in neoliberal society, this article draws on Marxist and feminist theory to conceptualise psychiatry as an institution of patriarchal and capitalist power, responsible for reinforcing traditional gender roles. Through outlining the changing circumstances of women, including the recent ‘feminisation’ of the labour force, we argue that there has been a more acute need for patriarchal capitalism to curtail the emancipatory potential of women through the heightened enforcement of sex-role ideology. This is demonstrated through a profile of ‘feminised’ mental disorders which have appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( DSM) since 1980 – including premenstrual dysphoric disorder and female sexual interest/arousal disorder – which we argue purposely reproduce a discourse which restricts women’s advancements in paid employment while reinforcing the cliché of ‘respectable femininity’ as still primarily associated with the family and the home. We conclude the article by suggesting that, under the conditions of neoliberalism, the mental health system is becoming an increasingly powerful institution for the social control of gender.

Neoliberalism, the Alt-Right and the Intellectual Dark Web

Drawing on research from digital media studies, political theory and rhetoric, this article explores online radical conservative and reactionary ‘ideological entrepreneurs’. It argues that online media are uniting an ‘ideological family’ around concepts of natural inequality and hostility to those who deny them. Placing this phenomenon in context, the article shows how online culture reinvigorates well-established discourses of opposition to bureaucrats, intellectuals and experts of all kinds, rejecting one version of the neoliberal state and of its personnel, a ‘new class’ understood to dominate through discursive, cultural power and imagined through the figures of the ‘Social Justice Warrior’ and the ‘Cultural Marxist’. In competing for a share of the marketplace of ideas, these ideological entrepreneurs promise insights – the revelations of the ‘red pill’ – critiquing ‘actually-existing’ neoliberalism yet insisting on the ‘rationality’ of governance through markets and promising adherents techniques for achieving success as liberated entrepreneurial selves.

Intimate Borders and the Sense of Never-Quite-Being: A Dystopic (Non-)Fiction

Today’s academy is a dystopia. Many scholars of color and international scholars face the daunting challenge of navigating neoliberal state institutions that are often built on legacies of racism, colonialism, and classism. This essay brings attention to the feelings of despair, anxiety, and paranoia felt by many scholars of color in the fields of humanities and social sciences, but whose narratives too often become ones of abrupt exit from the Ministry of Knowledge (and) Entrepreneurship (MKE). The essay relies on a discussion of Anzaldúa’s intimate terrorism, the composition of today’s academy, and the sense of never-quite-being. These themes emerge out of a dialogue with Anzaldúa, Deleuze, and Harney and Moten, who each have something to say about navigating institutions of power from a position of in-betweenness. Then, I assemble themes from contemporary popular dystopia films to develop a performative fiction—a narrative of never-quite-being that embodies the critical theory and dystopic themes woven through the experiences of a border-body in the academy. The essay ends with a discussion of what being intimate looks like for someone that never-quite-is, informed by Anzaldúa’s concept of mestizaje and Deleuze’s nomad thought.

Migration and the neoliberal state: accounting ethics in the Italian response to the refugee crisis

ABSTRACT This research adds to sparse accounting literature on immigration by problematizing the intertwined relationship between accounting and ethics in the neoliberal era. It explains ethical paradoxes inherent in the neoliberal project and how these unfold in the accounting practices deployed by the Italian state to handle the ongoing refugee crisis. Our analysis shows how the State’s proclaimed conviction to the human right cause turned out to be neoliberal in nature. On the one hand, the use of accounting was indeed partially dictated by the State’s mission of constructing the neoliberal citizen. On the other hand, accounting practices mainly prioritized efficiency over care and reflected the unwillingness of the State to enact responsibility for immigrants' human rights. We conclude that the use of accounting epitomizes complementary rather than opposing forms of neoliberalism and ultimately unveils the inability of the State to offer a humanitarian response to the immigration crisis.

Nuancing Holistic Simplicity in Sweden: A Statistical Exploration of Consumption, Age and Gender

Studies of sustainable ways of life have hitherto made limited use of register data since, e.g., voluntary simplicity is usually identified through characteristics that cannot be found in data registers. Despite this, claims about these trends have been made in many countries, at times generalising the phenomena both in academia and media, based on anecdotal examples. This article draws on a quantifiable definition of holistic simplicity that includes certain fully measurable aspects, such as living in more affluent suburbs, moving to less affluent places and a significant reduction in individual work income. Other aspects are partially observable in register data, such as housing and car consumption. The advantage of this study is that it combines relevant theories around voluntary simplicity with register data that capture important characteristics of the entire national population (in this case, in Sweden) and thus, to some extent, also captures the magnitude of the phenomena. The article aims to statistically explore different demographic groups’ probability of becoming holistic simplifiers in Sweden, regarding their consumption, gender and age. It discusses opportunities and limitations for advancing our knowledge on voluntary simplicity in Sweden, with current findings suggesting more of the same consumption patterns and only initial paths to degrowth. This is discussed in the context of individuals’ agency in a state such as Sweden, which is changing from collectivist social democratic values to more neo-liberal conditions.

'Public order is the first business of government': The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration and the making of a liberal counterinsurgent police-industrial complex

ABSTRACT Recent studies of post-1968 U.S. policing have situated the neoliberal carceral state and the concomitant rise of mass incarceration within a liberal capitulation to conservative law-and-order ‘militarization’. At the putative domestic center of this story, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), established in 1968 by Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson and greatly expanded under Republican Richard Nixon, has often served as a useful, if underacknowledged, subject of police and criminal justice buildup. Instead of viewing Johnson and his administration as misled or miscalculated actors, however, this essay recontextualizes the bipartisan consensus of LEAA through a particularly liberal counterinsurgency project that synthesized police-military hardware and community software. As the state’s go-to response to the political-economic and racial-colonial crises brought on by urban rebellions, LEAA’s brand of liberal counterinsurgency was instrumental in mobilizing a police-industrial complex through partnerships between police, military, academia, and industry. Drawing on archival research into police periodicals, agency publications, and project reports, I consider how a revived analysis of LEAA’s police-industrial complex can help abolitionist scholars and organizers rethink this origin moment of mass incarceration and police ‘militarization’ as representative of a conjunctural fix to the fundamental counterinsurgent project of U.S. policing and state power.

Digital feminist labour: the immaterial, aspirational and affective labour of feminist activists and fempreneurs

ABSTRACT Through interviews with over fifty feminist activists, this article explores and documents the intersections between gender, labour, and technology across a range of contemporary western digital feminist campaigns or initiatives such as SlutWalk, Hollaback!, Everyday Sexism, and feminist publications such as Feminist Times, Feminist Current, The Vagenda and The F-Word. In addition to outlining the ways digital feminist labour, carried out predominantly by women, is precarious, immaterial, aspirational, and affective, this article traces the ways enterprising feminists—or ‘fempreneurs’—have in turn harnessed digital technologies to creatively make money or earn a living from their activism. These activities range from developing writing, copyediting or design skills, engaging in various forms of craftivism, developing feminist training courses, to organising large-scale feminist events and festivals. The research thus demonstrates how feminists are adapting to neoliberal conditions to sustain themselves—and their activism—despite and in response to their precarious positions, while simultaneously raising questions about the sustainability and potentially the ethics of their labour.

Staking a claim: law, inequality and the city in South Africa

ABSTRACT The adoption of socio-economic rights in the post-apartheid constitution has given activists new tools to influence the development of economic policy. This article examines how – in the context of inequality and deprivation – urban communities, the residents of informal settlements, and civil society litigants have used these tools to reshape post-apartheid urban housing policy ‘from below’. It argues that this model of action provides a powerful example of popular work to combat widening inequality in the present conjuncture, operating to remake neoliberal state policy in a way that better responds to the experiences and needs of South Africa’s urban poor.

Introduction: Aspiration Burnout

Abstract This introduction to the special thematic cluster on burnout describes how the notion has informed cultures of contemporary work during the pandemic and the ways in which the concept of burnout reproduces the intertwined interests of labor and self-management under conditions of neoliberalism. The essay sketches a brief genealogy of the term, starting with the formulation of neurasthenia that preceded it and proceeding to its first citation within medical literature by Herbert J. Freudenberger and then to its philosophical uptake in the writing of Byung-Chul Han. In addressing burnout's relationship to recent art, criticism, and histories of media, the introduction stresses its unequal impacts across disparate populations relative to class, race, and gender.

Disrupting normalcy. Artistic interventions and political mobilisation against the neoliberal city (Santiago, Chile, 2019)

ABSTRACT This article explores the role of art interventions in mobilisations unleashed in Chile in October 2019, situating them in the urban fabric of one of the most segregated cities in the world: Santiago. Understood as an uprising against the precarity of life imposed by the neoliberal state, this social explosion devised creative and expressive strategies to disrupt the daily flow of ingrained normative structures, and questioned its longstanding legitimacy in shaping the city’s neoliberal layout. In this text, we first focus on the ways this spring of protest overflowed the genealogies that cross art, politics and public space on the local scene, opening up vanishing points between a certain tradition of politicisation of public art with solid roots in Latin American territory, on the one hand, and a more recent history of aestheticisation of urban protest that finds a crucial milestone in the playful resources of the student protests of 2011, on the other. From an interdisciplinary approach, we examine diverse art interventions that vindicated the urban space as a territory of public expression and political imagination to conceive a new constituent process. In this work, we sustain that these exercises reclaiming citizenship operated as ‘strategies of estrangement’, shedding light on how the neoliberal infrastructure of the city has naturalised inequality, social insecurity and segregation. By way of conclusion, we cross-examine the possibilities that aesthetic experience can offer for social and political resistance against neoliberal normalcy, and a common ground to explore alternative visions of futurity.

Islamophobia as Cultural Racism: The Case of Islamic Attire in Turkey

Grasping the various aspects of Islamophobia in Muslim societies requires much finer methods in order to decipher the intentions of the actors in distinctive life situations varying from the media to education. This article engages in a debate as to whether Islamophobia is a new type of racism, i.e., cultural, geographical, phenotypical, or Xeno-racism, and the relatively recent type that has emerged in neo-liberal states: anti-Muslim racism. In a Muslim-majority society, the ‘culture’ of members is fairly homogenous, so Islamophobia takes another cue, focusing on external markers, like the headscarf or beard. While anti-Muslim racism is sometimes exercised along more subtle lines of cultural difference in Muslim societies, it prevails through old-fashioned, phenotypical racism. The representation or rather misrepresentation of Islam and/or Muslims in the media can be understood as the prevailing source of antagonism between the secular and the traditionalist segments of Turkish society; indeed, Turkish media representation produces and reproduces a racialization of the majority, predominately by rendering Islam invisible, or by depicting Muslims in ways that denigrate their clothing, manners, style, and way of living across various mass media forms.

Crip Collectivity Beyond Neoliberalism in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower

The importance of Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower continues to crystalize, as Butler’s prescient imagining of urban California torn apart by neoliberal divestment comes to fruition. Following in the space opened up by Black feminist scholarship on Butler, the present essay examines her relevance beyond literary and cultural studies. I argue that Parable is a Black feminist crip theorization of political economy that diagnoses the disabling conditions of precarity under neoliberalism and also prescribes collectivity for crip and mad survival. Neoliberalism describes a global stage of advanced capitalism wherein governments are both incentivized and disciplined into enforcing economic policies that include privatization, deregulation, and market liberalization. As Jodi Melamed defines it, neoliberalism requires a certain kind of political governance, that puts the interests of business over the well-being of people (2011). Neoliberal governance engenders what I call “disabling contradictions,” yet the blame for conditions of precarity is deflected onto bodyminds themselves. In Parable of the Sower, Butler theorizes these disabling contradictions of neoliberal governance under advanced capitalism, drawing into focus the political economic systems that cause suffering. Parable also depicts strategies for crip and mad survival that are made possible through the conscious creation of community and networks of solidarity that counter the neoliberal state’s devaluation of bodyminds. Gathering to read and discuss the novel, rather than a distraction from the crises, furthers the emergence of crip and mad collectivities. As such, it is an urgent and timely practice for building futures for crip and mad people.

The necropolitics of neoliberal state response to the Covid-19 pandemic in India

We draw from the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic in India to outline that the neoliberal consolidation of the state is enabled by precariousness, violence, and inequality in overlapping planes of marginality. The pandemic showed the abysmal state of public health institutions in India as people experienced an erosion of dignity in both life and death. The harsh and sudden lockdown announced by the Indian state rendered workers jobless, hungry, exhausted, and on the borders of death. Instead of providing social security to workers, the state embarked on a neoliberal agenda of deregulation, weakening job security, and collective bargaining legislation. The state enacted a violent discourse of Hindu nationalism to blame Muslims for the spread of the pandemic in India to deflect attention from its abdication of responsibility in making healthcare and social security available to vulnerable segments of the Indian population. The neoliberal policy response of the state during the pandemic was embedded in the necropolitics of protecting the middle class and elite lives while directing structural violence against the working class and Muslims, making their lives disposable.