Neoliberal Order Research Articles

The Powerful Mighty State versus the Human Rights Defenders: The Courage to Challenge the Unruly Authority

In December 2018, the National Rights Institutions (NHRI) across the globe pledge to bolster their support for human rights defenders amidst a growing climate of threats and reprisals. While adopting the Marrakech Declaration and reaffirming the principles of Paris Declaration, NHRIs recognized that Human rights defenders have a positive, important and legitimate role in contributing to the realisation of all human rights, at the local, national, regional and international levels,. The National Rights Commission of India too, in its recent workshop organized in June 2019 observed that human rights defenders play a crucial role in a democracy and that the Commission is endeavored to create the enabling environment for the safeguard of human rights of defenders. Yet, the situation in India is that human rights defenders have been targeted, attacked, harassed, threatened and have been charged in false cases by both the state and the non-state actors including police, armed groups and private actors. The mighty bureaucratic state apparatus abuses all its power to crush any resistance. More specifically, over the recent years, the role of the state has been transforming from the `welfare’ regime to the capitalist neoliberal order, therefore a situation is created where common people are forced to resist. But those ruling elite exploit all their might and resources to make sure that it sends the loud message that the dissent will not be tolerated. The elitist, caste-based, majority-linked misogynist hegemony oiled by inequality of division of capital is destroying the idea of the diverse plural country. The scale of violation and abuse of power by the state and not state actors is increasing over the years. The situation is that those who have been advocating for the rights of the marginalized and indigenous communities are those who have been facing grave onslaught of threats. Some have been shot dead, others have been implicated in the false cases, facing censorship, physically assaulted, kidnapped, involved in the unjust prosecution, unlawful, arbitrary detention, forced disappearances, unauthorized searches, financial threat of losing livelihoods or are being intimidated. Those working on the issues such as caste-based discrimination, environment, land rights, right to information, business and human rights are particularly vulnerable to undue arbitrary intimidation, arrest, threat, restriction and detention. Poets, journalists, artists, lawyers, activists, and many other such professionals are being specifically targeted because they are perceived as a threat by the ruling elite. These new forms of emerging challenges before the HRDs call for rigorous efforts to safeguard their rights. This write up looks at the emerging challenges and suggests that the institutions such as NHRC, the civil society and the international organizations should proactively act expeditiously to devise the measures to defend the HRDs.

Deaths of the Subject and Negated Subjectivity in the Era of Neoliberal Capitalism

In recent years, various descriptions of subjectivity related to the era of neoliberal capitalism have been offered. These descriptions assume uncritically that there is both a subjectivity of this time and a qualified subject to which it corresponds. The contrast of these descriptions with the claims of postmodernist authors regarding the death of the subject posits a contradiction. In this article, a solution to this problem is provided by the support of the dialectic of Sartre’s realistic materialism. The application of the dialectic sheds light on the neoliberal individual, who, integrated as a negated subject in the totality of the neoliberal order, shows itself as a reified individual without subjectivity, or rather, with a negated subjectivity. From that it follows, opposed to a rather widely accepted definition, that subjectivity is not a positive characterisation but rather the negativity of the reified form of life within neoliberal capitalism.

Framing Local Attitudes to a Modern Health Intervention in the Neoliberal Order – Culturalism and Malaria Control in Southeastern Nigeria

Interventionists usually blame cultural factors and traditional attitudes for non-compliance of target populations, a framework Didier Fassin terms as culturalism. Despite their efforts, what the Roll Back Malaria employees find in southeastern Nigeria is a ‘troubling’ nonchalance towards the programme because target populations’ perceptions of malaria differ from the donor/programme perspective. The RBM employees cast the local attitude as culturalism, accordingly framing their exhortations in terms of this discourse. How the Roll Back Malaria employees deployed culturalism to fit with the neoliberal individualizing framework of current international health practices is one more nuanced analytical perspective the article brings to intervention literature.

Toward a Geoeconomic World Order

Recent developments suggest that the international economic order is transitioning away from the Neoliberal Order that has flourished for much of the post-Cold War period toward a new Geoeconomic Order. The shift to this new order, which is characterised by a growing ‘securitisation of economic policy and economisation of strategic policy,’ will likely see the rules, norms and institutions of international trade and investment law undergo significant change. We expose the differences in the underlying logic of these orders, explore how this shift is being driven by the emerging U.S.-China tech/trade war, and consider the consequences of this transition for global economic governance.

Tropical Gothic: arts, humanities and social sciences

The Gothic is undergoing a pronounced resurgence in academic and popular cultures. Propelled by fears associated with massive social transformations produced by globalisation, the neoliberal order and environmental uncertainty – tropes of the Gothic resonate. The gothic allows us to delve into the unknown, the liminal, the unseen; into hidden histories and feelings. It calls up unspoken truths and secret desires.In the tropics, the gothic manifests in specific ways according to spaces, places, cultures and their encounters. Within the fraught geographies and histories of colonisation and aggression that have been especially acute across the tropical regions of the world, the tropical gothic engages with orientalism and postcolonialism. The tropics, as the region of the greatest biodiversity in the world, is under enormous stress, hence tropical gothic also engages with gothic ecocriticism, senses of space, landscape and place. Globalisation and neoliberalism likewise impact the tropics, and the gothic imagery of these ‘vampiric’ capitalist forces – which impinge upon the livelihoods, traditions and the very survival of peoples of the tropics – is explored through urban gothic, popular culture, posthumanism and queer theory.As the papers in this special issue demonstrate, a gothic sensibility enables humans to respond to the seemingly dark, nebulous forces that threaten existence. These papers engage with specific instances of Tropical Gothic in West Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Southeast Asia, northern Australia, and the American Deep South.

Gothic "Voodoo" in Africa and Haiti

This paper seeks to historicize and demystify “Voodoo” religion in Africa and Haiti while also drawing comparisons and contrasts to concepts and themes related to “the gothic”. What is assumed to be “supernatural” or “paranormal” in Western and Gothic circles has long been a part of everyday reality for many peoples of African descent and devotees of Vodun in Western Africa and Vodou in Haiti. Tropes that are essential to realms of the gothic (supernatural characters, mystery, the macabre, spirits, and paranormal entities) — are also central to the cosmology and liturgy of so-called “Voodoo”. As “the gothic” undergoes a resurgence in academic and popular cultures, so too does “Voodoo” religion. And yet, both terms continue to be conflated by popular culture, and by equating “voodoo” with “the gothic”, the true spirt of both concepts become confounded. A certain racialized Eurocentric hegemony devalues one of the world’s least understood religions (“Voodoo”) by equating it with equally distorted concepts of “the gothic”. As globalization transforms society, and the neo-liberal order creates more uncertainty, the continued distortion of both terms continues. Vodun does more than just speak to the unknown, it is an ancient organizing principle and way of life for millions of followers. Vodou/Vodun are not cognates of the “American Zombie gothic”, but rather, are a mode of survival and offer a way of seeing and being in an unpredictable world.

Geo-capitalism and global racialization in the frame of Anthropocene

ABSTRACTThe appropriation of nature under current capitalist conditions implies the intensification of processes of exploitation of labour, dispossession of peasants’ lands, indiscriminate extraction of raw materials, and racialization of all these processes. These dynamics reveal a double process: from one side we are witnessing a global racialization generated alongside socio-ecological phenomena that are changing for the worse food, energy, land, water, and raw materials regimes. From the other side we are witnessing an imperious use of racist speeches, claims, public measures and violent practices aimed to galvanized the racial and racist spirit of European and American white populations against migrants and refugees driven by the underlying forces formerly recalled. These two dynamics are strictly interlinked. For a long time, researchers dealt with local dynamics and phenomena of racism often forgetting how global, large, planetary processes of exploitation, appropriation, and dispossession sculpt these dynamics at the local level. This article aims to deal with these processes of global racialization and racism by an analysis of the process of accumulation based on ‘racialized unequal exchange’ fostering the idea that that unequal ecological exchange bases on historical division of people in different subordinate races in line with the global neoliberal order.

Confucianisms for a Changing World Cultural Order ed. by Roger T. Ames and Peter D. Hershock

Reviewed by: Confucianisms for a Changing World Cultural Order ed. by Roger T. Ames and Peter D. Hershock Bart Dessein Roger T. Ames and Peter D. Hershock, eds., Confucianisms for a Changing World Cultural Order. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press: East-West Center, 2018. vi, 277 pp. US$65 (hb). ISBN 9780824872588 As its title indicates, this edited volume addresses three interrelated concepts: world cultural order, change, and Confucianisms (in the plural). The question the fifteen essays of this volume try to answer is more precisely how Confucianism in its different forms and interpretations may contribute to formulating an alternative for what Michael Nylan in her contribution, “Whither Confucius? Whither Philosophy?”, defined as “the vice of the vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness” (p. 205) that characterizes the world in the age of global capitalism. In the first part of this volume, “Confucianisms in a Changing World Cultural Order,” a general critique of neoliberalism is formulated, and two alternative social orders—an all-inclusive religious community and a restrictive Confucian community—are presented. The second part, “Different Confucianisms,” juxtaposes neoliberalism and East Asian Confucianisms. The third part, “Clarifying Confucian Values,” attempts to define core Confucian values that might contribute to the creation of a new global cultural paradigm. Reflecting on East Asia’s Confucian past, the fourth and last part of the volume, “Limitations and the Critical Reform of Confucian Cultures,” reflects on the limits of a Confucian world order. In “Rethinking Confucianism’s Relationship to Global Capitalism: Some Philosophical Reflections for a Confucian Critique of Global Capitalism,” Sor-hoon Tan formulates a critique of the neoliberal order based on the early Confucian conviction that the state should take care of everyone’s basic material needs, which is more important than an increase in economic production to the profit of a few and the detriment of many, as well as of education of the people (pp. 11–12). This viewpoint can be read in Lunyu 論語 13.9 and 16.1, or in Mengzi 孟子 3A3. This reference to early Confucianism can also be read as a critique of contemporary China. Its professed return to Confucianism notwithstanding, the road of global capitalism the country has taken has brought about increasing social disparity, ecological problems, and grassroots distrust in politics. It is in this respect striking that while a development toward the rise of capitalism and individualism may not have happened in Confucian China,1 it appears that, as stated by Sor-hoon [End Page 87] Tan (p. 10), “[e]ven though Confucianism failed to bring about capitalism, it has proven conducive to capitalism once countries enter that system.”2 This critique of neoliberalism is shared by Lee Seung-Hwan in “Confucianism as an Antidote for the Liberal Self-Centeredness: A Dialogue between Confucianism and Liberalism,” which equates “[t]he Confucian emphasis on placing common good before self-interest, and communal harmony before individual rights” with Marx’s criticism of bourgeois “rights-talk” (p. 38). This observation is in line with the distinction Fei Xiaotong 費孝通 drew elsewhere between a Confucian society, and capitalist and individualist European societies. The interrelatedness of human agency in a Confucian society necessitates attention to communal harmony and the common good. In individualist European societies, on the contrary, human behavior is typically seen as motivated by self-interest.3 As an alternative to the neoliberal order, Peter Y. J. Wong’s “Toward Religious Harmony: A Confucian Contribution” posits a world order in which “[o]ur understanding of Religion expands beyond identification with a particular religion,” because only “then we can begin to explore the kind of religiousness of the ordinary . . . the development of a religious culture that is accommodating enough to include most religions, which are themselves in turn open enough” (p. 50). A different alternative is suggested by Zhang Xianglong in “The Special District of Confucian Culture, the Amish Community, and the Confucian Pre-Qin Political Heritage” in which he calls for “Special Districts of Confucian Culture” (p. 58). The critique that is formulated of the neoliberal order and the ideal societies that are proposed by Peter Y. J. Wong and Zhang Xianglong bring the “growing contemporary relevance” of Confucianism (“Introduction,” p...

신자유주의가 잠식한 트랜스휴머니즘: 미구엘 사포크닉의 Repo Men을 중심으로

The main idea of this paper is to reveal the power relations of neo-liberalism and transhumanism through Miguel Sapochnik’s Repo Men. In the near future, people must encounter a new wave of organ donation phenomenon, in which patients do not have to find substitute organs from other healthy people but they can get necessary artificial organs instead. The artificial organs treat numerous illness and expand people’s lives, and those things also make people overcome fatality. Transhumanism is the key idea for the expansion of artificial organs and it becomes a new religion that gives hope of immortality to people. Sapochnik’s Repo Men shows us about the dystopian future of transhumanism with the inhumane and unleashed power of neo-liberalism. In his film, neo-liberalism encroaches transhumanism, and then it corrupts the bright objects of transhumanism for immortality. People who have artificial organs become as slaves and hunted by cruel repo men because of money. I would like to study the future of transhumanism and neo-liberalism in order to find out what kind of new ethical aspects will be needed and analyze transhumanism should be considered in the view of various approaches.

Women and the national agenda in Mashingaidze Gomo’s A fine madness (2010)

ABSTRACTThis article interrogates the representation of women in Mashingaidze Gomo’s A fine madness through the prism of feminist postcolonial theory. Feminist postcolonial theorists such as Gayatri Chakrobarty Spivak have identified points of intersection between imperialism, patriarchy and nationalism in what has come to be known as ‘the double/triple oppression of women’. Mashingaidze Gomo’s A fine madness appropriates the anti-imperialist ideology of the Robert Mugabe regime to engage economic/political challenges facing Zimbabwe/Africa in the context of the neoliberal global order. In wrestling with these issues, Gomo adopts an Afro-radical approach that subsumes the concerns of women in the broader rhetoric of national and continental decolonisation. The role of women in discourses of nationhood remains a topical subject not only in Zimbabwe but also in Africa as a whole. In view of this, I argue that discourses of nationhood and sovereignty often tend to be couched in patriarchal terms that ignore the concerns of women. In post-2000 Zimbabwe, discourses of national sovereignty which have been promoted by the Mugabe regime, constructed women, not as active participants and contributors to the national project, but as symbolic figures whose primary role is to support men in their heroic ‘national’ endeavours.

Precarious revolution: labour and neoliberal securitisation in Egypt

The article draws on precarious workers’ engagement with the Egyptian revolution between 2011 and 2013. Despite their radical moves—reclaiming land previously appropriated by the state and staging various neighbourhood protests—the workers in this ethnography refused to associate with the revolution. Their curious position between radicality and dismissal of the revolution lays the groundwork to explore neoliberal securitisation. Although securitisation evolved globally alongside neoliberalism in order to facilitate accumulation by dispossession, the particular securitisation strategies used with disparate groups of workers, and their implication on the different ways workers make claims for a good life, still need further research. The article thus explores the class project of neoliberal securitisation. It argues that securitisation has generally been marginalised in studies of labour precarity, which have tended to point to the retrenchments of welfare benefits and insecurity under market conditions. By instead positing neoliberal securitisation as a class project, I show how the evolution of property relations is drawing new actors into the class struggle. The article thus re-centre class within the literature on labour precarity and the politics of security. Based on an ethnographic study in al-Tibbin, a town built around the largest and oldest steel factory in the south of Cairo, the article explores how the differential tactics used to securitise workers’ communities deeply impacted their repertoires of political action, becoming a catalyst for class struggle between various groups of workers. Securitisation thus co-constituted precarity by continuously drawing new subjects to the class struggle. Despite this, scholars and revolutionary actors have accorded more attention to the ‘spectacular’ resistance of organised workers in contrast to precarious workers’ ephemeral but influential engagements—a tendency that has been detrimental to the revolution’s trajectory.

Personhood, jurisdiction and injustice: law, colonialities and the global order

Set against the colonial and neo-colonial unevenness of the globalized neoliberal order, this article offers a critical reading of legal personhood and jurisdiction as mechanisms of privilege and predation. Transnational corporations (TNCs) are, we suggest, the ultimate insider construct for the neoliberal capitalist-techno order. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of corporeal human beings on the move as the marginalized products of that same order (especially refugees and migrants) are confronted by boundaries and barriers all too material in their effect. In an age of anxiety-driven border hardening against mass human migration and of seamless, instantaneous movements of transnational capital and corporate location across jurisdictional boundaries, we examine the patterns of injustice implicated in and between these phenomena, tracing a Eurocentric logic visible in the complex continuities between coloniality, capitalism and the production of precarity in the Anthropocene.

Rebel with a Cause: Personal Significance from Political Activism Predicts Willingness to Self‐Sacrifice

AbstractGiven the social importance of political activism, it is critical to understand what motivates individuals to engage in it. Past research has predominantly focused on individual and collective frustrations as factors that motivate political actions. At the same time, the role of the positive experiences that activists gain from their political engagement was largely neglected. Drawing on quest for significance theory, we proposed that when people engage in political actions on behalf of important social values, they gain a sense of personal significance, and as a result of these positive feelings, they are more willing to self‐sacrifice for the cause in the future. We tested that hypothesis in six studies, which included both online and offline samples of political activists engaged in different forms of activism that challenge the neoliberal order: activism for a radical left‐wing party (N = 84), a pro‐democratic social movement (N = 1,409), feminist activism (N = 158, N = 258), environmental activism (N = 396), and activism for labor and healthcare rights (N = 156). The results we obtained were in line with our hypothesized model. We discuss the implications of our findings for individuals who want to mobilize support for political movements.

The Right to Rent: Active Resistance to Evolving Geographies of State Regulation

AbstractDrawing on recent qualitative research on the UK's Immigration Act 2016, this article sets out to explain the opposition of social housing professionals to the imposition of the Right to Rent. By locating this policy intervention within the evolving geographies of state regulation, it is possible to account for the mechanisms through which housing professionals can resist the extension of duties that were previously the remit of border agents and immigration officials. Synthesizing Bourdieu's critical sociology with Boltanski and Thevenot's sociology of critique helps explain not only the governmental underpinnings of contemporary immigration rhetoric, but also the forms of resistance for which housing professionals display a strong justification in exercising. The universal nature of ‘classification struggles’ within and beyond state institutions extends the relevance of this research to encompass most, if not all, welfarist regimes operating within actually existing neoliberal orders. The analysis of the findings of this research has wider implications that reach beyond housing and urban studies while immigration persists as one of the most significant contemporary political issues, almost without geographical exception, right across the globe.

The new left, Jeremy Corbyn and the war of position: a new coherence or further fragmentation?

ABSTRACTThis article assesses the emergence of the new groups, organizations and protests that have emerged since the financial crisis and asks whether we can understand these as a fresh development where diverse movements fashioned through different ideological departure points have moved towards a form of convergence in which a wider hegemonic project can be fashioned, or whether in fact such proclamations are effectively another form of ‘wishing thinking’ in terms of left-wing renewal is concerned. In line with recently argued work, it suggests that for the left to look to overcome the ideological obstacles that plagued its twentieth century development, it needs to provide a wide/open set of principles that look to contest dominant norms of the neoliberal order that exist at the many levels of civil society. In this way a ‘war of position’ (to borrow from Gramsci) needs to be forged that looks to avoid charges of ‘elitism’ and ‘fragmentation’ that had seen the left to fail as a coherent alternative since the cold war. Whilst the new left has forged forms of contestation at the civil level (for example Occupy and the ESF) and more recently at the Political level (with Sanders, Corbyn and Syriza/Podermos), it has yet to form a consistent and coherent war of position to neoliberal capitalism.

Retrofitted data centres: a new world in the shell of the old

This contribution looks specifically at the process of redeveloping data centre infrastructure: how the value of past capital investments in the built environment can be preserved and multiplied through further capitalist development. We argue that, while the majority of data centres are not placed in these retrofitted industrial buildings, the ones that are indicate a specific spatial logic within the neoliberal order. We show that retrofitting industrial buildings into data centres is about more than putting inactive capital back to ‘work’; it is also about the use of industrial infrastructure as a casing to obfuscate the origins, structure, and workings of the neoliberal project, as metaphorised by the data centres that help to constitute its subjects.

Decolonizing education: Re-schooling in India

The industrialization and its consequential imperialism and colonialism have impacted this world for three centuries. India has been a colony of the British Empire for two centuries. These eventful two centuries of Indian history did see the influence of not only the political and economical might of the “great” Britain, but its influence on every milieu of Indian life. India’s indigenous education system was gradually displaced and the colonial model of education pervaded under the patronage from the colonial-state. The language, pedagogy, evaluation and knowledge of the colonizer became naturalis obligato for the population of the colony. India got independence in 1947 and took to the task of decolonizing education immediately. The attempts to decolonize education from various standpoints of political activism, universalism and religious nationalism are charted in this article. What decolonizing education should entail and how India has responded to this question in the last century and how the neo-liberal order has supported a particular ideology to have a dominant say in this process are concerns of this article. We analyse how re-schooling and indoctrination are projected as the most nationalist response for methodical decolonizing of education.

Nostalgia del nemico. Il ritorno della Guerra fredda nelle serie tv

Recently, some TV series turned their nostalgic gaze to one of the least reassuring parts of the 80s: the Cold War between the USA and the USSR. “Stranger Things” third season (Netflix 2019), the success of “Chernobyl” (HBO 2019), along with the cult status reached by “The Americans” (Fox 2013-2018), brought back to life the collective image of geopolitical struggles, the existence of an enemy, as well as the dialectics between opposed systems of thought. This paper discusses the success of the three series in the light of the socio-political debate on Cold War nostalgia. Through the comeback of the Soviet Evil Empire on our screens, then, contemporary TV series seem to try and recall the underlying reasons for the contemporary neoliberal order. Lastly, we read these narrative devices as a possible form of repoliticisation of the collective imagination. The resurrection of an enemy from the past forces the audience to deal with the uncertainties, inequalities, and the ideological drifts of an actual socio-political context “with no alternatives”.

Public interest in the neo-liberal order: The role of the EU austerity model in the morphing of the Portuguese media landscape

In this article, I examine the role of the EU austerity model in the morphing of the Portuguese media landscape by analyzing it in relation to the growing dependency of the Portuguese democracy on external resources and to the associated issues concerning public interest and capital interests. Portugal’s case illustrates well the conflict between capitalism and democracy in the neo-liberal era. It demonstrates how governments no longer have the degree of control they once had over their own state due not only to the presence of supranational institutions, but also to their dependence on investors – which has led to the increasing political power of large corporations over national governments and over national public interest. In this process, the state plays an active role in promoting the free play of market forces through public policy. Against this backdrop, one may also suggest that the news media might no longer be an adequate agent of public interest under the neo-liberal order.

Rethinking Civil Resistance in the Face of Rightwing Populism: A Theoretical Inquiry

This paper seeks to examine some theoretical limitations potentially undermining civil resistance campaigns countering rightwing populism, and suggests how we might rethink the politics of nonviolent struggle. It argues that protests against rightwing populism have generally tackled the ‘supply side’ of populism or populist leaders. However, little attention has been paid to the ‘demand side’, which explains why constituents vote for populists. Increasing support for populist leaders reflects a collective perception that established political institutions are not living up to the expectations of ordinary people. In response to rightwing populism, civil resistance movements will need to engage two fronts of the struggle. The first is economic inequality perpetuated by a neoliberal order against which rightwing populists claim to defend the ‘people’. The second front entails a cultural reconstruction of the notion of the ‘people’ in response to cultural anxiety that has given ground to populist nativist discourses. This article proposes that both of these tasks require a conceptual reconfiguration of nonviolent resistance regarding power and culture.