Neoliberal Statebuilding Research Articles

A Critical Analysis of the Neoliberal State-Building in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Gap Between Aims and Achievements

Despite the long years of political, economic, and military presence of the international community with its remarkable amount of aid, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) still suffers from political instabilities, lack of economic growth, and high rates of unemployment. The Dayton Peace Accords (DPA), which were signed in 1995 to end the violent war turning out ethnic cleansing and caused unforgettable humanitarian and economic loss, built a highly decentralized state with a divided society. Its vision was based on the neoliberal agenda that puts a strong emphasis on the belief that ethnic harmony and sustainable peace would be achieved only through a reconstruction program of neoliberal policies. Against the backdrop of this vision, the absence of intergroup cohesion among distinct ethnic collective identities remains still as a puzzle of the neoliberal state-building agenda of the international community. By highlighting the limitation of state-building in its implementation in BiH, this research aims to give a plausible answer to the puzzle regarding the root causes of why state-building initiatives remain ill-equipped in achieving the formation of the upper level of shared collective identity in BiH. To this end, it will critically discuss the effectiveness –or ineffectiveness– of the Dayton recipe for BiH to build a functional and sovereign state along with an upper level of shared collective identity.

Infrastructure under pressure: Water management and state-making in southern Iraq

Water infrastructure is an active element of state-making in southern Iraq, although major failings in water governance have in recent years triggered violent protests. Informed by scholarship on state clientelism and the political ecology of infrastructure, I examine the conflict-affected trajectories affecting public water management in Basra governorate. The degraded water treatment network manifests a post-2003 political system structured by embedded clientelism and politically sanctioned corruption. However, broad categorisations of clientelism can miss context-laden political effects produced by the spatial and technological configurations of infrastructure. I consider the state effects of water infrastructure practices in Basra governorate–how water supply networks and treatment technologies project state (in)capacity by means of volumetric and qualitative control over water flows. The empirical focus is on compact water treatment units (CWTUs), which are the main technology of public water supply in Basra governorate. I undertake an analysis of the deployment and management of CWTUs, as experienced by local actors responsible for, or politically contesting, the workings of water infrastructure in Basra city. Clientelist practices targeting public procurement and maintenance contracts have disrupted and delayed the upgrading of water infrastructure; yet these practices were enabled by neoliberal state-building that promoted the privatisation of public resources. Shortfalls in state capacity to provide clean drinking water in Basra are compounded by the growing hydro-climatic unpredictability of water flows.

On the (Im)possibilities of a Free Theatre: Theatre Against Development in Palestine

The focus of this article is a critical evaluation of the impact of international development and conflict-resolution funding on theatre in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The article complicates the predominant narrative of theatre as ‘cultural resistance’ in conflict zones by historicizing the Ford Foundation's role in the institutionalization of Palestinian drama; delineating the effects of neo-liberal state building and development on Palestinian modes of performance; and subsequently, analysing the Freedom Theatre's imbrication in a normative, humanitarian logic. Aid, while ensuring the material conditions for the growth of the Palestinian performing arts, promoted a structural dependency that emptied the language of anti-colonial resistance of emancipatory potential, generating a soft, phantom sovereignty for the audience of the international community. By reimagining ‘freedom’ as liberation from a backward, conservative society, the language of the human rights industry and its attendant cultural economy spawns a spectral ‘cultural resistance’ where freedom and nationhood appear real and unreal – visions refracting, but not existing in, reality.

Palestinian leadership and the contemporary significance of the First Intifada

On the eve of the highly controversial 2020 plan for Israel to annex parts of the West Bank, the author examines the nature of the Palestinian condition and the many challenges Palestinians confront, including the absence of an effective leadership. In registering this, the article proposes a reassessment of the First Intifada that places it in a contemporary perspective and seeks to ‘excavate’ modes of resistance. It engages with the problematic of leadership and highlights how existing challenges might be addressed. Taking into account the Oslo Accords and subsequent attempts towards neoliberal state-building, it draws on theories of settler colonialism and stresses the neo-colonial continuum in Palestine. Finally, the author interviews key activists from the First Intifada to (respectively) provide insight into the nature of the contemporary situation and suggest an alternative model of leadership and struggle.

Blasphemy Rewired: Communal Configurations of the Public Domain in Kerala

From the punctuated invocations of legal clauses through the 20th and 21st centuries, to the post-2000 vilifications, attacks or murders of/on painters, scholars, students and social activists, allegations of blasphemy have often problematized public spheres across India. In this broad backdrop, nuanced tendencies have emerged (and continue to emerge) in Kerala, a state with a strong history of social reforms and political interventions on institutional networks of religion. The paper will focus on two trajectories: the narrative exclusions and communal vocalizations in select public performances as well as emergent institutional hegemonies that institute parallel orders in contemporary contexts of neoliberal state building.

The ends of revolution: capitalist de-democratization and nationalist populism in the east of Europe

The dissolution of Soviet-type socialism has been often taken to signal various ends: the end of history, ideology, and revolution; the foreclosure of the symbolic and epistemic space of emancipation opened up by the French, Russian, and anti-colonial revolutions. Yet, the celebrations of the march of liberal democracy and capital have soon given way to alarming observations about a new wave of right-wing populism that feeds on the contradictions of inequality and freedom, largely generated by neoliberal capitalist globalization. Based on my field research in Poland, my paper engages with this familiar problem, which is often discussed as the “crisis” of liberal democracy, or “dedemocratization.” I show how the ends of communism and revolutionary politics have contributed to the social environment of emptiness, nihilism or the void, in which right-wing groups were able to thrive and claim to be the real voice of social change and justice, as opposed to the liberal establishment. To explore the way that void has been historically and materially constituted, my paper traces the shifting conditions of collective action or revolutionary practice in Poland and Eastern Europe since the 1960s. Specifically, I focus on the tragic dissolution and absorption of the massive “Solidarity” worker movement into neoliberal state building in the 1990s and thereby engage with the often-invoked dialectic between insurrection and constitution, or movement and institutionalization that haunt the revolutionary struggles.

Institutionalizing neoliberalism: CFIUS and the governance of inward foreign direct investment in the United States since 1975

ABSTRACTThe United States has been one of the world's premier destinations for inward foreign direct investment (IFDI) since the 1970s, yet research remains limited on the origins of the domestic institutions that govern IFDI flows. This article focuses on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an executive body created in 1975 ostensibly to stand sentry on the US's ‘open’ investment door. Previous accounts have explained CFIUS's origins in terms of an inter-branch conflict between an ‘internationalist’ Executive and a ‘protectionist’ Congress, but these accounts are far from comprehensive. Based on new archival evidence as well as a broad review of congressional-hearing transcripts, government reports and trade publications, this article finds that existing analyses underestimate the influence of internationally oriented segments of capital, overlook the emergence of key conflicts within the Executive and disregard the specific economic ideas that motivated policy-makers to establish CFIUS and later reform it. These findings buttress the article's conclusion that CFIUS represents not merely a generic case of inter-branch conflict, but a concrete case of neoliberal state-building.

Food for the Global Market: The Neoliberal Reconstruction of Agriculture in Occupied Iraq (2003–2004) and the role of international law

AbstractThis paper revisits the occupation of Iraq between 2003 and 2004. The focus of my analysis is the agricultural reforms promoted by the occupying power, the Coalition Provisional Authority, which aimed at the marketisation of agricultural production, at the enhancement of the position of multi-national agribusiness and in the total integration of Iraq in global food markets. More specifically, this article maintains that the aggressively neoliberal reform of Iraq’s agriculture can be better understood as the extreme end of a wider spectrum of promotion of neoliberal state-building through international law and international institutions post-1990.

Palimpsests of Power

This article maps the development of UNESCO’s sponsored film programs. Funded simultaneously by religious organizations, philanthropic foundations, and corporate and governmental interests, early UNESCO educational films were particularly adept at utilizing diverse resources to bring diffuse networks of institutions and individuals together to produce films that promoted a specific form of participatory democracy and civil society. Via UNESCO’s Communication Programme, these films served to advance not only UNESCO’s humanitarian goals but also larger political and economic goals. By understanding the circulation and distribution of these productions, a clearer picture emerges of NGO- and state-sponsored visual information campaigns that utilized film to advocate for a particular form of neoliberal state building during the height of the Cold War.

Security scales: spectacular and endemic violence in post-invasion Kabul, Afghanistan

This article juxtaposes two distinct violent dynamics in a highly securitized urban space: one covered by global media in every detail, yet of marginal importance to the vast majority of city dwellers; the other endemic, but absent from outsiders’ urban imaginary of life and death in Kabul. Although insurgent forces have utilized Afghanistan’s capital city as a stage for acts of spectacular violence ever since the 2001 international invasion, for most city dwellers, especially women and children, domestic abuse has constituted the main threat to physical well-being. In contrast, increases in mortality and morbidity due to insurgent attacks carried out in the city between 2002 and 2011 have been infinitesimal. An interpretive framework that draws from critical geographical scholarship by highlighting global discourses and local norms helps expose that the international community’s discursive construction of Kabul as the locus for post-2001 neoliberal state-building lies at the heart of persistent, yet largely invisible, victimization within the city. The analysis demonstrates how such scalar politics of security have turned Kabul into an urban stage that provides global visibility of spectacular violence against foreigners while eclipsing endemic causes of bodily harm among Afghans.

Peace During and After the Age of Intervention

Peacekeeping was a major contribution to the twentieth-century project of peace in the sense of providing a tool through which a preliminary, negative peace could be consolidated in a state-centric world. Upon this basis an elite-level peace agreement could then be mediated between states. However, integrated missions and peacebuilding interventions since the end of the cold war adopted a radically different approach, indicating an ambition to create a liberal state without necessarily receiving local consent. This indicated a shift towards a trusteeship framework, used to install more progressive forms of politics from the West's perspective while enhancing regional security. The latest iteration of this has led to what might be described as neoliberal statebuilding. This has proven to be a dead-end, having done much to discredit the connection between intervention and peace, raising the question of what might replace it, especially in world of structural war and violence.

Political Islam and State Legitimacy in Turkey: The Role of National Culture in Neoliberal State-Building

Blad, Cory and Banu Kocer. (2012) Political Islam and State Legitimacy in Turkey: The Role of National Culture in Neoliberal State-Building. International Political Sociology , doi: 10.1111/j.1749-5687.2012.00150.x © 2012 International Studies Association The rise of Islamist parties to positions of political dominance in Turkey has been the subject of inquiry for scholars and concern for some American and European observers. This paper argues that this rise of Islamist political efficacy is the result of efforts to maintain state legitimacy in an era of neoliberalism. The integration of neoliberalism as a dominant political economic ideology reduces state economic regulatory capacities and social service endowment. The effect of this retrenchment is a commensurate reduction in state legitimation, as national populations view the state as unable—or unwilling—to meet requisite economic protectionist demands that were formerly exchanged for legitimate support. In an attempt to retain legitimate authority, neoliberal states are forced to move beyond economic protectionist strategies and embrace increasingly cultural legitimation approaches. We juxtapose the use of economic protectionist strategies in the 1945–1980 period with the integration of Islam as a cultural legitimation strategy following the 1980 coup in Turkey.

Rethinking neo-liberal state building: building post-conflict development states

In attempting to rebuild post-conflict failed states, the international community has drawn heavily on neo-liberal development paradigms. However, neo-liberal state building has proved ineffectual in stimulating economic development in post-conflict states, thus undermining prospects for state consolidation. This article offers the developmental state as an alternative model for international state building, better suited to overcoming the developmental challenges that face post-conflict states. Drawing on the East Asian experience, developmental state building would seek to build state capacity to intervene in the economy to guide development, compensating for the failure of growth led by the private sector to materialise in many post-conflict states. The article concludes that such an approach would, in the first instance, require the international community to accept more honestly its developmental responsibilities when it decides to intervene to rebuild failed states.