Political Currency Research Articles

The Commodification of the Womb: A Historical Attack on Black Women’s Reproductive Freedom

The commodification of the Black body is a process deeply rooted in slavery that has transcended a century’s worth of political and social change since abolition. In a literal sense, within the context of slavery, the Black body was commodified as both a force of labour and a resource for reproduction to feed the growth of America’s slave economy. In the present day, the commodification of the Black body has taken on a political and metaphorical meaning; Black women’s bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom are commonly used as a form of political currency for anti-abortion lobbyists throughout the United States. This paper covers the history of the commodification of Black women’s bodies while also displaying the ways in which Black women’s reproductive and bodily autonomy are targeted today. Drawing on theories of the fragmented commodity, the right to privacy, and reproductive freedom, this paper displays modern issues that are part of a historical continuity of targeting black women and their right to freedom.

Empowering the “Ecosystem”

This article draws upon original research including a series of interviews, extensive desk research, and a canon of political economy scholarship hailing from Lebanon and elsewhere to explore the political dynamics underpinning Lebanon's emerging tech “ecosystem.” It focuses on a seemingly peripheral actor within this ecosystem, the coding school, both as a window into the ecosystem's political machinery and as a surprisingly important site through which its wider interests are mediated. This focus explores how the coding school generates so-called empowerment conceived largely in terms of training and preparing Lebanon's “underprivileged youth” for global tech markets, through a strategic alignment with the ecosystem. Thus, empowerment becomes a political currency of sorts, helping to reify and repackage an enclave of Lebanon's economy. The article suggests that the political work to engineer this new economic landscape reflects how state-business interests come together to repackage so-called development and enforce new regimes of accumulation at a time of deepening crisis.

Public cultural institutions in Mexico and precarisation of creative labour

The Mexican state has been an active agent in the construction of cultural institutions and infrastructure for more than a century. But the symbolic and political currency of the cultural sector is not reflected in stable conditions for creative workers who exist precariously. In this article, we explore a manifestation of the simultaneous state of prominence and precarity in procurement regimes implemented by federal government agencies before the Covid-19 crisis, and support programmes from the federal and local government of Mexico City to employ creative workers during the early phases of the pandemic. We examine the content and arguments of these programmes to highlight how cultural policies and institutional structures developed by the government are a continuation, and even a deepening, of the already precarious work opportunities in the cultural sector. Through policy analysis and qualitative interviews, we contrast the officially stated goals of government institutions with the lived experiences of creative workers.

Diriliş: Resurrection theme in the populist regime of ‘New Turkey’

Populism has become the pillar of contemporary right-wing politics, and it has a large discursive toolkit, varying in different geopolitical contexts but always drawing its references from existing narratives, myths, affects, and cosmologies of a given public. The success of populist regimes lies particularly in their ability to harness existing imaginaries and turn them into political currency. Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) is no exception to this trend through its constant cultivation of antagonistic themes and manufacture of new hostilities. To get a better grasp of the ways in which this is accomplished, this report focuses on one of the most appealing, popular, and political themes in Turkish-Islamist politics: Diriliş (Resurrection). One can come across this theme in national politics, foreign policy, popular media, or the Islamist intellectual realm. Starting out as a Turkish Sunni Islamist philosophy in the Islamist intellectual realm, the diriliş theme proliferated over the years, subsequently with the rise of political Islam, and became a building block of Turkish-Islamist populist discourse in Turkey. With a close focus on various Islamist journals in İslamcı Dergiler Projesi (Islamic Journals Project) database and media, popular culture, and politics, this report charts the trajectory of the diriliş theme from the 1960s until today. I show its popularization process, its politicization throughout decades, and its gendered foundation. Diriliş theme appears and disappears at significant political moments in Turkey, and it successfully appeals to Turkish-Islamist groups while converting feelings of oppression to power and domination. Its loaded history makes diriliş a very powerful instrument for AKP’s populism.

Paths Towards LGBT Rights Recognition in Brazil

IntroductionThis article addresses the processes that led to the recognition of LGBT rights in Brazil, the role played by civil society mobilization, and the interaction between the Federal Supreme Court and the National Congress in these processes.MethodsThe study’s primary method is document analysis. Our sample was established in 2021 and includes four court decisions and 93 law proposals presented from 2011 to 2020 by 83 legislators whose profiles are also analysed (data collected in 2021). Moreover, the article references secondary source interviews conducted in 2017 and 2018.ResultsThe Federal Supreme Court was responsible for all the LGBT rights recognized at the federal level in Brazil. Our data shows that federal legislators, on the other hand, have been unable to make bills focused on LGBT rights (pro or against) pass. Some highlights from the results show that 46.2% of the proposals on the matter are contrary to those rights, and 48.2% of the legislators who mobilize the matter are affiliated with the Evangelical Bench, an influential conservative institution in the Brazilian National Congress. Although not yet able to make law proposals pass, those legislators with a conservative profile tend to use LGBT rights as political currency by presenting bills or making speeches against these rights. They also play a role in not allowing pro-LGBT rights achievements in the legislative arena. Aware of the legislators’ profile, civil society organizations tend not to focus all their efforts on this arena and to take or create legal opportunities, even though the path through courts still represents several obstacles. Moreover, although the Brazilian Federal Supreme Court has shown a willingness to decide on LGBT rights, the outcomes of the rulings depend on the composition of the body, which is influenced by nominations made by the president. That is, the same court Brazil has relied on to recognize LGBT rights could be responsible for denying them had it had the same powers but different members.ConclusionsWhile the deadlock in the Federal Congress persists, and the judicial decisions that recognized LGBT rights remain effective, LGBT persons continue to exercise their conquered rights. However, the conservative wave in Brazil places the country in a context of uncertainty and vulnerability with regard to LGBT rights.Policy ImplicationsThis study’s contribution lies in showing why Brazil is an unpaired case when it comes to LGBT rights recognition and how vulnerable these conquered rights are in the country. The article provides an overview of the recognition processes taking multiple arenas and actors into account. Therefore, the analyses and the database of law proposals fill a gap in the literature and can contribute to future work from both scholars (for example, other studies from the database) and practitioners (for example, the development of legal mobilization frames and strategies).

:The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes

:<i>The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes</i>

Spectres of European money and Stefan Eich’s Currency of Politics

AbstractThis paper aims at discussing the historical trajectory of European money and the way it can be illuminated through a dialogue with Stefan Eich’s The Currency of Politics. Fleshing out the different theories, visions, and conceptualisations of money in Eich’s book, this paper utilises this exposition to evaluate the development and operationalisation of European money. With an eye to contemporary debates about the re-politicisation or democratisation of money, the paper will critically assess the way in which Eich’s account can be used as a framework to explain European money.

The Currency of Politics: Rejoinder

AbstractThis response gives me the opportunity to clarify, extend, and complement several aspects of my conceptual and historical argument in The Currency of Politics. I do so primarily by situating my account more explicitly within debates over European monetary politics, by expanding on my use of history, and by articulating what differentiates my concern with the political theory of money and the politics of depoliticisation from complementary accounts. In doing so I elaborate on the ways in which engagement with the thought of John Maynard Keynes helped to structure my approach. While there are important limits to the politics of money under contemporary capitalism, these limits are not fixed economic ones but are better seen as political limits of monetary politics that nonetheless leave considerable space for articulating alternative demands for more democratic forms of money. This framing allows me to extend my argument in order to address contemporary struggles over credit policy, monetary reform, and climate change in Europe. I thus end with a set of critical reflections on the constitutional status of money in the European project and beyond.

The Art of Not Being Seen: The Politics of Money

Abstract This essay reviews Stefan Eich’s book, The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2022. Eich reveals the political interventions, both theoretical and practical, that have led to the appearance that money is not to be politicized or subject to democratic control. Although mildly critical of Eich’s book, the review above all serves the constructive purpose of building upon Eich’s insights by selectively examining the theories of money and episodes from monetary history in and through which the politics of money has been contested.

Memory Wars in Poland: When My Family’s History Turned into Political Currency

Memory Wars in Poland: When My Family’s History Turned into Political Currency

The stories behind stories: Reflections on the role of voice in research with unaccompanied refugee youth

The stories behind stories: Reflections on the role of voice in research with unaccompanied refugee youth

The currency of politics: the political theory of money from Aristotle to Keynes

The currency of politics: the political theory of money from Aristotle to Keynes

Stefan Eich, The Currency of Politics—The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes

Stefan Eich, The Currency of Politics—The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes

The communicative turn in money production and central banking

AbstractThis intervention expands Stefan Eich’s analysis of the parallel between language and money in The Currency of Politics by emphasising the increasing importance of linguistic communication within processes of production. This expansion has had an impact on monetary policy and on the communicative strategies of central banks. The suggestion is to integrate Eich’s call for the politicisation of monetary design with an appraisal of post-fordiist productive processes and the importance of money creation for the valorisation of those processes. If this reading of the expansion of the logic of economic value to linguistic communication is correct, then any call for a monetary design of money that works like public speech ought to be carry forward cautiously, in light of the colonisation of the latter (speech) by market forces

Political theories of money and the politics of contextualisation

AbstractThis essay engages with Stephan Eich’s The Currency of Politics. It finds that the book pursues two goals at once: a minimalist goal of bringing money as a subject of inquiry back into the fold of political theory and a maximalist goal consisting in the stated ambition to ‘articulate more democratic visions of the future of money’. It interrogates Eich’s effort to harnesses a historical perspective to normative claims from the standpoint of a historian of pre-modern Europe. More specifically, it asks what role close reading, intertextuality and contextualisation play in Eich’s approach; why he recognises certain episodes from the (distant) past rather than others as relevant to current predicaments and potential future scenarios; and why he singles out the English financial revolution of the 1690s as the first relevant moment of crisis after the monetary reforms undertaken in Athens in the sixth century BCE.

Euro as the currency of the EU’s green transition

AbstractStefan Eich’s The Currency of Politics offers us a new way of looking at the EU’s sustainable finance trend, one that allows us to see how the ‘greening’ financial transactions creates “green money” and thus intertwines with questions of justice and democracy. In this contribution I explore how The Currency of Politics can help us understand the significance and the constitutional implications of the transformation of the euro into the ‘currency of the green transition’ as it has been referred to by Eurogroup’s President in 2021. I show how the three trends of EU green bond issuance, granular sustainable finance regulation and the progressive greening of monetary policy are moulding the euro in a political sense as the ‘currency of the green transition’ as much as the legal tender. Euro currency becomes in this sense ‘a governance project’ for the sustainable transition. This perspective offers multiple points of engagement with the themes of Stefan Eich’s important book. For example, the claim of privatisation of money creation must be qualified to reflect on the implications of the granular way in which EU law defines what green money is. At the same time, while a ‘green currency’ creates spaces for engagement and new forms of organising a polity, it still remains largely removed from ordinary citizens as ‘technocratic’ rather than ‘democratic’ self-government.

Towards a constitutional theory of money: opening Europe’s money up to public discourse

AbstractStefan Eich’s The Currency of Politics reconstructs and contextualises the monetary understanding of some of the most renowned political thinkers in history. By contextualising each author’s conceptualisation (subjective perception) against their respective contemporary monetary frameworks (objective institutional dimension), Eich elaborates a narrative composed of cumulative layers leading to a double conclusion: that money is political at its core, and that current policies are actively de-politicizing money. These relevant findings are the point of departure of a reflection on the role that law, and constitutional theory in particular, must play in the configuration of Europe’s common currency to overcome some of the most acute difficulties the process of integration is currently experiencing. If the triad law, money and public discourse is supposed to articulate social life in the polity, European monetary integration has neutralised them by neglecting the relevance of one of their key features: civic reciprocity. Reactivating the three mechanisms of social integration requires an exercise of constitutional imagination able to integrate interdisciplinary knowledge about money within an institutional framework able to prevent the concentration of unlimited power in unaccountable institutions and to promote and fully exploit the democratic potential of money.

The Power of Parwanas: Indo-Persian Grants and the Making of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Southern India

This article examines Persian-language orders—parwanas—issued by regimes that succeeded the Mughal Empire in South Asia, to European trading companies. Focussing in particular on the mid-eighteenth-century exchanges between the Nizam of Hyderabad; the Nawab of Arcot; and the French Compagnie des Indes, we see how Mughal-style parwanas, or sub-imperial orders, previously used to give instructions or to make or withdraw grants, were transformed into a form of political currency. They were now used to exchange military and fiscal resources between South Asian state-builders and militarised European corporations, and to secure political legitimacy for all within a putative Mughal imperium. Moreover, the legal fiction of Mughal sovereignty led to a grants race, such that rivals—European and South Asian—sought more and more parwanas, while also querying the legitimacy of authorities that issued them. The very fragility of the Mughal empire and the lability of the political landscape in eighteenth-century South Asia was thus generative of prolific Persian legal documentation, as well as its rewiring to novel uses. European empire-builders negotiated this legal landscape with only partial literacy, consequently fetishizing the material aspects and ceremonial accompaniments of Persian legal documents, and according them power beyond their immediate substance.

The Plasticity of Race

This essay explores Jacques Derrida’s nonteleological conception of postracism, which he elucidated in his unpublished response to Ètienne Balibar’s keynote address at the tRACEs conference held at UC Irvine in 2003. Racism, for Derrida, is intrinsically “plastic,” which predisposes it to future metonymic forms even if racism stricto sensu were to end. Building on his observations, I argue that these metonymies also extend historically backward. The metaphysical distinction between physis and nomos that he identifies as the condition of racism also provides the basis for family: the most ancient and familiar form through which racism expresses itself. Racism is originarily plastic. In conjunction with my reading of Derrida, I critique the contemporary conflation of racism and white supremacy; the doctrinaire view that racism is only institutional (prejudice plus power); and the discourse of microaggressions, whose outsized political currency arguably transforms them into quasi-macroaggressions by conceiving them as expressions of white supremacy.

Science advocacy in political rhetoric and actions

‘Science’ is a proportionately small but recurring constituent in the rhetorical lexicon of political leaders. To evaluate the use of science-related content relative to other themes in political communications, we undertake a statistical analysis of keywords in U.S. Presidential State of the Union (SOTU) addresses and Presidential Budget Messages (PBM) from Truman (1947) to Trump (2020). Hierarchical clustering and correlation analyses reveal proximate affinities between ‘science’ and ‘research’, ‘space’, ‘technology’, ‘education’, and ‘climate’. The keywords that are least correlated with ‘science’ relate to fiscal (‘inflation’, ‘tax’) and conflict-related themes (‘security’, ‘war’, ‘terror’). The most ubiquitous and frequently used keywords are ‘economy’ and ‘tax’. Science-related keywords are used in a positive (promotional) rhetorical context and thus their proportionality in SOTU and PBM corpora is used to define fields of science advocacy (public perception advocacy, funding advocacy, advocacy) for each president. Monte Carlo simulations and randomized sampling of three elements: language (relative frequency of usage of science-related keywords), funding (proposed funding and allocated discretionary funding of science agencies), and actions (e.g. expediency of science advisor appointments, (dis-) establishment of science agencies) are used to generate a science advocacy score (SAS) for each president. The SAS is compared with independent survey-based measures of political popularity. A myriad of political, contextual, and other factors may contribute to lexical choices, policy, and funding actions. Within this complex environment ‘science’ may have political currency under certain circumstances, particularly where public and political perceptions of the value of science to contribute to matters of priority align.