Political Economic Order Research Articles

Dreaming Other Worlds: Commodity Culture, Mass Desire, and the Ideology of Inception

This essay provides a critical reading of the 2010 science fiction film Inception, advancing two theses about contemporary mass culture. First, mainstream cultural products contain certain utopian moments. Yet while they may offer glimpses of a world radically transformed in certain respects, this transcendent impulse rarely extends to the depiction of social relations. In fact, such products can be effective in consolidating dominant ideologies and naturalizing the existing political-economic order, because their sharp break from scientific or metaphysical realities may serve to conceal a symptomatic silence on matters of social organization. Second, this tension internal to commercial culture poses an opportunity for political intervention. The mass-cultural product, insofar as it must appeal to broadly felt desires, frequently makes a utopian or transformative promise that cannot be realized by the commodity itself. A culturally attuned Left could highlight this inadequacy by reappropriating mainstream cultural symbols in order to draw broader attention to struggles for social transformation.

Dayton at twenty: towards new politics in Bosnia-Herzegovina

The Dayton Agreement continues to be mentioned as a potential model by Western politicians and pundits for various conflicts and sectarian violence around the globe, most recently for Syria, Ukraine and Iraq. Indeed, the Dayton Agreement is rightly associated by Bosnians and foreigners alike with the end of war and the absence of renewed armed conflict. However, for most people in BiH it is also associated with ushering in a political-economic order of inequality and dispossession, not only of the means of dignified livelihood, but of a future and the agentive capacities to shape that future. For this reason, most long-time observers caution against seeing BiH as a ‘success story,’ or at least recognizing it as one with a morbid after-life. The articles in this collection make clear that negotiations for peace between warring parties may not be the best conditions under which to design a system to secure freedom and prosperity. Indeed, they caution us to draw sharp distinctions between peace accords and social contracts.

The Radiance of the Jewish National Home: Technocapitalism, Electrification, and the Making of Modern Palestine

AbstractContrary to conventional wisdom, the history of the Palestine mandate and its power relations were not determined solely by a series of legal measures, beginning with the 1917 Balfour Declaration and ending with the UNGA partition resolution of 1947. Rather, the emergence of modern Palestine was a process significantly guided by global technocapitalism. Palestine was constituted on the basis of a successful Zionist pitch for the area as an economically viable territory—as an area of production and consumption and crucially also as an entity locatable in the global circulation of capital and commodities. A central vehicle for this technocapitalist vision in Palestine—proposed by the Zionists, and enthusiastically adopted by the British—was a hydroelectrical megasystem in the Jordan Valley. Significant portions of the mandate's borders were mapped onto the station's technical blueprint, and conceiving of and building the powerhouse created not just borders, but also “Palestine,” a bounded entity with a distinct political and economic character. While the electrification, like Zionism in general, was justified in a language of egalitarian universalism, the power system and the “free-market” capitalist system it helped create in Palestine generated familiar kinds of political and economic inequality. Specifically, it conjured a political-economic order based on a Jewish national scale in which the Arabs were expected to supply the menial labor power in return for the economic development that was to lift all boats.

Review of Ignacio Corona and Alejandro Madrid, eds. 2008. Postnational Musical Identities: Cultural Production, Distribution, and Consumption in a Globalized Scenario. Lanham: Lexington Books.

In Postnational Musical Identities, Ignacio Corona and Alejandro Madrid bring together twelve scholars working with (primarily) popular music in (primarily) Mexico and Latin America to consider the relationship between music, identity, and globalization. Assuming that identity is inherent to human subjectivity, the editors analyze the relationship between ethnic and national musical identifications and the globalizing processes that might rearrange, reinscribe, or call into question such correlations. Corona and Madrid layout their frames for thinking about globalization and music (i.e., “The Idea of the Postnational,” “Music Scholarship in Times of Postnationality,” and “The Collapse of Grand Narratives in Popular Music”) in the introductory chapter, “The Postnational Turn in Music Scholarship and Music Marketing.” They rely heavily on cultural studies and postmodernist scholars such as Stuart Hall (1996) and Frederick Jameson (1998), on pop music scholars drawing on these tradition such as Tony Mitchell (1996); on Appadurai’s (1990) basic charter for an anthropology of globalization (his famous “-scapes” framework); and on Hardt and Negri’s (2000) vision of the “postnational,” neoliberal political-economic order.

Generational Precarity, Education, and the Crisis of Capitalism: Conventional, Neo-Keynesian, and Marxian Perspectives

In the wake of the global financial crisis, societies across the world are attempting to manage potentially destabilizing levels of youth unemployment and underemployment. New terms have entered the popular lexicon such as ‘generation jobless’, ‘the new underclass’, and ‘the precariat’ in order to describe a generation of young people struggling to acquire secure livelihoods in the most dismal labor market since the Great Depression. This article draws on analytical resources from critical sociology of education and heterodox political economy in order to critique orthodox economic diagnoses of generational precarity as a human capital problem. It argues that while neo-Keynesian accounts provide an important corrective to certain aspects of conventional (neoclassical/neoliberal) viewpoints, they ultimately fall short of the explanatory power of Marxian analysis, particularly concerning the primacy of class relations and the contradictory role of employment within an increasingly crisis-ridden global capitalism.

The Impact of Turkey's Current Corruption Crisis on ITS Economy

Corruption is one of the main problems of the Turkish economy and society. It played an important part in all economic crises since civil governments came into power again after the third, last putsch in 1980. But in opposite to all the economic crises before, the current one is almost exclusively based on corruption. On December 17, 2013 Turkey's officials and the public were shocked by surprise, when the first arrests took place. Later on, even the prime minister seemed to be involved, as on 24 February, 2014 voice recordings of him are circulated in the internet in which he orders his son to dispose large sums of cash. As the ongoing crisis is caused predominantly by one factor, corruption, it will be interesting to see, how this factor can directly influence the economic situation of a country. The paper, therefore, will investigate how the sudden discovery of corruption in December 2013 impacted Turkey's economy, particularly foreign direct investment and forced the immediate restructuring of the political economy in order to rebuild lost trust.

Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism has been a popular concept within anthropological scholarship over the past decade; this very popularity has also elicited a fair share of criticism. This review examines current anthropological engagements with neoliberalism and explains why the concept has been so attractive for anthropologists since the millennium. It briefly outlines the history of neoliberal thought and explains how neoliberalism is different from late capitalism. Although neoliberalism is a polysemic concept with multiple referents, anthropologists have most commonly understood neoliberalism in two main ways: as a structural force that affects people's life-chances and as an ideology of governance that shapes subjectivities. Neoliberalism frequently functions as an index of the global political-economic order and allows for a vast array of ethnographic sites and topics to be contained within the same frame. However, as an analytical framework, neoliberalism can also obscure ethnographic particularities and foreclose certain avenues of inquiry.

Sounding the Mexican Nation: Intellectuals, Radio Broadcasting, and the Revolutionary State in the 1920s

This essay examines early radio broadcasting in 1920s Mexico. I particularly focus on the competing intellectuals involved in shaping Mexico City broadcasting, and how the incorporation of these varying artists, writers, and technicians shaped business practices, the Mexican state, and nationalism in the revolutionary era. It appeared to some intellectuals that radio would bring about a more open, democratic society that embraced an exciting, globally-connected future. To others, radio represented a static-filled future of cheapened culture and imitation that would remain a knock-off, but perhaps that could assist in the “civilization” of Mexico. Foreshadowing Mexico’s increasingly multicultural future, early radio broadcasters managed to settle on nothing and accommodate all. Likewise, instead of enforcing their own vision for broadcasting, officials of the new revolutionary government embraced the contending perspectives. They pursued this path because of their own inability to enforce their will and, subsequently, as an attempt to incorporate outside forces shaping broadcasting into the state apparatus. Despite the sometimes contradictory projections that resulted, the inclusion of diverse but popular intellectuals ensured that the growth of Mexican broadcasting mirrored and reinforced the new political-economic order.

Sounding the Mexican Nation: Intellectuals, Radio Broadcasting, and the Revolutionary State in the 1920s

This essay examines early radio broadcasting in 1920s Mexico. I particularly focus on the competing intellectuals involved in shaping Mexico City broadcasting, and how the incorporation of these varying artists, writers, and technicians shaped business practices, the Mexican state, and nationalism in the revolutionary era. It appeared to some intellectuals that radio would bring about a more open, democratic society that embraced an exciting, globally-connected future. To others, radio represented a static-filled future of cheapened culture and imitation that would remain a knock-off, but perhaps that could assist in the “civilization” of Mexico. Foreshadowing Mexico's increasingly multicultural future, early radio broadcasters managed to settle on nothing and accommodate all. Likewise, instead of enforcing their own vision for broadcasting, officials of the new revolutionary government embraced the contending perspectives. They pursued this path because of their own inability to enforce their will and, subsequently, as an attempt to incorporate outside forces shaping broadcasting into the state apparatus. Despite the sometimes contradictory projections that resulted, the inclusion of diverse but popular intellectuals ensured that the growth of Mexican broadcasting mirrored and reinforced the new political-economic order.

Christian Political Economics, Richard Whately and Irish Poor Law Theory

AbstractThe Irish poor law debate of the 1830s has largely been overlooked, but is a substantial source in understanding the impact of social theory concerning ‘virtue’ on social policy making in the early nineteenth century and on into the present time. The Chair of the Royal Commission for Inquiring into the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland (1833–36) was the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, Richard Whately, a leading figure in intellectual endeavour in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although his contributions to theology, economics and education have been reassessed, his central role in poor law thought is not well understood. This article examines the key tenets of his social theory and reassesses their impact on the Irish poor law debate. Whately was an Oxford Noetic (Greek for ‘reasoners’) committed to merging the study of natural theology and political economy in order to encourage ever greater levels of virtue on individual and societal levels. He believed that individual and social lives were designed to advance through the reciprocal exchange of labour, goods and ideas in a free and open market economy. Ireland in the 1830s presented the ideal opportunity for Whately to express his theory of moral growth and social advance in terms of poor law policy, directed towards modifying circumstances to make possible the development of individual abilities while avoiding measures which would encourage vice or discourage virtue.

Tempest in the Andes? Part 1: Agrarian Reform and Peasant Differentiation in Cotopaxi (Ecuador)

This paper, published in two parts, contains an analysis of the links between the ‘agrarian question’ in the Ecuadorian Andes and the creation of a network of indigenous‐peasant organizations that became the backbone of the national indigenous movement. Based on a monographic study in the province of Cotopaxi, in Ecuador's central sierra, I explore the relations between agrarian and social change. I analyse the agrarian roots of Andean ethnic platforms at the local level, attempting to see how those processes that politicized ethnicity came about between the 1960s and the first decade of the twenty‐first century. Beginning with the redistributive results of the state‐driven agrarian reform (1964–73), the paper demonstrates that the articulation of the contemporary indigenous movement cannot be explained without an understanding of the implications that the reform process entailed and the synergies it unleashed, amongst these being an increase in the internal differentiation of the peasantry until then subject to the power of large estate owners. Throughout this process, the leaders, authentic organic intellectuals, played a fundamental role, picking up the reins of the organizations, weaving their own political discourse and becoming independent of their external allies. In a second stage, the NGOs and cooperation agencies that focused their attention on the indigenous world made organizational strengthening a banner of their work on the ground, consolidating that structural transformation. In this paper, I explore the deep roots of the agrarian system's political economy in order to come to a full understanding of the social differentiation process and the ethnicization of the peasant movement. This contributes towards the comparative reflection of other scenarios in the Andean region and, in general, of those Latin American spaces characterized by the presence of significant contingents of indigenous‐peasant populations.

Hidden privatization of public education in Cambodia: Equity implications of private tutoring

The international construction of a new political economic order in Cambodia has had contradictory effects on education. The rhetoric of democracy thrives alongside corruption and human rights abuses, the Education for All initiative exists alongside privatization of public education, and many international education development efforts perpetuate (post)colonial legacies. In this context, private tutoring has emerged as an essential part of the public education system. A mastery of the required curriculum is now possible only through a careful combination of public schooling and private tutoring. Only those who can afford private tutoring thus receive access to a complete national education and have greater opportunities to successfully graduate from public school. Drawing on a preliminary analysis of qualitative and quantitative data, including 26 classroom observations, six focus groups with a total of 37 participants, grade tracking of 36 students, and informal interviews with 10 participants, this article examines the nature, scope, and equity implications of private tutoring in Cambodia. The article concludes by explaining how a seamless combination of public schooling and private tutoring creates an educational arrangement that continues to stratify Cambodian youth along socioeconomic lines.

When Governance Gets Going: Certifying ‘Better Cotton’ and ‘Better Sugarcane’

ABSTRACTAs many new certification systems for commodities have been established over the past decade, scholars have devoted sustained attention to the ways that these multi‐stakeholder governance initiatives have transformed the industries in which they were launched. With a few notable exceptions, studies in this area have continued to focus on the development and impacts of new governance mechanisms, and on the sectoral or industrial changes that have ensued. In contrast to these ‘inside‐out’ perspectives on governance innovation and change, this article considers how two prominent yet relatively under‐studied commodity governance initiatives have been shaped by the broader political economic order in which they operate. To offer an ‘outside‐in’ account of the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) and Bonsucro (formerly the Better Sugarcane Initiative), the article details recent changes in what the author terms the ‘world commodity order’, and situates the BCI and Bonsucro within this order. From this vantage point, the author ultimately makes two analytical claims: (i) that the world commodity order has not precluded the differential institutionalization of these initiatives; and (ii) that aspects of the order have circumscribed the potential of the BCI and Bonsucro to deliver pro‐poor business practices.

Crime, Justice, and Inequality: Oh Canada, Where Art Thou?

Since Canada’s colonial beginnings, it has become increasingly riddled with classism, racism, sexism, and other damaging outcomes of structured social inequality. In 2006, however, many types of social injustice were turbo-charged under the federal leadership of the Harper government. For example, a recent southern Ontario study shows that less than half of working people between the ages of 25 and 65 have full-time jobs with benefits. The main objective of this paper is to critique the dominant Canadian political economic order and the pain and suffering it has caused for millions of people. Informed by left realism and other progressive ways of knowing, I also suggest some ways of turning the tide.

What Food is to be Kept Safe and for Whom? Food-Safety Governance in an Unsafe Food System

This paper argues that discussion of new food-safety governance should be framed by the realization that the dominant food system within which food-safety governance is designed to makes food safe is itself a structural and systemic sources of food un-safety, poor health and a future of food insecurity for many. For some, an appropriate policy response lies in addressing the connections between the food system and diseases such as heart disease, obesity and diabetes. For others it means subsuming food-safety governance within food security governance. For yet others, safe food implies food sovereignty governance and the primacy of a climate change resilient food system. Conventional approaches to food-safety governance are typically framed within a liability model of responsibility that has limited usefulness for addressing institutional, structural or systemic sources of harm such as those critics increasingly attribute to the dominant food system and which are not amenable to remedy by food-safety governance as it is widely understood. One cannot identify critical hazard points where risk is to be managed. These are food-system safety challenges. Because food-safety governance is so deeply political there needs to be greater attention to issues of governance rather than the more usual focus on the technologies of food-safety. Feminist political theorists have much to contribute to re-thinking food-safety governance in the context of diversity and the complexities of power. One could usefully start with the simple questions, “what food is to be kept-safe, for whom and who is the subject of food-safety governance in a post-Westphalian political economic order?” These questions can help unpack both the narrow parochialism and the misleading universalism of food-safety talk. This paper answers that neither the citizens of a particular state (or network of states) nor the falsely universalizing identity of ‘the consumer’ are adequate answers to these questions about ‘who’ and ‘what’. Answering these questions about who and what with respect to food-safety governance brings issues of justice, ecology, public health and the legitimacy and nature of governance itself into the heart of food-safety discussions.

A Theory of the Dynamics of Entangled Political Economy with Application to the Federal Reserve

This paper develops the theory of entangled political economy by outlining a process by which the political-economic order can become increasingly entangled. The theory posits that a Big Player polity organization, a key feature of which is a lack of a hard budget constraint, exports this feature to the economy organizations it oversees. The channel through which it does so is the repeated interactions of economy and polity organizations’ agents during times of crisis. The actions of the Federal Reserve, in particular its bailing out of large financial houses in the latter part of the 20th century and the most recent financial crisis, are used as a historical illustration of this theory. The paper also discusses the possibility of constitutional craftsmanship as a solution to the undesirable consequences that accompany increased economy-polity entanglement.

The Challenge of Refurbished State Capitalism: Implications for the Global Political Economic Order

Will the global financial crisis of 2008 represent a symbolic juncture in the geo-economics of globalization? There are differing views, with some arguing that the Washington Consensus is dead, while others holding that the fundaments of the neo-liberal global order remain intact. This article engages with this debate by putting three distinct questions analytically prior: First, is there a political economic model that actually stands in contradistinction to the Washington Consensus and the neo-liberal global order? Second, if there is a potential challenge to the neo-liberal order, what exactly is it? And third, if such a challenge exists, what precisely is its nature and logic as it interacts with the neo-liberal global order? This article argues that there is, indeed, a challenger: refurbished forms of state capitalism. However, the nature and logic of the state capitalist challenge to the U.S.-centered neo-liberal system is fundamentally different from the Soviet challenge during the Cold War. Diverse formations of capitalism are co-dependent on the global level in the present era. Refurbished state capitalism is no exception. It represents an “in-system” challenge, since it does not attempt to actively undermine and supplant the neo-liberal order, but rather to gain influence over it. New forms of refurbished state capitalisms are thus simultaneously in symbiosis and in rivalry with the neo-liberal global order.

The public utilities war and corruption in Ukraine

Non-payment of utility bills, evasion of payment through a variety of corruption schemes and fraud, and unauthorised shifting of the costs of utilities consumed are widespread in Ukraine among the public and businesses, often with the involvement of local and central government officials. This research is focused on the public default, its reasons and consequences for the defaulters, and on corruption in the public utilities. It is primarily based on interviews with experts, current and former employees of public utilities, and consumers. The findings have implications for the legitimisation of political power and economic reorientation, fairness and order in Ukraine, and the impact of corruption on the failing economic infrastructure.

The Domestication of Open Government Data Advocacy in the United Kingdom: A Neo‐Gramscian Analysis

AbstractThe article adopts a neo‐Gramscian analytical framework developed in the field of International Political Economy in order to analyze the relationship between an online collective of civil society actors and U.K. government policymakers in the case of the UK's Open Government Data (OGD) initiative. The aim of the article is to consider the neo‐Gramscian notion of trasformismo as a useful conceptual tool for exploring the relations between the OGD advocates and policymakers within the U.K. state. Empirical evidence is presented which suggests that the notion of trasformismo is able to illuminate some of the political processes of absorption, adaptation, and distortion which have emerged during the development of the UK's OGD initiative, and which have functioned to restrict the counterhegemonic potential of OGD in order to shape the initiative toward a distinctly neoliberal framework for action.

"Relationships and Money, Money and Relationships": Anxieties around Partner Choice and Changing Economies in Post–Soviet Cuba

"Relationshipsand Money, Money and Relationships": Anxieties aroundPartnerChoice and Changing Economies in Post-SovietCuba Elise Andaya Now, everyone has family ... overseas that help them because here the salaries don't suffice. And if they don't have family overseas, people go looking ... for a partner with money, and that's the way it goes. Relationships and money, money and relationships. I'm telling you, girl, you have to survive and with the problems we have, it's not easy. —Lisette Fuentes, 28, homemaker Feminist scholars have long contended that putatively private concerns around gender, kinship, and reproduction serve as key entry points for exploring broader social struggles and transformations. Building on their insights, I use the discourses around partner choice in contemporary Cuba as a lens onto experiences of social change fol lowing the devastating economic crisis precipitated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba's principal trading partner. As with other modernist projects, the early Cuban revolutionaries viewed time and history as linear processes, in which the gradual perfeccionamiento (per fecting) of society with the passage of time would bring about a fully realized socialist society. Ideologies and practices of marriage and kin ship were considered one marker of this progress toward el hombre nuevo FeministStudies39, no. 3. © 2013 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 728 Elise Andaya 729 (the new man) and the new nation; orthodoxy held that in socialism's egalitarian society, romantic partnerships would be based on per sonal compatibility and mutual respect rather than concerns around economic or social mobility. The dramatic re-shaping of Cuba's economy and society in the post-Soviet era, however, has given rise to new economic inequali ties as well as new strategies for survival and well-being. As the epi graph above suggests, kinship relations can often take center stage in these negotiations. In this article, I examine the perceived impact of the economic crisis on practices of partner choice in contemporary Cuba. I argue that anxieties around changing ideologies and practices of gender and kinship reflect a broader disquiet about changing social and economic hierarchies in Cuba and the future of the socialist proj ect in a new global and local political-economic order. When socialism emerged in Cuba, it did so in a highly stratified society shaped by nearly four hundred years of a sugar-plantation and slave-based economy under Spanish colonialism (1515-1898) fol lowed by fiftyyears of US influence during which Havana was inter nationally known as "the playground of the Caribbean." The 1959 revolution held out the promise of a radically egalitarian society in which the state would satisfy the needs of all of its citizens, eradicat ing the racial, economic, and gender inequalities that the revolution aries viewed as the legacy of capitalism and colonialism. Bolstered by economic subsidies from the Soviet Union, the new state guaranteed support for citizens through full employment; established the ration system to ensure an egalitarian distribution of household necessi ties; inaugurated national systems of social services, education, and healthcare; desegregated public spaces; abolished laws governing "legitimate" and "illegitimate" children that disproportionately dis criminated against children born of race- and class-mixed unions; and wrote the 1975 Family Code that explicitly articulated the shared role of women and men in the ideal socialist family. This social transformation, the revolutionaries argued, was also dependent on the production of a new socialist subject who would be motivated by values of solidarity, morality, and collectivity rather than by individualist and materialist interests. Yet although Cuban socialism declared the birth of the "new man," it was perhaps more crucially on the practices of women that claims to social progress 730 Elise Andaya were staked. While the revolutionaries' Marxist-Leninist framework meant that changes in class relations and relations of production were generally prioritized over explicit gender or familial policy, reforms aimed at incorporating women into the public labor force inevitably reshaped broader gender relations. The reconfiguration of colonial gender and kinship ideologies, which emphasized women's domestic roles as the source of their moral authority, was a particular goal of socialist reform efforts. Female participation in public labor, the rev olutionaries predicted, would not only contribute to building social ist society but...