Economic Political Power Research Articles

VIEWING TRADE LIBERALIZATION THROUGH A FEMINIST LENS: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF THE COUNTERHEGEMONIC DISCOURSE OF GENDER AND TRADE ADVOCACY GROUPS

An intersectional feminist approach informs qualitative content analyses of gender and trade advocacy websites in order to gain insights into the relation between trade liberalization and women in the global South. Findings include these websites are advocating for more representation in policymaking institutions spanning the global and local divide; emphasizing the need for networks within and outside institutions; and advocating for alternatives to free trade. The diverse and often contradictory understandings and strategies displayed by these websites arise from concern with giving voice to local needs and women in the South. These findings underscore the contributions a feminist approach makes to global political economy research by bringing attention to the heterogeneity of global political economic processes and power relations, and providing insights as to how global counter-hegemonic efforts can embrace diversity rather than being homogenizing.

Connecting political economies of energy in South Africa

The South African energy debate is and will remain a heated one. Given South Africa's history of racial inequality and contemporary concerns around sustainability, much of it rightly focuses on the links between energy, poverty and the environment. Yet, many contributions to the (mainstream) debate seem to have a somewhat one-sided focus that might hamper rather than stimulate the understanding of these links. They either display a strong technical, quantitative bias and/or lean towards rather simplistic ideas about policy processes and dynamics. The article argues that many of these analyses could benefit greatly from a critical focus on the political economy of energy: the political–economic power structures that influence both many energy policies and the issues of energy equality and sustainability. Two major global developments emphasise the importance of this focus: the recent financial crisis and South Africa's role in the increasingly tense geopolitics of energy in Africa. The article concludes with some suggestions on how currently disparate political economies of energy could be better connected.

Constructing power through law: Private law pluralism and harmonization in the global political economy

ABSTRACT In this paper, I explore two central characteristics of the mobilization of law in the global political economy – the role of legal pluralism and the importance of legal expertise. The interaction of these two factors goes a long way towards explaining the ways in which legal norms, actors, and institutions have been enrolled to construct and organize powerful actors in the global economy. In order to explore these dynamics, the article focuses on the area of private international law and analyzes the ongoing effort to harmonize the legal rules governing secured credit. This case study helps to highlight the connections between legal expertise and projects of political economic power, and to work out a fundamental dynamic generated by legal pluralism – the combination of continued conflicts between powerful actors in a context of shared understandings of the basic rules of the global economic system. I conclude by considering the obstacles presented by these dynamics for projects that aim at harnessing international economic law to the needs and interests of the weak.

The New Triad Power: Key Players in the Promise of Global CSR

The world of Global CSR is typified by transnational issues and crises that are a product of our historical maturation as individual country entities. Effective response to these global ethical, moral and physical problems requires the response by society's most socially, economically and politically powerful players in a collaborative and integrated manner. The thesis of this paper addresses the thought that those players implicit in most of the negative history and many of the problems presently facing the global community are the very players that must be included within the solution: Trans National Corporations (TNC), Non Governmental Organizations (NGO) and Supra-National Unions (SNU). Through their interaction and interdependency these actors form a triad of political influence and economic power that dwarfs the possibilities of other organizations and combinations considered. These three entities work in a symbiotic and self-reinforcing relationship and only through this inter-reliance can a solution powerful and focused enough be developed to redress the pending ecological damage and return the world to an economically sustainable future. Coupled with the above, a necessary shift in our most cherished concepts of Nation State and self regulating markets is needed in order for stakeholders to see and appreciate the true interconnectedness of the global system.

Axes of projection: poetics of urbanisation and globalisation in the Americas

Modernist architecture in Latin America was originally intended to propel the region into the ‘developed First World’. Meanwhile, modernist architecture in Anglo-America has often served to consolidate the political-economic power of the ‘First World’, especially in the age of globalisation. This essay examines the First/Third World divide through two historical ‘moments’ of modernism, beginning in Brazil and ending in California. Brazilian modernism reached its apex with the construction of Brasília (1955–1960), designed principally by two undisputed masters of Brazilian modernism, Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. The politico-economic ambitions of Brazil's modernist architecture, however, appear to have ended in failure. Rather than curing underdevelopment, modernism (and modernisation) may have exacerbated it. Yet for all modernism's failures, we should not assume that history has somehow left Brazil behind, as if Brazilian architecture were caught in some historical time-lag. In this essay I will test this notion by considering Richard Meier's Getty Center complex in Los Angeles. In projecting an ‘imperial’ power of globalisation onto Los Angeles, the Getty Center strives to create new meaning for its urban milieu. Yet in doing so it may be repeating problems manifest in Brasília.

Tasmania's Tamar Valley Pulp Mill: A Comparison of Planning Processes Using a Good Environmental Governance Framework

In November 2004, the Tasmanian government requested the state's planning body, the Resource Planning and Development Commission (RPDC), to undertake an evaluation of a proposal to establish a pulp mill at Long Reach near Bell Bay on Tasmania's Tamar Estuary. In early 2007, Gunns Limited, the project's proponent, pulled out of the RPDC process and the government established an alternative, ‘fast‐track’ process under the Pulp Mill Assessment Act (PMAA). This article evaluates the RPDC and the PMAA assessment processes using a ‘good environmental governance’ framework composed of eight criteria – transparency, accountability, openness, balance, deliberation, efficiency, science and risk. The comparison reveals that although the RPDC process fell short of the ideal, it was markedly superior to the PMAA process that replaced it. The case highlights how political economic power can be used to the detriment of public planning and the communities and environment that rely on it.

Dancing with the Devil?: Notes on a Free University

The Magna Charta Universitatum (1988) states that: ‘The University is an autonomous institution at the heart of societies’. It does not explicitly say what autonomy denotes. However, very clearly, academic freedom is an integral part of an autonomous university: ‘To meet the needs of the world around it, its research and teaching must be morally and intellectually independent of all political authority and intellectually independent of all political authority and economic power.’ At the same time, the role of the university is widely discussed in contemporary Europe. The main changes which affect the current debates on the role of the university are economization, privatisation and internationalisation, which are not direct aims of the Bologna process, but still can be seen as indirect contributions of it (Masschelein and Simons, 2005). What does this actually imply? And what are our reactions to it within the university tradition of academic freedom?

Broccoli and Desire

Abstract: Tracing the commodity chain of broccoli from Nashville, Tennessee supermarkets to Maya farmers in highland Guatemala, this paper examines relations of desire and political economic power. We argue that the global broccoli trade is shot through with desires—desires of Western consumers to eat healthy foods as well as desires for Maya farmers to get ahead economically. Such desires simultaneously subvert and sustain the hegemonic constellations that anchor crucial nodes in the international broccoli trade.

BOOK REVIEW | A Violent World: TV News Images of Middle Eastern Terror and War

Having mainly written on cinema during his career as a lecturer on film and television at Tel Aviv University, Nitzan Ben-Shaul forays into new territory in his most recent book A violent world: TV news images of Middle Eastern terror and war by looking at television news. He sets out to apply cinematic analysis techniques to news without producing an overly deterministic analysis. While recognizing that there are significant differences between film studies and news analysis, he nonetheless finds points of convergence. He uses three major sources: coverage from CNN, the Israeli Broadcasting Authorities’ Channel 1 and Channel 2, and the Palestinian PATV. Building on a Gramscian notion of hegemony in which elite interests are presented as universally beneficial, he argues that post-modernism, derived from post-Fordist globalization, is the dominant ideology in the US. Inherently de-centered, this core ideology conceals configurations of political economic power. Thus the US can maintain global relations in which peripheral elites engage in “double-talk” aimed at maintaining the autonomy of the state apparatus while enlisting the support of the superpower. These ideologies, he argues, are embedded in television as a medium and news as a format. Thus he rejects a conception which envisages the media progressing inevitably towards objectivity. Rather he argues for a critical media theory which examines the production of dominant ideologies through the media. It is these ideologies, he suggests, which work to legitimate the state apparatus. Ben-Shaul uses qualitative content analysis to compare three stations’ coverage of two different types of conflicts. First, the “War on Terror,” or what he terms a “direct core-periphery conflict,” and second the Al Aqsa Intifada, an indirect one. Unfortunately he spends the most time analyzing CNN, which has been the subject of numerous content analyses, and the least space analyzing PATV, which has not previously received much scholarly attention.

NIMBY and the Civic Good

Policy scholars dedicated to efficient urban and industrial planning have long tried to understand the “NIMBY syndrome” in order to overcome local resistance to controversial land uses. However, environmental policy scholars have begun to rethink the NIMBY syndrome, arguing that the concept is authority‐centered and reduces land‐use disputes to a moral struggle between rational/civic‐minded planners and irrational/self‐interested opponents. After describing a struggle over locating homeless services in Seattle, this paper extends this larger critique to disputes over human service facilities and argues that the NIMBY syndrome framework fails to capture the political and ethical complexities of locating human services. A conclusion examines how critical sociologists can still critique imbalances of political–economic power in the planning process without deploying the NIMBY syndrome nomenclature.

Poles of market growth?

Control over communications is a crucial concomitant of political-economic power. China’s emergence as an important force within the global capitalist system is thus giving rise to a substantially greater presence in the system of international communications. A series of initiatives, briefly inventoried here, aims to win a place for Chinese interests across the entire spectrum of media and telecommunications systems, spanning hardware, software and services. How should we interpret these in the context of China’s rise? Chinese initiatives in communications and information are best apprehended neither as a developing country’s attempt to redress glaring imbalances in the global communications system, though of course they contain traces of this, nor as a current threat to the global dominance of the United States, though over the long term this might change, much as the US challenged and ultimately unseated British control over international communications. Rather, they are seen here as contributing to the ongoing structural reconfiguration of the political economy of transnational capitalism. The likely outcome is greater, rather than lesser, instability.

More than `Anglo-American', it is `Western': hegemony in geography from a Hungarian perspective

The paper assesses the inequalities of the production of geographical knowledge mainly against the backdrop of the East–West relations, which still dominate Hungarian practice. However, it also offers examples of Anglo-American hegemony making itself felt more acutely; or of Hungarian geographers, at the receiving end of these dimensions of hegemony, producing hegemony in a different system of relations. Investigating the political economic power relations underlying this hegemony and the social agents involved in `hegemony-producing' helps establish potential strategies of putting an end to the inequalities of academic knowledge production. Some possibilities of these strategies are outlined.

Religious‐historical perspective on conflicts and violence: secular materialism versus spiritual humanism

International conflicts and violence are similar in nature to domestic conflicts and violence which are also similar to those taking place between individuals. Only difference between them is that of magnitude that increases as one moves from individual to societal national level and finally to international level of conflicts. The fundamental question at issue here is that of self‐interest with respect to social and political authority and economic power. The conflicts become most intense and violence gets widest and most cruel at the international level. There are two broad methods in dealing with this problem – use of force to coerce and subjugate or application of the power of persuasion to win the hearts and minds of the people. The former is the conventional secular materialistic method but often used invoking the name of religion and the latter is that of true spiritual humanistic practices and applications in preserving and promoting the cause of all of humanity.While the first does not require the system to be fair and just, the latter predicates them. The foundation of the first is “us” vs. “them” as it divides humanity into many nation states, but that of the second is “us” vs. “us” since it recognizes and practices universality of humanity. More importantly, the former grants unfettered authority to the leaders of the society in the form of sovereignty of the “nation state”, the latter subjugates the authority of the leaders to that of a higher supreme Authority.

The State as a Chosen Woman: Brideservice and the Feeding of Tributaries in the Inka Empire

The Inka state was gendered in complex and apparently contradictory ways. In military contexts, it became masculine, emphasizing conquest us the basis of men's individual matrimonial claims and the Inka sovereign's right to "give" them women. However, in its civilian tributary system, the Inka state assumed a female guise, providing food, drink, and clothing to dependent tributaries as an expression of its political-economic power, according to the Andean idiom of mink a. By extending Collier and Rosaldo's notion of brideservice. this paper explores how these "opposed" genderings of the Inka state actually implied each other and formed a single complex, [gender, consumption, labor, state. Andes]

Distributional Coalitions and the Politics of Economic Reform in Latin America

For much of the discipline of economics, a closed economy is seen as the result of efforts of distributional coalitions and rent seekers to maintain sector-specific protections. Accordingly, economic liberalization is explained by the policy consistency of uncompromising reform elites. Students of the politics of economic adjustment in the developing world, in turn, have argued that reform programs concentrate costs in the present and disperse benefits in the future. Hence, losers are prepared to engage in collective action, whereas prospective winners, facing uncertainty about payoffs, remain disorganized. They thus posit the cohesiveness and insularity of policymakers as the main variable for explaining successful reform. Both economists and political scientists, therefore, adopt a collective action approach that overlooks how groups organizein supportof liberalization.In the recent Latin American experience, however, these reforms have preserved market reserves for firms that provided vital political support to, and often colluded with, policymaking elites. This setting has thus reproduced incentives for rent-seeking behavior, even in the presence of comprehensive liberalization. This evidence supports two interrelated theoretical claims. First, distributional coalitions may proliferate when the state withdraws from the economy, not only when it intervenes. Second, interest-based variables retain explanatory power in political economy—which state autonomy arguments disregard—irrespective of whether the economy is closed or open—which neoclassical perspectives overlook. To highlight the centrality of interest groups favoring marketization, therefore, the article suggests modifications to the dominant theories of collective action and the literature on the politics of economic adjustment.

Politics of the development of small and medium‐sized firms in Japan

Since the 1980s, small and medium sized firms in Japan have adjusted themselves remarkably to the market changes of the post‐Fordism industry, and have significantly contributed to the country's economy. This paper emphasizes the interaction of the state and local producers in building a social environment for nurturing the development of small and medium‐sized firms in Japan. An important role assumed by the state is the creation of local firm‐supporting institutions which have been the foundation of constructing regional industrial system. These local institutions were effectively utilized by the local producers of small and medium sized firms. In this process, central political power and local economic power fused in organizing ‘production’ in a new way of horizontal collaboration.

The Political Economy of Monetary Policy in the European Union: The Case of Belgium

The neoliberal notion of globalization implies a homogenizing of international markets into the Anglo-Saxon model. Drawing upon work by Gerald Epstein, this paper describes the changes in Belgium's political-economic power relations as the process of European integration has progressed from the 1960s to the 1990s. It then analyzes the changes in monetary policy and markets that have accompanied this move towards the European Monetary Union.

The political economy of Israeli protectionism: An empirical analysis

The aim of this study was to examine the tariff structure in Israel in terms of the four main theoretical models of endogenous commercial policy. The empirical results for levels of protection in Israel support several of the models. In particular the pressure group model performs well and especially the variable that represents the lobbying power of the Histadrut/public sector in Israel. This is consistent with the longstanding political power of the Histadrut in Israel. The Histadrut's role in the Israeli economy rises above the “western” concept of a labor union and takes on a quasi-governmental function. The clearest example of this elevated status is seen when the government included the Histadrut as part of the commission charged with the responsibility of carrying out the “nominal liberalization” process of the 1960s. Evidently it is this kind of political-economic power that allowed the Histadrut to affect the level of protection Histadrut-dominated industries received.

The Tension between Religion and Culture

a concentration of political-economic power in hands of only a few ego-centered empire builders. Others emphasize need to combine internal (emic) principles of understanding with external (etic) interpretive categories and critical analyses. Can traditional Buddhist-Christian claims be reformulated in general (universal, neutral?) categories without distorting central features of religious claims and practices? Should aspects of traditional Buddhist-Christian claims be changed (re-formed) in light of rational criteria, scientific explanations and social-economic theory? Can a person see the in a coherent way if one takes seriously interpretations internal to Buddhist and Christian communities, as well as external critical principles? Or, are realms of discourse and structures of evaluation so different that they exist only as alternatives? How does vocabulary we use and selection of issues engaged contribute to, or eliminate possibilities for, a harmonious global culture? Perhaps we can begin to reflect on problem areas, and consider several approaches for living together in a world of multiple faiths, ideologies, and procedures for defining truth and authentic living.

SIR JOHN RUTHERFURD: A FIFTEENTH CENTURY ABERDEEN BURGESS

Dr. Grant comments that in later medieval Scotland men such asJohn Mercer of Perth and Adam Forrester of Edinburgh founded landed families and that as early as the fourteenth century there was a well established social movement upwards of burgess-administrator-landowner in Scotland.1 This trend reflected the growing political status and economic power of Scottish merchants within late medieval society. In this broad and general social and economic context, Aberdeen, by the fifteenth century, was one of Scotland's premier royal burghs. It had been encouraged and supported in its early development by crown grants, and concessions encompassing both local and overseas trading privileges together with substantial town owned landed assets. Subsequent economic growth was maintained by the supply of commercial products from the burgh's extensive agricultural hinterland, supporting a vigorous commercial life at a domestic and foreign level. This picture is partly supported by some fragmentary tax evidence for Scottish burghs north of the River Forth for the years 1485, 1495 and 1535. They help demonstrate both Aberdeen's regional and national economic pre-eminence in the later middle ages as shown in Table 1.