Shock Doctrine Research Articles

Rebuilding Together Through Buen Vivir: Democratic Collectives and Ecuadorian Liberation Theologies in the Face of the IMF and Disaster Capitalism

ABSTRACT Disaster capitalism and shock doctrine have come to the fore in Ecuador after the 2016 earthquake and 2022 economic crisis and national strike. In opposition to the form of shock doctrine these two disasters highlight are theological anthropologies and praxis of religious alternatives to care and rebuilding. A disrupted research trip explores the competing visions of development, governance, and flourishing between the International Monetary Fund’s presence in Ecuador with shock doctrine and local economic collectives’ and the national solidarity movement’s liberative pastoral responses through Buen Vivir, an indigenous praxis of interdependence. The formation of democratic economic collectives and the validation of solidarity in large-scale national strikes demonstrate the power of pastoral theological responses holding to an expansive vision of Buen Vivir and theological anthropologies insisting on interdependent practices of care, justice, and liturgy to bring about fundamental shifts to our understanding of good living and subjectivity of all living things.

The governance shock doctrine: Civic space in the pandemic

SummaryMotivationEmergencies heighten societies' need to be governed. Accordingly, the COVID‐19 pandemic put systems of public governance under severe pressure across the globe. Civic freedoms were widely curtailed for public health reasons. Scarce resources needed to be allocated swiftly, with little opportunity for debate.PurposeIn settings characterized by authoritarianism, violent conflict, and restricted civic space, relations between governments, civil society, and citizens at best tend to be fragile and fraught even in “normal” times. What happens when these settings are rocked by a profound shock such as the onset of a global pandemic?Methods and approachThis article is based on research on civic space and civic action shortly after the onset of the pandemic in three such settings—Mozambique, Nigeria, and Pakistan. Civil society advocates in each country tracked and interpreted events in real time, debated their responses, supplemented their own knowledge through key informant interviews, and compared experiences across countries.FindingsI argue that the three governments' responses to the COVID‐19 pandemic constitute a “governance shock doctrine,” based on the premise that shocks bring responses from the powerful that advance certain agendas. This patterned phenomenon, visible across the three countries, consists of “securitization” of the public health emergency, suppression of dissent, extension and centralization of executive powers, curtailment of press freedoms, and tightened regulation of civic space, including online space. Civic activism navigated or combated these attacks in various ways.Policy implicationsMeasures adopted in emergency situations tend to persist, threatening to lock civil society into living with pandemic‐era restrictions. Preventing this should be a global priority, and especially important where authoritarianism already looms. An energetic mobilization among national and international actors to reassert and protect civic space is needed if the erosion of civil liberties and normalization of autocratic governance wrought by the political‐military apparatus in so many countries during the COVID‐19 pandemic is not to become permanent, and if the inspired and progressive innovations in organic civic activism over the 2020–2021 crisis period are to survive and flourish.

The pandemic shock doctrine in an authoritarian context: the economic, bodily, and political precarity of Turkey’s journalists during the pandemic

What happens to journalists when hit by a pandemic in a country governed by authoritarian media regulations? We examine journalists’ experience in Turkey’s mainstream and alternative media and find that while the pandemic has deepened their economic precarity, journalists further suffer from bodily and political precarity. In the context of Covid, the body emerges as a site on which precarity with multiple dimensions (economic anxiety, illness, and state violence) is inscribed. Under the conditions of what we deem political precarity, most journalists cannot speak truth to power as the pandemic is politically instrumentalized. This retheorizing of precarity dewesternizes the term by connecting it to state-induced forms of violence relying on relations of political recognition and value ascription. We urge journalism and media labor studies to refrain from Eurocentricism and technological determinism that center the standard employment model and the disruptive cultures of technology at the expense of body and politics.

Has the University Always Been “Neoliberal”?

Has the University Always Been “Neoliberal”?

Trans Readings and Translocalities in Beyond the Pink Tide

Trans Readings and Translocalities in <i>Beyond the Pink Tide</i>

The Impact of the Changing World Order on the Situation of Central and Eastern Europe

This article presents the impact of the changing world order on the situation of Central and Eastern Europe, paying particular attention to Poland. It looks at the geopolitical and economic conditions during the regional superpower rivalry between the United States, China, Russia, and the European Union within the emerging multipolar order, which is manifested in the 17 + 1 format and the Three Seas Initiative. Poland, trying to get out of the peripheral status resulting from the neoliberal shock doctrine, is currently losing its ability to balance between China and the United States, is antagonizing Russia in the process, and weakening ties within the European Union. Changing its peripheral dependence requires a reevaluation of its stance toward Eurasian integration and its openness to China.

Lecturas del miedo y control social en la teoría sociocrítica y posmoderna

Históricamente el factor miedo a las amenazas ha desempeñado un rol fundamental en la legitimación de los sistemas políticos y sociales porque se presentan como la encarnación de un poder para la protección de personas y comunidades ante los distintos peligros que afectan a una sociedad determinada, de ahí que el miedo además se constituye en una fuerza que propicia en cada momento el despliego de los dispositivos del control social, formales e informales para disciplinar y castigar de ser preciso. El objetivo de este artículo científico radica en debatir distintas lecturas sobre el binomio: miedo y control social en los dominós del derecho, la teoría crítica de la sociedad, el pensamiento postestructuralista de Michel Foucault y la doctrina del shock. La investigación transcurrió en las coordenadas de la hermenéutica y la metódica de las entrevistas abiertas con guion semiestructurado como excusa para triangular los postulados de las teorías seleccionadas, la opinión de dos expertos en la materia y la perspectiva particular del equipo de investigación. Entre los hallazgos concluyentes de la investigación destacan que en cualquier escenario venidero las estrategias de resistencia civil y movilización ciudadana juegan un rol primordial para inclinar la balanza del lado de las democracias.

Media, Affect, and Authoritarian Futures in “New Turkey:” Spectacular Confessions on Television in the Post-Coup Era

AbstractA spectacular shock doctrine is reformatting Turkey since the failed coup in July 2016. We examine how the television economy transformed the organization behind the coup (FETÖ) from a public secret into a spectacle. We investigate the televised confessions of former Gulenists, who revealed the scandalous FETÖ’s inner workings live on television. We argue that former Gulenists’ media performances based on confession, apology, and spectacular secrecy captured public affect to justify their complicity with the putschists rather than bringing political justice. The government capitalized on these confessions as part of its strategic information warfare to tame the opposition after the coup, while reconstructing Gulenists as a weird cult rather than a political network. As the citizens were bombarded with affective televisual confessions, politicians secured authoritarian futures without a glimpse of justice, because these shows spectacularly erased the networks behind the coup.

Designing our sustainable energy future: A shock doctrine for energy

A lack of understanding amongst industry and government regarding future business model and policy routes for achieving renewable energy targets risks society falling short of the energy transition required to help limit global heating to 1.5 °C. Despite a lack of clarity regarding the business- and governance-models required to facilitate such a transition, the urgency for achieving this shift is becoming increasingly apparent amongst industry and government. This paper explores the business and governance-models seen as likely to facilitate the adoption and uptake of sufficient levels of VRE to meet the global energy sector's climate crisis mitigation responsibilities. A Grounded Theory approach was undertaken to investigate and analyse the results of 28 semi-structured interviews, the coding of which involved the identification of 4 themes and 12 sub-themes. These themes allowed the development of an overarching sectoral pathway solution, framed in the form of a ‘government keystone model’, that exemplifies the current sectoral reality that governments hold the power to clearly design and implement an economically, environmentally and societally beneficial shift to high levels of VRE. It is argued this proactive role could be adopted using the looming “shock” to the margins of traditional energy business models by rising levels of VRE.

The Covid-Shock Doctrine: Under the Tutorship of CoV-2, the Voice(s) From Poland.

These are two autoethnographic voices. We speak in a strange time: democracy dies, social justice dies. A lot of people have died of the virus, many die of fear. We write to protest against new neoliberal and neoconservative “shock doctrine.” We write together to protest against destructive self-absorption, isolation, and fear. It is protest-text. But we are not sure what we can do now.

Linking health justice, social justice, and climate justice

Linking health justice, social justice, and climate justice

The Silicon Doctrine

This article explores and theorises what is here termed the Silicon Doctrine (SD), that is the legal ideology underpinning the libertarian version of the digital economy promoted (among others) by Facebook, Uber, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google. The first part of the text explores the Silicon Doctrine’s Frankensteinian ideological roots. The second part of the text scrutinises three dimensions of the Silicon Doctrine: 1) data extraction; 2) domination of the informational infrastructure; and 3) labour exploitation. This article examines the social contract proposed by Silicon Valley, evaluating its two-sided role as a disruptive breakout from the twentieth century social model, and as a continuation of the neoliberal shock doctrine.

Echo natury: o politycznych skutkach katastrofy naturalnej w Borach Tucholskich w 2017 roku

The impact of natural disasters on politics is well known around the world. However, this phenomenon has not been studied in Poland. The author tries to explain the political events and phenomena that are connected with the natural disaster that hit the Tuchola Forest on the night of 11 and 12 August 2017 from the perspective of the shock doctrine and the world-systems theory. The author makes a hypothesis that local political elites try to take over power and, thanks to the political capital gained after the August’s disaster, they propose to establish a new municipality (Rytel) on the devastated area, against social interest. During the research, a number of political phenomena occurred, such as socio-political divisions in the Czersk municipality that determine the political preferences of the residents of Rytel and the municipality. It has been revealed that natural disasters are a catalyst of political conflicts in Poland.

Ireland Inc.: The corporatization of affective life in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland

Employing a framework of commercial nationalism, this article analyses how a post-Celtic Tiger Irish government aligned with elite interests has doubled down on its commitment to corporate citizenship. Despite the depredations of this era being directly attributable to the irrational exuberance of the Celtic Tiger period and lapses in financial regulation, Ireland post-2008 is marked by a radical forgetfulness and defined by ‘Shock Doctrine’ regulatory policies that have installed corporatism at the heart of everyday life. Key features of this landscape include ongoing governmental facilitation of tax avoidance by multinational corporations, the hollowing out of public services, the normalization of under-employment and a burgeoning housing crisis. We show here how the popular images and narratives of the period index a shift toward corporate impregnability and a public culture in which individuals absorb greater risk and take up positions of heightened precarity.

Out of the Ruins: The Emergence of Radical Informal Learning Spaces ed. by Robert H. Haworth and John M. Elmore

Reviewed by: Out of the Ruins: The Emergence of Radical Informal Learning Spaces ed. by Robert H. Haworth and John M. Elmore Sarah Moon Out of the Ruins: The Emergence of Radical Informal Learning Spaces Edited by Robert H. Haworth and John M. Elmore PM Press, 2017. 288 pp. Click for larger view View full resolution When Occupy Wall Street began on September 19, 2011, I was thrilled. Just out college, September 11th had been a wake-up call for me. I began reading too much on the internet and devoured Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, my first exposure to capitalist critique, in a couple nights. In 2007, I became involved in environmental organizing around mountain-top removal. I was drawn to the movement out of a deep-felt compassion for the people and land affected and I stayed involved for several years because of the sense of belonging the movement offered. It was the first time I had found a group of people that seemed to share the disenchantment I had experienced but who were also taking action against hegemonic powers: raising awareness, promoting legislation to end mountaintop removal, carrying out direct actions, and raising funds to bring clean drinking water to affected communities. Understanding the human cost and environmental impact of the legal crime of mountaintop removal forced me to acknowledge the extent to which our current system is not aimed at universal empowerment, health, well-being, and freedom. Out of the Ruins is based on the premise that many educators recognize the degree of harm perpetrated by the global capitalist system and believe that traditional education serves that system. The contributors to Out of the Ruins recognize traditional education as cooperating with the capitalist system to produce obedient subjects who will accept the existing system as the best possible reality and raise no challenge to it. Several of the authors throughout the text use the term "deschool," the process of helping individuals unlearn what they have been taught through traditional education, to describe the first goal of their work. But the authors in Out of the Ruins go beyond system critique to also share examples of a variety of informal learning spaces both with and without ties to the university. In the introduction, editor Richard Haworth quotes Max Haivan that living within our current system, "our ability to imagine possibilities beyond the confines of market values, especially those thoughts and ideas based in possibly futures outside our current practices is minimized or squashed" (6). Out of the Ruins [End Page 97] shows us that the work of critical pedagogy and radical informal learning spaces is to reawaken that imagination and connect with others also seeking what Deleuze and Guattari call "lines of flight." The collection moves from critiques of standard education to theoretical frameworks for alternative education and finally to depictions of radical informal learning spaces in cities across North America and the UK. Community literacy educators will find much value in this book, both on the theoretical front and in the examples of radical informal learning spaces that provide both inspiration as well as reflection on the pitfalls and limitations of such spaces. The opening chapter, "Miseducation and the Authoritarian Mind," serves as foundational for the collection by establishing the need for liberatory education to counter the rise of authoritarian thinking in education and society-at-large. John Elmore takes time to paint a picture of two authoritarian personality types, sadistic authoritarian and passive authoritarian, both plagued by fear of life's ambiguities, which drives them to seek the safety and predictability of hierarchical structure. By turns dominating those below and submitting to those above, authoritarian individuals affirm the hierarchy and thereby keep anxieties at bay. Elmore writes that traditional education has served the development of the authoritarian personality and ultimately become a "co-conspirator with despotism" (25) and calls for critical educators to "find ways to turn our classrooms into laboratories of critical consciousness" and "lead the way out of the ruins" (33). In "Don't Ask, Just Think," David Gabbard takes up the titular admonition of Slavoj Zizek and directs it at critical pedagogues. Gabbard challenges critical pedagogues to consider their potential idiocy (defined...

Fukushima-ken Commerce Community Development Regulation and Earthquake Disaster Shock Doctrine

Fukushima-ken Commerce Community Development Regulation and Earthquake Disaster Shock Doctrine

Overturning Catastrophes

Overturning Catastrophes Alexandra Perisic The word catastrophe is derived from the Greek word katastrephein, meaning a "sudden turn" or "overturn" (from kata=down and strephein=turn). In Greek theatre, it designated the last parts of a tragedy, the moment when the action begins to unravel and the protagonist has to face the consequences of their actions. In the 1700s, the meaning was extended to include any sudden disaster, leading to the now frequent conflation between disasters and catastrophes. Writing on theatre and catastrophe, Federica Bueti contends that "kata-strephein is, then, not the tragic death of the hero, but, rather, the moment when the ethical dilemma of the hero is made visible, a cue of further collective reflection" ("The Theatre of Catastrophe"). It is a moment of pause, when the situation could still develop in a number of ways. In this article I expand on catastrophe as a sudden overturn or a possibility (and sometimes excuse) for a sudden overturn; one whose aftermath is not predetermined. I argue that in capitalism1 catastrophes often lead to a collision between two worldviews. On the one hand, as argued by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), capitalists use disasters and catastrophes to privatize new sectors of society and impose free market reforms. While I concur with Klein's assessment, I also contend that there is another side to catastrophes. Following Félix Guattari's claim that ruptures allow for the emergence of new ethical and aesthetic modes of being, I argue that catastrophes can lead to non-capitalist imaginings and practices. In my analysis, I rely on two examples. First, I focus on Martinican writer and philosopher Edouard Glissant and his metaphor of the womb abyss. According to Glissant, the Middle Passage was a catastrophe, perhaps the biggest one in human history. The passage was primarily an abyss, the utter and complete dehumanization of the slave population. Yet, it was also a womb, where in an atmosphere of extreme violence, creolization began, a mixing of different cultural elements leading to new ways of being in the world. The struggle between the dehumanizing forces of capitalism and the utopian forces of what Glissant calls the world in Relation, began during the Middle Passage and continues to this day. I place Glissant's theory in conversation with a more contemporary example, the recent national debt crisis in Greece. The near bankruptcy of Greece could be characterized as a catastrophe. In light of this situation, two poles were formed. [End Page 118] Grassroots efforts, founded upon ideas of mutual aid and solidarity, led to community kitchens, healthcare clinics, and popular assemblies. On the other hand, the European troika (the European commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) used this opportunity to pursue and intensify neo-liberal austerity measures.2 In the summer of 2015, we witnessed precisely a clash between two worldviews in the aftermath of a catastrophe. The juxtaposition of Glissant's writing and the Greek debt crisis is not meant to lead to a comprehensive account of catastrophes or to a generalizable model. However, thinking about catastrophes dialectically and comparatively can help us take an ethical stance and decide on a political course of action in the future. Particularly given that, due to global warming, increasing social inequality, and military/police violence across the globe, we are likely to witness many more catastrophes to come. neoliberal catastrophes Naomi Klein's 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism has become a bestseller and a mandatory reference in any discussion of neoliberalism, economic crisis, natural disasters, and war. In this brilliant and extremely well documented work, Klein traces the development of the neoliberal doctrine from its endorsement by Milton Friedman and his disciples in the University of Chicago's economic department, to the present day.3 She underlines the dependence of neoliberalism on the shock doctrine, which she defines as "using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering" (8). The doctrine posits that the aftermath of a crisis—be it economic, political, or environmental—when the population is disoriented and its reference points obfuscated, is the best time...

Atlas Shrugged’s Shock Doctrine

Naomi Klein opens The Shock Doctrine by comparing the psychological hypothesis that an array of shocks “could unmake and erase faulty minds” with Milton Friedman’s economic hypothesis that a course of painful policy shocks could return society to “pure capitalism.” Klein’s book raises the following question: why did shock become the dominant metaphor for economic and psychological modernization? This article suggests that Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged provides one answer, revealing how shock’s emergence as a form of neoliberal subject-making is rooted in the white flight anxieties about racializing and decaying urban cores that emerged in the postwar period.

Maurizio Peleggi, ed. A Sarong for Clio: Essays on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Thailand, Inspired by Craig J. Reynolds

A Sarong for Clio: Essays on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Thailand, Inspired by Craig J. Reynolds Maurizio Peleggi, ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2015, 208p.When a stellar cast gathers for the festschrift, the result is both a thoughtful reflection on the past oeuvre by Craig J. Reynolds, who inspired the essays, and a peek into the various issues and debates that will characterize the future of Thai studies.If not directly mentioned, Reynolds' influence and carefully crafted concepts from his decadeslong career in Thai and Southeast Asian Studies pervade the book. This can partly be attributed the contributors' association with Reynolds as his students, colleagues, and friends. However, it would be wrong assume that the volume represents a closed academic circuit. Reynolds' opuses span from the 1970s the 2010s and counting. His seminal works illuminate important aspects of these often turbulent decades, such as the analyses of Buddhist and Marxist writings in Thailand and beyond, the charting of previously under-explored terrain of historiography in Southeast Asia, the clearing of the ground for intellectual and social histories in the area, the probing of the ideas of national identity and globalization, and the meditation on varied aspects of power, including its unorthodox linkage with magic and local knowledge. All the while, he widely borrows conceptual tools from, inter alia, semiotics, feminism, structuralism, and post-structuralism, but always subjects them scrutiny and test in the Southeast Asian weather. The editor Maurizio Peleggi's introductory chapter well captures this across-the-board and seasoned nature of Reynolds' works and thoughts.In the essays that follow, three Reynolds' leitmotifs emerge quite clearly, namely: (1) power in its multifarious manifestations, (2) an emphasis on the outcasts of Thai history, and (3) knowledge, especially in its written forms of manual and historiography. All three permeate the chapters, although some bring each of these themes out more evidently than others.One common ground of all authors is that power operates in many fields. It operates in art historiography, in artifact of museological practices, in Buddha statues, and in beauty. Rather than in the eye of the beholder, according Peleggi in his own essay (Chapter 4), Thai art is a discursive field of power, an intense playground of national myth and colonial rule. Power also operates in the visual sense as art history (and arguably all histories) works to make the past synoptically visible (p. 92), especially through classifying and inscribing meaning in objects. In Chapter 7, Yoshinori Nishizaki argues along the same line, though in a different context, that visibility is a matter of power. In his analysis, it is inscribed in a grandiose observation tower in the provincial city of Suphanburi, the public work that has become a symbol, a source of collective pride and social identity.We can also approach power via semiotics and politics of translation, as Kasian Tejapira illustrates in Chapter 9 where he discusses the term in Thailand in the aftermath of the 1997 financial crisis and the shock doctrine of neoliberalism. Kasian skillfully traces the transformation of the IMF's notion of good governance as part of its liberalization and privatization package imposed on crisis-ridden economies, its Thai translation as thammarat, which was picked up and used by several groups with various intentions, be it liberal, communitarian, or even authoritarian.The collection also demonstrates that power exists in all levels of a society: it is concentrated in the elites' hands, but also practiced by the subalterns. When these forms of power clash, various mechanisms are called forth resolve the tension, and they can be brute, hegemonic, discursive, or emotional. This formulation of power is encapsulated in a number of essays in the volume. …

“Iraqnophobia”: A Biomedical History of State-Rearing and Shock Doctrine in Iraq

The history of Western foreign policy in the Middle East has long assimilated Arab culture to sickness. Specifically, the biological episteme of “contamination” has shaped American foreign policy in the Gulf for decades. In so doing, the US Government continually borrowed references from the natural sciences to frame its foreign policy, leading some commentators to claim that biology supplanted philosophy and religion as the primary political category. The article analyses the semantics of Iraqnophobic metaphors, from the British experience of “nursing” Arabs at the close of the First World War to the recent “shock doctrine” of American therapists. First, the paper will concentrate its attention on the metaphors of disinfection and surgical resection. Second, it will address the metaphors of lustration, State-rearing and scientific recovery. Finally, it will explore Iraqis’ rebellion against their self-appointed tutors and doctors. Elaborating on the belligerents’ nursing and biomedical metaphors, the following pages address the life cycle of foreign “legal transplantation”, “antibody” resistance and “immunosuppressant” counterinsurgency in Iraq.