Neoliberalism (Anthropology)

A number of people have claimed that the ongoing financial crisis has revealed the problems with neoliberal thought and neoliberal policies in the 'Atlantic Heartland'. However, if we look at the history of the 'Heartland' economies then it becomes evident that they were never neoliberal in the first place - that is, the economic policies and discourses in these countries did not follow neoliberal prescriptions. /We Have Never Been Neoliberal/ explores this divergence between neoliberal theory and 'neoliberal' practice by focusing on the underlying contradictions in monetarism, private monopolies, and financialization. The book finishes by proposing a 'manifesto for a doomed youth' in which it argues that younger generations should refuse to pay interest on anything in order to avoid the trap of debt-driven living.

The articles included in this special collection examine the implementation of varied conservation agendas, seeking to integrate the strengths of a political ecology framework with insights derived from Science and Technology Studies (STS). By taking an ethnographic approach to the study of conservation projects, they challenge the nature/culture divide so central to the Western philosophical tradition and draw attention to the ways in which nature and culture are co-constituted in and through practice.

This article discusses the transformation of the Moroccan state under contemporary neoliberal globalization, and considers what this transition means for the ways in which scholars view state-society interplay in Morocco and the Arab world more generally. Specifically, it examines the protest of unemployed graduates in Morocco, suggesting that public demonstrations are not only a means to communicate and mobilize demands, but also a technology to reclaim and reproduce a particular “truth” in public. This truth does not necessarily equate with the reality of the neoliberal state as a dispersed material force. As such, by looking at the case of Morocco, we hope to instigate further debate on the nature of the state and its specific relation to phenomena as globalization, society and social protest.

Focusing exclusively on external forces risks producing an over-generalized account of a ubiquitous neoliberalism, which insufficiently accounts for the profusion of local variegations that currently comprise the neoliberal project as a series of articulations with existing political economic circumstances. Although neoliberal economics were initially promoted in the global south through the auspices of structural adjustment programs designed by the International Financial Institutions, powerful global south elites were only too happy to oblige. Neoliberalism frequently reveals opportunities for well-connected government officials to informally control market and material rewards, allowing them to easily line their own pockets. It is in this sense of the local appropriation of neoliberal ideas that scholars must go beyond conceiving of ‘neoliberalism-in-general’ as a singular and fully realized policy regime, ideological form, or regulatory framework, and work towards conceiving a plurality of ‘actually existing neoliberalisms’ with particular characteristics arising from mutable geohistorical outcomes that are embedded within national, regional, and local process of market-driven socio-spatial transformation. What constitutes ‘actually existing’ neoliberalism in Cambodia as distinctly Cambodian is the ways in which the patronage system has allowed local elites to co-opt, transform, and (re)articulate neoliberal reforms through a framework that ‘asset strips’ public resources, thereby increasing peoples’ exposure to corruption, coercion, and violence. It is to such an 'articulation agenda' that this article attends, as in seeking to provide a more nuanced reading to recent work on neoliberalism in Cambodia by outlining some of its salient characteristics, I reveal a more empirical basis to theorizations of ‘articulated neoliberalism’.

In our everyday living we are surrounded by a world of visuals and we are socialised into appropriating these visuals with certain meanings and values as per the dominant visual regime. As consuming citizens of the (neo)liberal economics, we tend to take these visual narratives for granted or non consequential, especially in context of entertainment hubs. While a similar incorrect narrative would be contested, and refuted in school textbooks or as state national icons. This is because the entertainment hubs thrive on the pretext of the freedom of political incorrectness that the consumers are aware of. However, the visual narratives in such hubs, though silent and without explicit description, have a significant potential to propagate dominant narratives and social prejudices that get reproduced in different economic and political praxis. In this paper, I attempt to investigate the politics of visual narrative produced in the consumption patterns of (neo) liberal India through the case of Kingdom of Dreams (entertainment hub). For this purpose, I draw on my ethnographic accounts and photographic evidence of KOD, conducted in February 2017. The observations show that the globally mediated picture of India still thrives on early nationalist accounts of art being dominated by patriarchal, heteronormative and Brahmanical, Hindu religious motifs of spirituality leaving out contributions of other religious civilizations and minorities. The case also reveals the strictly economical relation state establishes with its citizens using these entertainment hubs as quasi agencies and how Bollywood with its aspirational consuming actors is in turn appropriated as the idealcultural identity for the consuming citizen.

This collection of essays and notes attempts to tread the invisible borders between mythos, the neoliberal-Christian-nationalist 'world view' and socio-political trends in the rise of Trump, the Red Hats and the Evangelicals to political dominance in the United States.

This paper sets out to develop two related ideas. First, it seeks to identify how both violence and neoliberalism can be considered as moments. From this shared conceptualisation of process and fluidity, I argue that it becomes easier to recognise how these two phenomena actually converge. Building upon this conceived coalescence of neoliberalism and violence, the second aim is to recognise how the hegemony of neoliberalism positions it as an abuser, which facilitates the abandonment of those ‘Others’ who fall outside of neoliberal normativity. I argue that the widespread banishment of ‘Others’ under neoliberalism produces a ‘state of exception’, wherein because of its inherently dialectic nature, exceptional violence is transformed into exemplary violence. This metamorphosis occurs as aversion for alterity intensifies under neoliberalism and its associated violence against ‘Others’ comes to form the rule.

This entry explains the rising popularity of the concept of financialization, despite it being considered a vague and chaotic concept. It also summarizes the wide-ranging multidisciplinary literature on financialization and makes a distinction between seven dimensions, or elements, of financialization, upon which a new definition of financialization is put forward that suggests that the power of the financialization literature lies in how it tries to understand the increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements, and narratives at various scales, resulting in a structural transformation of economies, firms (including financial institutions), states, and households. In discussing the different elements of financialization, the entry focuses on the financialization of the economy, nonfinancial firms, the state and households, but also on the processes of banking disintermediation and assetization. Finally, some avenues for future research are suggested.   
   
Keywords: assets, contemporary capitalism, corporate financialization, economic geography, financial geography, financial markets, global financial crisis, housing, globalization, lobbying, neoliberalism, political economy, real estate, state   
   
Definition of financialization: the increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements and narratives, at various scales, resulting in a structural transformation of economies, firms (including financial institutions), states and
households.

CIRS launched the “Social Currents in North Africa” research initiative to investigate variations in social movement mobilization in Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania, and Algeria before, during, and after the Arab uprisings. The project examines social and cultural vibrations evident throughout Maghrebi society. The research initiative comprises a series of empirically grounded studies that focus on both comparative and single-country case studies examining social movements and currents in North Africa.

Abi-Mershed, O., Cavatorta, F., Merone, F., René Larémont, R., Buehler, M., Silverstein, P.A., Boutieri, C., Ould Ahmed Salem, Z., Wilson, A., Gana, N. and Boum, A.,

«Non c'è alternativa, disse una volta Margaret Thatcher. Le profezie della fine del mondo, della storia o della lotta di classe che attraggono le classi medie occidentali sembrano darle ragione mentre si succedono guerre, pandemie e disuguaglianze. Oggi, si dice, è più facile immaginare la fine del mondo che quella del capitalismo. Questo libro è un’inchiesta che risale alle origini dell’immaginario dell’impotenza organizzata e scardina le certezze di una narrazione dominante. Con un’indagine di ampio respiro che va dall’ecologia alla politica, dall’economia alla filosofia, dal cinema alla scienza e alla letteratura, questa contro-storia del presente esplora i mondi dei nuovi pensieri della liberazione ed è ispirata a un pensiero folgorante di Antonio Gramsci: l’attuale politica neoliberale è una rivoluzione passiva accompagnata da magnetici discorsi sul «crollo», la «catastrofe» e la «crisi».

In libreria da giovedì 19 maggio.

Ora qui: https://lnkd.in/dM7qPJhs

**N.B. - an improved version of this thesis was published as a book by De Gruyter (2023) in the Contributions to the Sociology of Language series. The conclusion, which summarises the entire work, is available on my Academia.edu profile and the book itself is readily available elsewhere, including as an affordable paperback**


The tendency of macro-level economic forces to drive language shift is frequently referred to in scholarship on language planning and policy (LPP). Despite this, there has, to date, been very little research that attempts to systematically explain how economic change contributes to language minoritisation. This thesis takes steps towards addressing this deficit by examining the effects of the “Great Recession” which began in 2008 on the vitality of the Irish language in those peripheral communities where it remains a vernacular, collectively known as the “Gaeltacht”. Although the first official language of the Republic of Ireland, Irish was in a severely threatened state in the Gaeltacht even before 2008, and this work demonstrates how the Great Recession served to significantly exacerbate what was an already challenging situation.

The decade following 2008 saw a rapid intensification of neoliberal policy measures both in Ireland and elsewhere. Given the international dominance of neoliberalism, this period thus offers a valuable opportunity to examine how neoliberal policies can negatively impact LPP initiatives. Drawing on concepts which are well established in the wider field of public policy studies, but not yet prominent in the more specialised area of LPP, the neoliberalisation of Irish-language policy between 2008-18 is charted, as are the disproportionately severe budgetary cutbacks received by institutions serving to promote the vitality of the Gaeltacht. It is argued that neoliberalism’s inherent antipathy towards social planning and redistributive economic policies meant that measures to support the Gaeltacht were inevitably hit particularly hard in an era of austerity.

The findings of ethnographic research conducted in some of the strongest remaining Gaeltacht communities in Galway and Donegal in the mid- and north-west of the country are also presented. These illustrate some of the micro-level consequences of the macro-level language policy reforms that took place in the wake of the crash, as well as many of the broader consequences of the recession for these communities, particularly with regard to their effects on the sociolinguistic vitality of Irish. Labour market transformations, drastically increased out-migration and the dismantling of important community institutions are documented, along with other related developments.

This study thereby demonstrates some of the key ways in which the peaks and troughs experienced by Ireland’s economy – which itself is one of the most neoliberal in the world – have contributed to the weakening of the Irish language in its core communities in recent years. In doing so it adds empirical weight to the assertions on the centrality of economic change to language loss that are so commonplace in LPP literature and highlights some of the fundamental tensions between neoliberalism and language revitalisation policy.

The problem with the label “deregulation” is that it implies less regulation and that deregulation is commonly framed as something that frees markets from government intervention, suggestive of neoliberalization. In reality, state intervention is a necessary condition for markets to thrive. In this chapters, I discuss three very different cases of what I label regulated deregulation: the electric power industry in New York State, local bus services in Great Britain and Sweden and mortgage securitization in the US and UK. All three cases are commonly labeled as deregulation, but I have tried to show how these cases all have elements of deregulation-as-liberalization but not of deregulation as defined by a reduced role of law and the state. If anything, the liberalization has been enabled, managed and controlled by re/setting rules and re/establishing “an enforcement mechanism designed to control the operation of the system’s constituent institutions, instruments and markets” (Spotton 1999: 971). Neoliberalism is not simply the roll-back of the state. Neoliberalization may involve the roll-back of the welfare state, but at the same time neoliberalism leads to a regulatory explosion (Levi-Faur 2005), indicative of the state widening its net (Cohen 1985), embedding market principles more deeply in the fabric of society (Panitch and Konings 2009). The concept of regulated deregulation enables us to see how liberalization of selective economic agents was only made possible by introducing a new regulatory system that replaced or amended the existing regulatory system. Regulated deregulation allows for the combination of competition and economic incentives on the one hand, and coordination and the regulation authority-led making and shaping of different economic sectors and industries – i.e., regulated deregulation negates the ostensibly contradiction between liberalization and state control. Under regulated deregulation some economic agents are given greater freedom from state control, but the market framework itself is regulated. By problematizing the dominant narrative of deregulation-as-neoliberalization, the concept of regulated deregulation stresses that regulation is not anathema to actually existing neoliberalism. By actively mobilizing regulation, neoliberal agents are creating the conditions of neoliberalization through the state.

The rising number of non-status migrants is one of the central political issues of our time. This essay argues that if we want to understand the political and philosophical importance of this phenomenon, the contributions of Alain Badiou, his militant group L'Organisation politique (OP), and the struggle of the sans-papiers movement in France are absolutely crucial. This is the case because, I will argue, Badiou, the OP, and the sans-papiers created a new kind of migrant justice struggle in the mid-1990s that in many ways remains at the practical and theoretical roots of much of non-status migrant organizing today. However, this essay also argues that Badiou's theoretical and political work with the sans-papiers also needs to be revised and updated in light of certain developments in more recent migrant justice struggles.

Anthropological studies have paid too little attention to the everyday experience of traffic, a fact all the more striking given the central place that traffic has come to occupy in urban life worldwide. I submit that the daily experience of traffic is a critical and underutilised medium for examining social inequality in a global, urban social order. My analysis invokes the spectrum of inequalities in relation to traffic in Istanbul, mapping both the hierarchies born out in paradigmatic traffic situations and certain extremes – those barred or excused from participating in the traffic scene. I argue that traffic congestion constitutes a unique zone in which cross-class encounters take place. This analytical focus on the daily experience of traffic demonstrates that urban inequality is produced not only through segregated social spaces, but also on the move.

PLEASE SEE http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00141844.2012.714395
OR http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2012.714395

The pervasiveness of neoliberalism within the field of human geography is remarkable, especially when we consider its virtual absence from the literature less than a decade ago. While the growing attention afforded to neoliberalism among geographers is new, the phenomenon of neoliberalism is not. This paper traces the intellectual history of neoliberalism and its expansions across various institutional frameworks and geographical settings. I review the primary contributions geographers have made to the literature, and specifically their recognition for neoliberalism’s variegations within existing political economic matrixes and institutional frameworks. Contra the prevailing view of neoliberalism as a pure and static end-state, geographical inquiry illuminates neoliberalism as a dynamic and unfolding process. The concept of ‘neoliberalization’ is thus seen as more appropriate to geographical theorizations insofar as it recognizes neoliberalism’s hybridized and mutated forms as it travels around our world. I also consider some of the most salient ways that neoliberalism has been theorized among human geographers. In particular, I highlight understandings of neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology, as a policy-based approach to state reform, and as a particular logic of governmentality, arguing that while there are significant differences between these various formations, it may also be important to work beyond methodological, epistemological, and ontological divides in the larger interest of social justice.

'The Discourse of Neoliberalism: An Anatomy of a Powerful Idea' explores the internal workings of capitalism’s most infamous contemporary offspring by dissecting the diverse interpretations of neoliberalism that have been advanced in academia. Using a critical geographical approach to pierce the heart of neoliberal theory, the book arrives at a discursive understanding wherein political economic approaches to neoliberalism are sutured together with poststructuralist interpretations in an attempt to overcome the ongoing ideological impasse that prevents the articulation of a more vibrant solidarity on the political left. Reading neoliberalism as a discourse better equips us to understand the power of this variegated economic formation as an expansive process of social-spatial transformation that is intimately bound up with the production of poverty, inequality, and violence across the globe. In examining how imaginative geographies are employed to discursively bind neoliberalism’s attendant violence to particular places and thereby blame its victims, this vivisection of neoliberalism reveals the concealment of an inherently bloodthirsty character to an ever-mutating process of socio-spatial transformation that simply refuses to die.

Contemporary theorizations of neoliberalism are framed by a false dichotomy between, on the one hand, studies influenced by Foucault in emphasizing neoliberalism as a form of governmentality, and on the other hand, inquiries influenced by Marx in foregrounding neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology. This article seeks to shine some light on this division in an effort to open up new debates and recast existing ones in such a way that might lead to more flexible understandings of neoliberalism as a discourse. A discourse approach moves theorizations forward by recognizing neoliberalism is neither a ‘top down’ nor ‘bottom up’ phenomena, but rather a circuitous process of socio-spatial transformation.

This thesis offers an ethnographic study of one urban Aboriginal organisation, Winanga-Li Aboriginal Corporation; a successful human services agency struggling against the socioeconomic disadvantage faced by Aboriginal Australians. The thesis argues that the difficulties faced by Winanga-Li stem not from Indigenous incapacity, but rather from government policies that maintain Indigenous oppression.

Three interwoven theoretical strands serve to explicate this thesis: those of post-colonialism, identity politics, and neoliberalism within contemporary government bureaucracies.  Essential to this theoretical framework is the exploration of power relationships between Indigenous Australians and the State. These power relationships not only bear upon Indigenous interactions with other Australians and each other, but also upon both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples’ constructions of Indigenous culture, tradition and behaviour.

Australian governments have a poor track record of interacting and consulting with urban Indigenous collectives. This, coupled with the centralised top-down design and development of Indigenous-specific human services, results in the programs intended to ameliorate Indigenous disadvantage producing negligible outcomes. Further frustrating efforts to improve the socioeconomic outcomes of Indigenous Australians is governments’ preferred approach for funding a small number of large non-Indigenous organisations to provide Indigenous-specific human services. Although such organisations have little experience with the Indigenous clients they intend to serve – or credibility in their eyes – these organisations are increasingly being awarded Indigenous service funding through neoliberal tendering processes, since their structure and ideology aligns with those of the State. As a result, Indigenous-controlled organisations are being coerced into adopting an economic imperialist outlook or risk being defunded; thus losing the organic governance culture that has uniquely been producing results in reducing Indigenous disadvantage.

While Australian governments openly acknowledge the egregious disadvantage Indigenous Australians face when compared with their non-Indigenous counterparts, and attempt to decrease it largely through the delivery of Indigenous-specific human services, their policies have failed and are continuing to fail. Evidence demands a new approach to the funding and design of Indigenous-specific human services if positive outcomes are to be achieved, and this thesis puts forth plausible recommendations for more effective Indigenous human service delivery.

Taking point of departure in Zambian education system, this project investigates the idea of education as a means towards a modern society. Inspired by Professor James Ferguson and professor Fazal Rizvi, the project questions the idea of a progressive development towards a modern society and examines what happens when international education principles characterized by neo-liberalism, innovation and critical thinking are being implemented in the Zambian society. Taking use of Carol Bacchi’s ‘Policy as Discourse’, the project examines the agents involved in the process of making education polices, both the principles on Education for All from 1990, and two Zambian education polices from 1996 and 2005. The project concludes that from 1996 to 2005 Zambian education policies follow to a greater extent international agreed principles that cause challenges in the local society, and that it can be difficult to become a Zambian modern society when many stakeholders have different agendas.

Increasingly, a range of 'things' (e.g. infrastructure, data, knowledge, bodies, etc.) are configured and/or reconfigured as assets, or capitalized property. Accumulation strategies have changed as a result of this assetization process, which characterizes a particular form of technoscientific capitalism. Rather than entrepreneurial strategies based on commodity production, technoscientific capitalism is increasingly underpinned by rentiership, or the appropriation of value through ownership rights (e.g. intellectual property), monopoly conditions, and regulatory or market devices and practices (e.g. investment dispute courts, exclusivity agreements, etc.). While rentiership and rent-seeking are often presented as negative phenomena (e.g. distorting markets, unearned income) in both neoclassical and Marxist literatures – and much in-between – it is my intention in this paper to unpack rentiership as an increasingly constitutive political-economic process underpinning technoscientific capitalism. Rather than being framed as a problematic 'side-effect' of capitalism, I argue that rentiership can help us to understand how different forms of value extraction are constituted by and come to constitute different forms of technoscience. This has significant analytical, political, and normative implications for understanding the relationship between science, innovation, and business (e.g. how do rentier rationales configure research agendas, how does innovation enable rentiership, what are the consequences for social equity, etc.).

Pregnancy is considered a feminine experience in mainstream Canadian culture. Babies identified as female at birth are expected to grow up to become feminine heterosexual mothers. This research considers the desires, choices, and experiences of individuals who were identified as female at birth, but who do not identify as feminine heterosexual women; this dissertation focuses on the reproductive desires, choices, and experiences of butch lesbians, transmen, and genderqueer individuals in British Columbia. Three methods and two distinct populations formed this research. Participant observation was conducted in 21 cities across southern BC. Questionnaires were completed by 28 health care professionals (HCPs), and by 46 butch lesbian, transmen, and genderqueer (BTQ) individuals. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with 10 HCPs, 8 BTQ individuals who had experienced at least one successful pregnancy, and 4 BTQ individuals who had either experienced or been diagnosed with a condition linked to infertility. What I found, is that for many BTQ individuals, reproduction associated with the female body (ie: pregnancy and breastfeeding) is not exclusively considered a feminine desire or experience. In fact, what I discovered is that BTQ individuals who experience pregnancy and breastfeeding explicitly challenge the cultural fetish associating femininity with reproduction (including pregnancy, breastfeeding, mothering, and fertility). Thus, I highlight not only the typically ignored desire and achievement of pregnancy of BTQ individuals, but also how BTQ individuals have experienced breastfeeding, how some BTQ parents raise queerlings, and how some BTQ individuals have negotiated diagnoses and experiences of infertility. Overall, I highlight the unique and various expectations and experiences that butch lesbians, transmen, and genderqueer individuals have regarding their ‘female’ (and potential) biological reproduction. In the end, I hope that by presenting the diverse reproductive experiences, desires, and choices of BTQ individuals, that I can foster more of an understanding of these experiences, desires, choices, and individuals, and thus challenge the cultural fetish that links femininity with ‘female’-associated reproduction. Moreover, I offer recommendations for health care professionals in an effort to foster more understanding in BTQ health care, as well as help to facilitate more queer competent health care professionals.

In establishing an anarchic framework for understanding public space as a vision for radical democracy, this article proceeds as a theoretical inquiry into how an agonistic public space might become the basis of emancipation. Public space is presented as an opportunity to move beyond the technocratic elitism that often characterizes both civil societies and the neoliberal approach to development, and is further recognized as the battlefield on which the conflicting interests of the world's rich and poor are set. Contributing to the growing recognition that geographies of resistance are relational, where the “global” and the “local” are understood as co-constitutive, a radical democratic ideal grounded in material public space is presented as paramount to repealing archic power in general, and neoliberalism’s exclusionary logic in particular.

Neoliberalism means many things to many people. Often used indiscriminately to mean anything ‘bad’, neoliberalism is in need of dissection as an analytical category and a way of understanding the transformation of society over the last few decades. This paper is a brief introduction to neoliberalism and a number of key analytical approaches used to study it, including governmentality, Marxism, ideational analysis, history and philosophy of economics, institutional analysis, state/regulation theory, and human geography. It finishes with some suggestions for areas of further and future research.

One highly prominent aspect of ISIS’s program of destruction in Syria and Iraq that has come to the media attention recently is their program of cultural heritage destruction that took the form of smashing artifacts in archaeological museums, iconoclastic breaking and bulldozing of archaeological sites, dynamiting of shrines, tombs, and other holy sites of local communities, and burning of libraries and archives. In this paper, I focus on ISIS’s destruction of archaeological heritage. I argue that this destruction can be seen as a form of place-based violence that aims to annihilate the local sense of belonging, and the collective sense of memory among local communities to whom the heritage belongs. Therefore, heritage destruction can be seen as part and parcel of this scorched-earth strategy described above. I also argue that the Islamic State coordinates and choreographs these destructions as mediatic spectacles of violence aimed at objects and sites of heritage, and these spectacles take place as re-enactments or historical performances that are continuously and carefully communicated to us through ISIS’s own image-making and dissemination apparatus that increasingly utilizes the most advanced technologies of visualization and communication. I will also pose questions about the relatively weak responses from the archaeological community around the world that rarely went beyond the stereotypical expression of “dismay” to ISIS’s heritage destruction. At the same time, I will try to answer the why and how of ISIS’s dislike of archaeological heritage in the context of late capitalism.

Neoliberal economics have emerged in the post-Cold War era as the predominant ideological tenet applied to the development of countries in the global south. For much of the global south, however, the promise that markets will bring increased standards of living and emancipation from tyranny has been an empty one. Instead, neoliberalisation has increased the gap between rich and poor and unleashed a firestorm of social ills.

This book deals with the post-conflict geographies of violence and neoliberalisation in Cambodia. Applying a geographical analysis to contemporary Cambodian politics, the author employs notions of neoliberalism, public space, and radical democracy as the most substantive components of its theoretical edifice. He argues that the promotion of unfettered marketisation is the foremost causal factor in the country’s inability to consolidate democracy following a United Nations sponsored transition. The book demonstrates Cambodian perspectives on the role of public space in Cambodia's process of democratic development and explains the implications of violence and its relationship with neoliberalism.

Taking into account the transition from war to peace, authoritarianism to democracy, and command economy to a free market, this book offers a critical appraisal of the political economy in Cambodia.
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Reviews:

Gunn, G. C. 2013. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 43.1: 188-191.

Brickell, K. 2011. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 52.3: 372-374.

Percival, T. 2011. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 32.2: 270-272.

Christie, R. 2010. South East Asia Research, 19.2: 349-372.

Ordóñez de Pablos, P. 2010. International Journal of Asian Business and Information Management, 1.4: 65-66.

As austerity measures intensify in the wake of the most recent global financial crisis, it is becoming ever more clear that neoliberalization exhibits a distinct relational connection with violence. This is not an admonishment of the protests that continue to swell, but rather a recognition that these movements are in fact pushing back against the violent measures that have frustrated and demoralized everyday existence under neoliberalism. There is now considerable room for scepticism with regard to the ‘rising tides lifts all boats’ discourse that is perpetuated by proponents of neoliberal ideology, as the free market has categorically failed at producing a harmonious global village. Promises of utopia are confronted with the stark dystopian realities that exist in a growing number of countries where neoliberalization has not resulted in greater peace and prosperity, but in a profound and unmistakable encounter with violence. This paper questions how neoliberalizing processes often comes suffused with processes of othering that result in conflict, arguing that neoliberalism itself might be productively understood as a particular form of violence.

Turkey has witnessed a proliferation of Islamic television channels since the liberalization of broadcasting in the 1990s. The programming of these TV channels was initially distinctly theological in character, with shows focusing on the doctrinal, scriptural, and ritualistic aspects of Islam. More recently, however, they have started producing family-friendly entertainment programs as well as shows aimed at “strengthening the family.” Islamic broadcasters intend their family-focused programming as civil initiatives against what they see as the increasing corrosion of the “moral fabric of the family” and devaluation of “family values” in contemporary Turkish society. In these TV shows, audiences are provided with guidance and techniques that would help them cultivate ethical dispositions, knowledge, and skills so that they could assume autonomy and responsibility for administering their families more effectively. Islamic broadcasters explicitly identify their role as assisting the state in  fighting social problems through their programming. Moreover, the discourses and sensibilities promoted on television articulate with the biopolitical concerns of the nation-state and the emerging rationalities of governance. While Islamic television professionals’ self-ascribed mission to “strengthen the family” emerges from a religiously inspired moral imperative to provide service, it simultaneously indicates their internalization of neoliberal rationalities of governance that promote the responsibilization of non-governmental actors for providing social services as well as that of individuals for supporting and caring for their family members. [Keywords: Islam, television, media, family, family values, secularism, neoliberalism, Turkey]

You can download the paper at: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/670934

"""How does a revolt come about and what does it leave behind? What impact does it have on those who participate in it and those who simply watch it? Is the Greek revolt of December 2008 confined to the shores of the Mediterranean, or are there lessons we can bring to bear on social action around the globe?

Revolt and Crisis in Greece: Between a Present Yet to Pass and a Future Still to Come is a collective attempt to grapple with these questions. A collaboration between anarchist publishing collectives Occupied London and AK Press, this timely new volume traces Greece’s long moment of transition from the revolt of 2008 to the economic crisis that followed. In its twenty chapters, authors from around the world—including those on the ground in Greece—analyse how December became possible, exploring its legacies and the position of the social antagonist movement in face of the economic crisis and the arrival of the International Monetary Fund.

In the essays collected here, over two dozen writers offer historical analysis of the factors that gave birth to December and the potentialities it has opened up in face of the capitalist crisis. Yet the book also highlights the dilemmas the antagonist movement has been faced with since: the book is an open question and a call to the global antagonist movement, and its allies around the world, to radically rethink and redefine our tactics in a rapidly changing landscape where crises and potentialities are engaged in a fierce battle with an uncertain outcome.

Contributors include Vaso Makrygianni, Haris Tsavdaroglou, Christos Filippidis, Christos Giovanopoulos, TPTG, Metropolitan Sirens, Yannis Kallianos, Hara Kouki, Kirilov, Some of Us, Soula M., Christos Lynteris, Yiannis Kaplanis, David Graeber, Christos Boukalas, Alex Trocchi, Antonis Vradis, Dimitris Dalakoglou and the Occupied London Collective. Art and design by Leandros, Klara Jaya Brekke and Tim Simons. Edited by Antonis Vradis and Dimitris Dalakoglou of Occupied London.

Occupied London is an anarchist collective writing on all things urban. Since 2007, the collective has worked together to publish an irregular journal, offering a platform for discussion within the global social antagonist movement, and featuring contributions by writers and collectives from around the globe, including Nasser Abourahme, Zygmunt Bauman, Franco Berardi, Klara Jaya Brekke, Manuel Castells, Mike Davis, Dimitris Dalakoglou, Christos Filippidis, David Graeber, Richard Pithouse, Marina Sitrin, Antonis Vradis, and many, many more. Since 2008, the collective has maintained a wildly popular blog, “From the Greek Streets,” providing up-to-the-minute coverage of the urban revolt of December 2008 in Greece, and examining the impact and legacies of the revolt and the crisis that followed. http://www.occupiedlondon.org | http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog)

AK Press is a worker-run, democratically-managed publisher of anarchist and radical literature. Founded in 1990, AK Press is a ten-person collective of committed anarchists, spread between Oakland, Baltimore, and Edinburgh, working hard to publish more than twenty new titles each year, and distributing thousands of other titles from like-minded publishers around the globe. (http://www.akpress.org | http://revolutionbythebook.akpress.org)"""

With the recent development of the Occupy Movement, public criticism of neoliberalism has climaxed since the onset of a global financial crisis in late 2008. The mobilization of protesters in cities throughout the world was preceded by much speculation in the media and blogosphere over the past few years, where commentators have been quick to suggest that the end of neoliberalism is upon us. The validity of postneoliberalism, however, remains tenuous, as its advocates continue to treat neoliberalism as a monolithic, static, and undifferentiated end-state. Despite the desire to move beyond neoliberal strictures, there is an undeniable continuity to neoliberalism that must be appreciated if we ever hope to leave this unforgiving version of capitalism truly in the past.

At a time when neoliberalism has become an accepted term in public debate to refer to the current state of modern societies and their political economies, Kean Birch critically analyses the conflicting theories that shape our understanding of ‘neoliberalism’.

With an ever-expanding variety of perspectives on the concept of neoliberalism, it is increasingly difficult to identify any commonalities. This book explores how different people understand neoliberalism, and the contradictions in thinking of neoliberalism as a market-based ethic, project, or order. Detailing the intellectual history of ‘neoliberal’ thought, the variety of critical approaches and the many analytical ambiguities, Kean Birch presents a new way to conceptualize contemporary political economy and offers potential avenues for future research through a judicious exploration of ‘neoliberal’ practices, processes, and institutions.

This work will be an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, scholars, and researchers to critically assess the concept of neoliberalism across many disciplines. The book will also serve as a general introduction to a wider audience interested in the term ‘neoliberalism’, its potential pitfalls, and its contested future.

This article is a manifesto for anarchist geographies, which are understood as kaleidoscopic spatialities that allow for multiple, non-hierarchical, and protean connections between autonomous entities, wherein solidarities, bonds, and affinities are voluntarily assembled in opposition to and free from the presence of sovereign violence, predetermined norms, and assigned categories of belonging. In its rejection of such multivariate apparatuses of domination, this article is a proverbial call to nonviolent arms for those geographers and non-geographers alike who seek to put an end to the seemingly endless series of tragedies, misfortunes, and catastrophes that characterize the miasma and malevolence of the current neoliberal moment. But this is not simply a demand for the end of neoliberalism and its replacement with a more moderate and humane version of capitalism, nor does it merely insist upon a more egalitarian version of the state. It is instead the resurrection of a prosecution within geography that dates back to the discipline’s earliest days: anarchism!

This article is aimed at Foucauldian scholars and seeks to introduce them to ethnographic works that interrogate neoliberal governmentalities. As an analytic category ‘neoliberalism’ has helpfully illuminated connections between seemingly unrelated social changes occurring at multiple scales. Foucault began his engagement with neoliberalism 35 years ago in his College de France lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics, significantly prior to the emergence of neoliberalism as a dominant political force. Despite this, Foucault’s grasp of neoliberal rationalities remains fresh and insightful, which perhaps explains why scholars inspired by his analytics of governmentality have been able to make major contributions to the current literature on neoliberalism. However, there are increasing concerns that governmentality scholars succumb to a more general tendency among social scientists to present neoliberal transformations in monolithic and linear terms. A small but growing group of researchers is combining governmentality with ethnographic and quasi-ethnographic methods in order to investigate the changes wrought by neoliberalism while avoiding deterministic, homogenous and static accounts of social transformation. By beginning with the everyday these works reject the idea that neoliberal governmentality forms a coherent apparatus and instead focus on governmental ensembleges or assemblages within which neoliberal political rationalities link up with non-liberal rationalities for governance, and neoliberal thought and practice changes across time and space.

This article puts forward two main arguments. First, it highlights the relation between different phases of neoliberalism in Morocco together with the specific methods and techniques of urban government that were deployed in efforts to govern the slums and their populations. A period of roll back neoliberalism during the 1980s generated reforms that tried to increase government control over the urban territory to compensate for the negative social outcomes of structural adjustment. The subsequent period of roll out neoliberalism coincided with the attempt to manage and regulate the slum population as such, through new modalities of state intervention. Secondly, while evolutions in neoliberal government reflected a gradual process, this transition in Morocco was accelerated by security concerns following two severe moments of urban violence: the 1981 riots and the 2003 suicide bombings in Casablanca. Therefore, Morocco’s recent political transformations cannot be understood in terms provided by the mainstream narrative linking economic liberalization to democratization. Rather, it reflects a profound shift towards intrinsically authoritarian modalities of neoliberal government which are clearly revealed at the urban scale.

Increasingly, governments are experimenting with ways to provide public goods by involving the private sector in the planning, financing, building and operating of a range of services, facilities, infrastructure, etc. In the geographical literature on neoliberalism this entanglement of the state and markets has been loosely conceptualized as a process of marketization. This concept describes the insertion of markets or market forces into the state and public sector. In this paper we unpack this concept by highlighting the need to think about a range of marketization processes at play across a range of geographies.