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I. Proposed Title & Editor Information Handbook of
Neoliberalism Dr. Simon Springer, PhD Assistant Professor
Department of Geography, University of Victoria Victoria, BC,
Canada [email protected] Dr. Kean Birch, PhD Assistant Professor
Department of Social Science, York University Toronto, ON, Canada
[email protected] Dr. Julie MacLeavy, PhD Senior Lecturer School of
Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol Bristol, United
Kingdom [email protected] II. Description &
Rationale The Routledge Handbook of Neoliberalism seeks to offer a
comprehensive overview of the phenomenon of neoliberalism by
examining the range of ways that it has been theorized, promoted,
critiqued, and put into practice in a variety of geographical
locations and institutional frameworks. Neoliberalism is easily one
of the most powerful discourses to emerge within the social
sciences in the last two decades, and the number of scholars who
write about this dynamic and unfolding process of socio-spatial
transformation is astonishing. Even more surprising though is that
there has, until now, not been an attempt to provide a wide-ranging
volume that engages with the multiple registers in which
neoliberalism has evolved. The Handbook of Neoliberalism
accordingly serves as an essential guide to this vast intellectual
landscape. With proposed contributions from over 50 leading
authors, the Handbook of Neoliberalism will offer a systematic
overview of neoliberalisms origins, political implications, social
tensions, spaces, natures and environments, and aftermaths in
addressing ongoing and emerging debates. Numerous books have been
published on neoliberalism, including important edited volumes, but
none of these contributions have attempted to bring the diverse
scope and wide-ranging coverage that we plan to incorporate here.
Most of the edited volumes and monographs on neoliberalism that
have been published to date have a very specific thematic focus,
either on particular empirical case studies, or alternatively
attempt to wrestle with a specific theoretical concern. In
contrast, the Routledge Handbook of Neoliberalism aims to provide
the first comprehensive overview of the field. With authors working
at institutions around the world, the Handbook of Neoliberalism
will offer a thorough examination of how neoliberalism is
understood by social scientists
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working from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. Our goal is to
advance the established and emergent debates in a field that has
grown exponentially over the past two decades, coinciding with the
meteoric rise of neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology, state form,
policy and program, and governmentality. In short, the Handbook of
Neoliberalism will intervene by both outlining how theorizations of
neoliberalism have evolved and by exploring new research agendas
that we hope will inform policy making and activism. The Handbook
of Neoliberalism will include a substantive introductory chapter
and seven main thematic sections. By presenting a comprehensive
examination of the field, this edited volume will serve as an
invaluable resource for undergraduates, graduate students, and
professional scholars alike. We envision the book as both a
teaching guide and a reference for human geographers,
anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, heterodox
economists, and others working on questions of neoliberalism and
its multifarious effects. III. Timeline for Delivery of Completed
Manuscript This is large-scale project that will take considerable
time to pull together based on the number of potential authors
involved, securing commitments from them to write chapters, and the
typical delays that come with attempting to get very busy people to
adhere to deadlines. Contingent upon our efficiency in recruiting
authors, we expect that December 2014 would be an approximate
timeline of when we would expect chapters to be returned to us for
comments prior to external peer review. We anticipate that the
final volume will be submitted for review in the summer of 2015.
IV. Table of Contents Introduction Simon Springer, Kean Birch, and
Julie MacLeavy ORIGINS 1. Historicising the Neoliberal Spirit of
Capitalism Matthew Eagleton-Pierce (SOAS, University of London) -
[email protected] Neoliberalism is often read as the latest revision
or revival of the liberal tradition. Yet plotting what is new
within neoliberalism, however precisely defined, is riven with
conceptual and methodological problems. Inspired by Boltanski and
Chiapello (2007), this chapter offers a particular framing of
neoliberalism as the latest ideological spirit in the history of
capitalism. This spirit encompasses relatively stable schemas of
justification, including patterns of thought that are grounded in
lived experiences beyond the world of technical experts. The
chapter charts and clarifies this terrain in two ways. First, it
discusses how many rationalities associated with neoliberalism can
be tied to three master themes in the history of liberal thought:
(1) individualism, whereby the individual is granted moral,
ontological priority over the collective; (2) universalism, such as
seen in the expansionary tendencies towards a world market; and (3)
meliorism, whereby humans are claimed to have the potential to
improve and remake themselves. While acknowledging that these
themes have contemporary imprints on ideas and policies linked with
neoliberalism, the second part of the chapter urges caution with
imputing that neoliberalism has some bounded, historical
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coherence. In doing so, the argument dissects how each of these
themes can also feature contradictions between theory and practice.
It will also be suggested that such practical tensions partly
account for the regenerative capacity of contemporary neoliberalism
to legitimise itself and contain rival critiques that may aim to
undermine processes of accumulation. 2. The Ascendency of Chicago
Neoliberalism Edward Nik-Khah (Roanoke College) and Rob van Horn
(University of Rhode Island) - [email protected],
[email protected] The Chicago School of Economics was one of
the primary formations in the post-World War II US economics
profession, ascending in a little over three decades from a
position of relative weakness to become Americas most powerful
economic program. During this time, the formation of the Chicago
School was conditioned by its status as the primary American
outpost of the Mont Pe lerin Society. This chapter examines the
relationship between these two institutions. We emphasize in the
rich interplay between the distinct intellectual and institutional
programs of the three most crucial figures at ChicagoMilton
Friedman, Aaron Director, and George Stiglerand their work
locations, the Department of Economics, the Law School, and the
Graduate School of Business respectively. Our analysis devotes
special attention to their views about knowledge, democracy, and
the appropriate role of the economist. In particular, we examine
Chicago scholars engagement in economics imperialism, in
redirecting state activities, and in reengineering science. We
conclude with some observations about the status of the Chicago
School today. 3. Neoliberalism and the Transnational Capitalist
Class William K. Carroll (University of Victoria) -
[email protected] Although a literature on the transnational
capitalist class (TCC) began to form in the 1970s, along with the
first stirrings of neoliberal public policy, both of these
intersecting phenomena have deeper lineages in elite capitalist
networks, transnationalizing investment, and the interaction
between the two. This chapter traces the development of capitalist
internationalism, initially within the International Chamber of
Commerce (established in 1919), then within the Mont Pelerin
Society (established in 1947) and later within such peak elite
organizations as the World Economic Forum. These think tanks and
elite forums have provided crucial sites for hammering out what
became a neoliberal consensus in a transnational process of
policy-planning, linked informally to states and to
intergovernmental bodies. In the late 20th Century, as corporate
capital became increasingly transnational, an international elite
network took shape, linking together leading corporate capitalists
and neoliberal policy groups and affording the TCC some capacity to
act in the global political field as a class-for-itself. However,
the TCC is not an economically and politically homogeneous entity,
and neoliberalism itself is a variegated and evolving project. The
chapter takes up the relationship between class fractions of the
TCC and variants of neoliberal doctrine, as presented in research
by Van der Pijl and Robinson and Harris, as well as recent
developments in neoliberalism and the TCC, particularly the
emergence of climate capitalism and the green economy. 4.
Theorizing Neoliberalizations Kevin Ward (University of Manchester)
and Kim England (University of Washington) -
[email protected], [email protected]
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This chapter takes stock of the various attempts across the
social sciences over the last fifteen years to theorize
neo-liberalism. This period saw it face unprecedented analytical
scrutiny from a range of theoretical positions. A rather crude
characterization is that in exploring the process of
neo-liberalization, political economists saw patterns, points of
connection and programmatic features. Alternatively,
post-structuralists saw contingency, difference and discreteness.
The chapter reviews these caricatures, but also examines the points
of agreement and overlap amongst those who have sought to theorize
neo-liberalization head-on. In addition, the chapter considers the
challenges that the post-2007 financial crisis has posed to earlier
attempts to theorize neoliberalization. The chapter includes a
discussion of what sorts of explanations we are currently left with
when much of the industrialized Global North continues to suffer
economically but the neo-liberal models that created the
pre-conditions for the crisis seem to remain largely unchallenged.
5. Hegemony Dieter Plehwe (WZB Berlin Social Science Center) -
[email protected] Neoliberalism emerged in the course of the
1930s in confrontations with economic planning perspectives
advanced by socialist and Keynesian as well as populist and fascist
thinkers. Neoliberals confronted at the time what they considered
an anti-liberal, collectivist hegemonic constellation. The post WW
II configuration in turn consolidated welfare economics, welfare
state capitalism and state interventionism in the Western
capitalist world in addition to the fortification of planned
economies under the guard of the Soviet Union. Neoliberals
advocating market economic principles, competition, individualism
and limited statehood thus continued to face a hostile environment
in most Western countries with the notable exception of the Federal
Republic of Germany (Social Market Economy) and to a lesser extent
the United States during the McCarthy years. Philosophically and
academically, let alone politically, neoliberal intellectuals were
on the defense. The founding of the Mont Plerin Society by F.A. von
Hayek, Wilhelm Rpke and Albert Hunold among others in 1947 can
therefore be considered a counter-hegemonic effort, and clearly was
so understood by F.A. von Hayek in particular. His essay
"Intellectuals and Socialism advocated a long term hegemonic
strategy based on considerable academic research and debate as well
as non-academic networking and dissemination efforts. Modelled
after the Fabian Society, Hayek and his disciples constructed what
is best understood as an anti-passive revolution strategy in
critical distance to the realities of capitalist transformation in
the age of Fordism (welfare state capitalism). When the crisis of
the 1970s (stagflation) unfolded, organized neoliberals were well
positioned and increasingly well-funded to expand their influence
within and beyond the academic sphere. The era of social liberal
hegemony arguably came to an end ushering in the era of neoliberal
hegemonic constellations. While the collapse of the Soviet Union
and socialist planning in the second world and the so-called
Washington Consensus in development politics reinforced neoliberal
hegemony, the various financial and economic crisis of the 1990s
and 2000s and the global financial and economic crisis since 2008
challenge the continuing viability of neoliberal approaches to
economic and in the meantime social, environmental etc. policy
making. While a Gramscian understanding of hegemony does not
require a near complete consensus with regard to key policy issues
as sometimes suggested, neoliberal hegemonic constellations appear
to be less able to secure the stable functioning of institutions
around the world, and to sufficiently integrate marginalized and
oppositional forces into the historical bloc. It is nevertheless
too early to speak of a post-neoliberal age considering the
strength and force of neoliberal leadership in
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areas like the European Union (austerity), or the deepening of
transatlantic integration (TTIP) vis--vis Russia and China in
particular. The present transformation of capitalism can be
considered oscillating between the poles of a post-neoliberal Green
New Deal on the one hand, and authoritarian versions of
neoliberalism. 6. Governmentality at Work in Shaping a Critical
Geographical Politics Nick Lewis (University of Auckland) -
[email protected] Foucaults concept of governmentality has
been widely deployed in geography to connect the political and the
cultural, the material and the discursive, the ideological and the
technological, and the politics of the subject and the politics of
the state. Over a period of thought dominated by critique of
neoliberalism, the coupling neoliberal governmentalities has become
a prominent critical refrain, albeit often consolatory. How
effective the coupling has proven in connecting these different
knowledge terrains to establish a space for developing critical
geographical insights is uncertain. In this paper, I trace the ways
in which governmentality has been deployed to shape a
post-structuralist political economy (PSPE) in economic geography,
and how in doing so it has opened up less consolatory and more
generative critiques of neoliberalism. As a project of knowledge
production PSPE has a particular geography associated with a
long-term critical engagement with the changing nature, form and
work of neoliberal governmentalities in the New Zealand context. It
also has an historicity that has given it a prominence in economic
geographys attempts to grapple with neoliberalism as multiple,
grounded, and simultaneously an ideology, a political programme,
and a subjectifying governmental technology. The paper will examine
a genealogy of PSPE to explore possibilities for academic
geographers to practice a critical politics under neoliberalism. 7.
Neoliberalism in Question Sally Weller (Monash University) and
Phillip ONeil (University of Western Sydney) -
[email protected], [email protected]
This chapter offers a critique of the construction of
neoliberalism as a variegated, hybrid yet hegemonic global
imaginary, as an idea capable of enrolling all manner of
political-economic change into its purview. We draw on a range of
authors to make three arguments. First, that the necessary fluidity
of the definitions of neoliberalism to enable them to incorporate a
range of policy actions and outcomes acts to dull academic
argument. Second, that the lazy use of neoliberalism as a
descriptor of observed changes has too often replaced close study
of the relationships among state policies, economies, societies and
developmental trajectories at the national and regional scales.
Third, that the political utility of the idea of neoliberalism as a
means of uniting progressive politics is highly questionable. Our
title, which echoes the title of Andrew Sayers 1989 critique of
post-Fordism, draws attention the fact that the idea of
neoliberalism is both overly flexible and insufficiently
specialised, and that it feeds the tendency for dualistic thinking,
with debates about neoliberalism versus post-neoliberalism the
latest example. Our argument is that as a direct consequence of the
misuse of the notion of neoliberalism, the important detail of
political-economic change is too often overlooked. We advocate more
robust debate about the nature of contemporary socioeconomic change
and the perennial issues at stake in explaining continuity and
change. We conclude that removing the word neoliberalism from our
analyses would force us all to produce more careful
explanations.
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8. Neoliberalism: From Cultural Phenomenon to Multi-sided Social
Fact Stephanie Mudge (University of California, Davis) -
[email protected] Albeit contentious and politically loaded,
neoliberalism is now a fairly well established term in the human
sciences. Neoliberalism refers to a utopian project of European and
American intellectuals from the late 1930s who considered
themselves the bearers of liberal virtues, and who eventually built
a network of academic centers, research institutes, and educational
foundations centered in North America and the United Kingdom.
Neoliberalism is, in this sense, above all a cultural phenomenon: a
set of truth claims and an institution-building project driven by
charismatic leaders and rooted in a particular concept of the
market as an organic, natural realm of individual freedom and in
which, by contrast, politics, bureaucracies, and states are threats
to be contained. More than a cultural phenomenon, however, from the
late 1960s forward the neoliberal project developed variable
linkages to cross-national struggles over governments and policies,
political representation and party politics, class power, and
economic profit. Neoliberalism thus acquired a multi-sided
character that went well beyond its origins. Understanding the
specificities of neoliberalism as a multi-sided social fact and yet
avoiding conspiracy theory and eschewing simplistic conflationsfor
instance, treating neoliberalism as a proxy for neoclassical
economics, American hegemony, or political rightnessremains a main
challenge for scholarship on neoliberalism today. POLITICAL
IMPLICATIONS 9. Neoliberal Geopolitics Sue Roberts (University of
Kentucky) - [email protected] This chapter reviews the main ways
geographers and others have considered the relations between
neoliberalism and geopolitics. The review is structured around the
ideas of neoliberalism, geo-economics, and geopolitics. Key works
discussed include those by Luttwak, Silen, Sparke, Coleman,
Springer, Cowen and Smith. In addition to providing a critical
review of the relevant literature, the chapter considers the recent
US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and on-going use of drone
strikes by the US as examples of neoliberal geopolitics. Broadly
speaking, the emphasis is on the relations between the
generalization of the logics of the market (neoliberalism) and ways
of viewing and engaging the world premised on the use of force. As
a rhetoric claiming the desirability of a flat world, neoliberalism
would seem to be a kind of anti-geopolitics; relegating
considerations of inter-state rivalry to the sidelines, while an
unfettered capitalism takes center stage, integrating and enriching
all who participate. However, this chapter argues that
neoliberalism and geopolitics have proven quite compatible.
Recalling Shakespeares phrase Why, then the worlds mine oyster we
might do well to consider Pistols subsequent line in the play. It
is, Which I with sword will open. 10. Neoliberal Transformations of
State and Sovereignty: On the Dynamics of Revival and
Reconfiguration Brenda Chalfin (University of Florida) -
[email protected] If the formal origins of neoliberalism can
be traced to the convergent crises and solutions of Reaganism and
Thatcherism in the Global North, thirty-years hence neoliberalism
as a philosophy, policy agenda and catch-all explanation of the
condition of the present has
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become a world-wide phenomenon. Among neoliberalisms twists,
turns and unintended consequences is the fate of the sovereign
state. Originally slated for radical surgery, these reforms
including the abolition of social service provision, state-owned
industries, and most dramatically, the dismantling of the
regulatory edifice that was the hallmark of liberal democratic
regimes of the twentieth century. Caught in neoliberalisms path of
creative destruction, state institutional forms across the globe
have survived the neoliberal onslaught to be configured anew. This
essay addresses three aspects of this dynamic emerging during the
past decades of high neoliberalism: the rebuilding of state
authority in alliance with supra- and international organizations;
the merging of state agendas with the imperatives of finance
capital ; and the refiguring of the nation-state imaginary in the
neoliberal mold, rendering sovereignty a marketable commodity.
These processes are explored from the perspective of polities of
the Global North and South as well as the broad swath of
transitioning states in between. A central concern will be to
capture diversity as well as identify cross-cutting trends that
mark late-modern statehood world-wide. 11. Neoliberalism and
Relational Citizenship: Speed, Subjectivity, and Space Kathryn
Mitchell (University of Washington) - [email protected]
Citizenship is a process that is formative and relational. The
speed associated with fast and mobile citizenship often entails the
slow-down or stoppage of movement for others. The formation of
certain kinds of positive emotions and identities of belonging
vis--vis urban, national, or supranational citizenship frequently
corresponds with feelings of exclusion for the remaining
population. Healthy bodies and well-educated minds for some
citizens are achieved through the ill health and ignorance of
others. Space is formative in all of these relational
processesthrough enclaving, targeting, deterritorialization, and
other geographical forms of inclusion and separation. In this
chapter I identify and discuss the ways in which the spatial
effects of neoliberalization impact citizenship formation and the
relations between individuals and populations around the globe. 12.
Development and Neoliberalism David Craig (University of Otago) -
[email protected] International development agencies have
been core to global neoliberalisation processes since the early
1980s, when Regan- appointed World Bank president Alden Clausen
turned the Bank from poverty alleviation towards policy based
lending, better known as Structural Adjustment. Drawing lessons
from early reform in Chile, and working in concert with a wider
Washington consensus of Regan- Bush- Clinton administration
agencies, the Bretton Woods organisations continued to lead
neoliberal development well into the early 21st century.
Sidestepping democratic processes and imbuing a sense of crisis,
early shock therapy structural adjustment enacted a core stabilize,
liberalize, privatize adjustment mantra, mainly by reforms
orchestrated from central agencies (Treasury, Finance ministries),
often supported by US trained economists (Chicago Boys) or
technopoliticians. Stabilisation meant austerity, and popular
reaction to cuts and re-pricings of staple goods were often
violent. Politicians and subsequently Bretton Woods lenders acted
to mitigate deflationary effects through a range of measures:
social funds, fast dispersing loans, engaging NGOs as
subcontractors. After a lost decade of negative growth in sub
Saharan African countries, the evident failures of Structural
Adjustment led to a series of move to rehabilitate its primary
sponsors and policy settings. The role for the state and its
institutions was
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revised, and reforms were re-branded around the more inclusive
neoliberal Poverty Reduction consensus. This, in concert with a
revived development security nexus, set Developments agenda through
the 2000s. This chapter charts the rise and partial demise of
neoliberalism in international development, and offers an
assessment of its legacy and prospects. 13. Free Trade and the End
of Democracy Jason Hickel (London School of Economics) -
[email protected] Free trade agreements have proliferated across
the globe since the early 1990s. Despite their name, most of these
agreements have very little to do with meaningful human freedom,
and rather a lot to do with corporate freedom. In exchange for
much-needed access to the markets of rich countries, poor countries
are compelled to accept damaging neoliberal reforms related to
labor standards, pollution laws, public services, and corporate
taxes. Ironically, in the rhetoric of "free trade" the very things
that promote real human freedoms - such as the right of workers to
organise, equal access to decent public services, and safeguards
for a healthy environment are cast as somehow anti-democratic, or
even totalitarian. These freedoms are reframed as "red tape", or as
"barriers to investment", even when they have been won by popular
grassroots movements exercising democratic franchise. In this
paradigm, democracy itself is cast as anti-democratic, inasmuch as
it grants voters control over the economic policies that affect
their lives. We can see this happening very clearly in two new free
trade deals: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
(TTIP), which will govern trade between the US and the European
Union, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which will govern
trade between the US and a number of Pacific nations. These
agreements include "investor-state dispute settlement" mechanisms
that grant corporations the power to sue sovereign nations for laws
that reduce their profits. In other words, corporations will be
empowered to regulate democratic states, rather than the other way
around. These trade deals also pre-emptively prevent states from
making certain laws that regulate finance and fossil fuels,
effectively stripping elected representatives of their power to
protect citizens from economic crisis and climate change. This is
the most far-reaching assault on the ideas of sovereignty and
democracy that has ever been attempted in history. And it is being
conducted under the banner of "freedom". 14. The Violence of
Neoliberalism Simon Springer (University of Victoria) -
[email protected] As austerity measures intensity 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 skepticism
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
chapter questions how and why neoliberalizing processes
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often result in conflict, arguing that neoliberalism itself
might be productively understood as a particular form of
violence.
15. Neoliberalism and the Biopolitical Imagination Nicholas
Kiersey (Ohio University) - [email protected]
Understood perhaps most fundamentally as a critic of liberal
government, Foucaults thoughts on the place of economic thought in
our lives are often overlooked. Nevertheless, it is clear that he
attached particular importance to the role of economic imagination
in shaping contemporary imperatives of rule, a process which he
termed biopolitics. This chapter starts with a survey of what is
popularly understood by the term biopolitics, and the various
debates it has promoted. It notes the significant influence of the
work of Giorgio Agamben in these debates, especially in the context
of the War on Terror. However, as I suggest, those who follow
Agamben appear to ignore key aspects of Foucaults arguments about
power, and the power of the state specifically, and the fact that
he attributed a critical role to modern economic discourse in
catalyzing the liberal imagination. Crucially, a growing number of
works are now giving attention to this latter point, and exploring
the various ways in which biopolitics must itself be situated in
ongoing processes of sociological transformation. Some, for
example, focus on the unevenness of global liberalism, and on this
basis cast doubt on notions of 'global governmentality.' Others
focus on the crisis-ridden terrain of existing western capitalism,
drawing attention to the significance of biopolitical imperatives
for everyday life. To explore these issues, the chapter contends,
we should bring an innovative attitude to our reading of Foucaults
few rudimentary remarks on neoliberal capitalist subjectivity,
integrating more fine-grained methods of postliberal economic
analysis from Autonomist Marxism, among other sources. 16.
Neoliberalism and Media Convergence Julie Cupples (University of
Edinburgh) and Kevin Glynn (Massey University) -
[email protected], [email protected] Neoliberalism (along
with its multiple contestations) defines the current global
conjuncture, but so too does the emergence of a highly elaborated
and complex convergent media environment marked by rapid
technological development, digitalization, miniaturization and
mobilization. This chapter will explore the clash between top-down
and bottom-up forces within this complex conjunctural moment.
Citizens, activists and conventionally marginalized populations are
forging new modes of media consumption/production and devising more
democratic ways to communicate, express their views and challenge
hegemonic and neoliberal structures of power. For example, media
prosumers use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, Internet forums
and crowd-sourced and volunteered geographic information to respond
to political events, government policies, for-profit corporations
and mainstream media texts. In many cases, government agencies,
corporations and mainstream media are forced to respond to this
bottom-up media activity. Within what Mark Andrejevic calls the
digital enclosure, our participatory media activities are however
being appropriated by states and corporations in the form of big
data that can be harnessed toward the advancement of neoliberal
agendas. While corporations strive to ever more precisely chart
consumer profiles and preferences by exhaustively mining social
media sites, the NSA and other agencies subject citizen activists
to extensive surveillance and criminalization. Thus, although the
Internet empowers us with access to once unimaginable volumes of
information and forms of connectivity, it simultaneously renders us
vulnerable to
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algorithmic control exerted by the forces of commodification and
securitization. SOCIAL TENSIONS 17. The Co-constitution of Race and
Neoliberalism: More than Just a Racist Eruption David Roberts
(University of Toronto) - [email protected] In 2010, Minelle
Mahtani and I published an article challenging scholars of
neoliberalism, especially within geography, to approach the
connection between race and neoliberalism in a more sophisticated
manner. The scholarship on race and neoliberalism, at the time,
tended to focus on racialized outcomes of neoliberal reforms the
racist eruptions of neoliberalization. We argued that it was
problematic to understand and theorize these as two separate social
entities that sometimes intersect. Instead, we demanded an
understanding of race and neoliberalism as co-constitutive.
Following Giroux (2005) we argued that while neoliberalism is
saturated with race, it also modifies that way that race and racism
is understood and experienced in contemporary society. Since
publication, the article has had significant influence on the
theorization of race and neoliberalism garnering nearly fifty
citations. This chapter revisits the original argument and then
proceeds to analyze how these arguments have been taken up by other
scholars through a literature review of articles and book chapter
that have cited the 2010 piece. Towards a conclusion, I work to
plot a course as to what I believe should be the future directions
in which the scholarship theorizing race and neoliberalism may want
to go. 18. Young Women as Ideal Neoliberal Subjects: Better to be
Sick than Angry Christina Scharff (Kings College London) -
[email protected] Gender intersects with neoliberalism in
various ways. A discussion of these complex entanglements would
depend on our understanding of gender and neoliberalism, which are
concepts that have been defined and used differently, depending on
disciplinary orientation, political outlook, and spatial and
temporal context, to name just a few. Instead of attempting to
provide an overview of the various ways in which gender and
neoliberalism have been analysed and theorised, this chapter will
hone in on recent feminist research on contemporary Western
societies. This body of work has suggested that women, and in
particular young women, have been constructed as ideal neoliberal
subjects. By adopting a Foucauldian approach to neoliberalism,
feminist research has shown that public, media and policy
discourses have positioned young women as subjects of capacity who
can lead responsibilised and self-managed lives through
self-application and self-transformation. Based on empirical
research, I will explore these subjectivities. In particular, the
chapter will draw on over sixty in-depth interviews with young,
female classical musicians who, due to their positioning as both
young women and cultural workers, may be neoliberal subjects par
excellence. By focusing on the ways in which the research
participants negotiated playing-related injuries, which were
prevalent but often hidden, the chapter will shed light on some of
the contradictions, exclusions and politics of neoliberal, gendered
subjectivity.
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19. Neoliberal Paradoxes of Sexuality Sea Ling Cheng (Chinese
University of Hong Kong) [email protected] What kind of sexuality
does neoliberalism endorse, let be, or penalize? What kind of
sexual subjects are compatible with the free, self-sufficient, and
self-advancing subjects of neoliberalism? How is sexuality
mobilized in neoliberal political, economic, social, and cultural
projects? What are the sexual limits of neoliberalism? Sexuality
stands at the intersection of the political, economic, and cultural
reconfiguration of relationships between the state and the
individuals in neoliberal transformations. While scholars generally
agree that neoliberalism varies across locations, examining
sexuality as a dense transfer point for relations of power
(Foucault 1978) illuminate the paradoxes and contradictions of
neoliberalism. Socially, the retreat of the state from the social
sphere is accompanied by a reification of the nuclear family and
relational sexuality. This buttresses a class-based view of
sexuality as a means of individual identity and emotional
expression, a private matter that must be distinguished from the
public and therefore commercial realm. Embedded as such as part of
a narrative about self, authenticity, and nationhood, sexuality has
been further deployed for the securitization of state and national
borders. This entry discusses how neoliberal governance and
subject-making are contested in the realm of sexuality, providing
an overview of the culture wars and policy debates around sex,
ranging from gay marriage to sex trafficking to reproductive
technology. 20. Health and Neoliberalism: Biopolitics, Biocapital
and the New Washington Consensus Matt Sparke (University of
Washington) - [email protected] This chapter surveys the way in which
both macro forms of neoliberal governance and micro practices of
neoliberal governmentality come together in context-contingent ways
to shape health policies, health systems and embodied health
outcomes. Changing forms of biopolitics in the era of biotech
molecularization are important considerations in this respect, and
a key argument of the chapter is that neoliberalization is leading
to extremely unequal but interconnected regimes of biopolitics and
necropolitics globally. To understand the connections, it is
argued, we have to come to terms - inter alia - with how these
divergent biopolitical regimes are tied together by biocapital.
Their starkly divergent consequences in terms of risk management
and precarity therefore need to be considered in relation to one
another, both on a global and local scale. This approach to
neoliberalism therefore takes us beyond static statistical accounts
of how inequality maps on to ill-health in particular data-set
defined populations. Instead, it opens up the possibility of
mapping geographies of global structural violence. By doing so it
also offer sobering lessons about the ways in which even efforts to
reduce the violence and repair the world remain structured by an
emergent new Washington Consensus on neoliberal market fostercare.
21. Welfare and Neoliberalism Julie MacLeavy (University of
Bristol) - [email protected] This chapter examines the
(often counter-productive) neoliberal impulses underlying the
restructuring of contemporary welfare states. Its particular focus
is on how a neoliberalised approach to the broader political
economy has been translated in an age of austerity and used to
legitimate further cuts to central and local government budgets,
welfare services and benefits, and the privatisation of public
resources resulting in job losses. Employing a critical
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gender analysis of contemporary welfare policies in different
national contexts, it will argue that the discourse of austerity
re-constructs and re-embeds negative attitudes towards welfare,
which have made possible a process of welfare reform, as attitudes
have shifted from a general consensus that welfare exists as a
safety net for people with no or low incomes, towards a more
punitive policy approach which emphasises self-sufficiency and
individual requirements to work. In doing so, it will explore the
consequences of welfare restructuring for different social groups.
22. Labour and Neoliberalism Ben Jackson (University of Oxford) -
[email protected] Labour has been central to the
concerns of neo-liberalism from its ideological inception to the
roll out of neo-liberal policies in government in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This chapter surveys
how neo-liberals have analysed this concept, focusing in particular
on the way in which neo-liberal theory has sought to treat labour
as a commodity to be bought and sold like any other on the market.
A distinctive feature of neo-liberal thinking is the view that
there is no such thing as market-based coercion in labour
relations, only coercive interventions into the market sponsored by
the state and by powerful, state-backed unions. This has led
neo-liberals to adopt a sceptical pose towards labour market
regulation and collective bargaining. The chapter investigates the
ideological foundations and policy implications of this stance and
discusses the key neo-liberal writings on labour by such authors as
W. H. Hutt, Henry Simons, F. A. Hayek and Gary Becker. 23. The
Commons Against Neoliberalism, the Commons of Neoliberalism, the
Commons Beyond Neoliberalism Max Haiven (Nova Scotia College of Art
and Design) - [email protected] In this chapter I briefly explore
the relationship of the commons to neoliberalism in three
registers. First, I offer a brief historical overview of the
commons as both actuality and idea, with a focus on the celebratory
concept of the commons as it has risen to prominence amidst the
neoliberal period. I trace both neoliberalism and the idea of the
commons as stemming from the crisis of post-war Keynesianism. This
section is organized around the contrast between the neoliberal
agenda of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the
common-ist agenda of the Zapatistas. The second section of this
chapter examines the ways in which, over the past twenty years,
neoliberalism has come to adopt and co-opt certain aspects of the
reality and the idea of the commons. It begins by addressing the
curious success of Nobel (Memorial) Prize winner Elinor Ostrom and
other mainstream economists and concludes with a discussion of the
rise, in the past few years, of the rhetoric (and reality) of the
"sharing economy." These, I suggest, are examples of how neoliberal
capitalism increasingly relies on the commons (in idea and in fact)
to reproduce itself. In the final section, I take up a new
generation of radical theorizations (and practices) of the commons
that are less celebratory and utopian, notably Stefano Harney and
Fred Moten's concept of the "undercommons" and Silvia Federici's
historically-informed conceptualization of the commons as the
fabric of a struggle over social reproduction. Here I follow George
Caffentzis in retaining the conceptual and actual power of the
commons to resist and confront neoliberalism, but in ways that
attend to the potential for co-optation and the need to retain a
broader analysis of capitalism.
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24. Neoliberalism and Social Economy Peter Graefe (McMaster
University) - [email protected] Early analyses of neoliberalism,
adopting an alarmist tone, emphasized the retrenchment of state
social provision to make space for market regulation. With time,
these added the nuance that programmes were not just retrenched,
but also redeployed. It was not just a question of changing the
balance of state and market, but of transforming the logics and
re-orienting the goals of state provision, and of attempting to
transform the subjectivities and identities of citizens. Analysis
of the social economy and neoliberalism has followed a similar arc.
At first, the question was one of the social economy as a site for
privatization and state offloading. Then, as a site of
institutional and policy experimentation, it has sustained the
interest of those analyzing neoliberalism more dynamically. For
more Foucauldian analyses, there is interest in the technologies
that align non-state service providers with governmental
programmes, as well as the manner in which social economy
organizations govern clients. For analysts more versed in the
tradition of the regulation school, the interest has been tied more
to how this innovation relates to the temporality of neoliberalism.
Are we witnessing the roll-out of new institutions and
governmentalities so as to extend market metrics deeper into social
provisions, and indeed into organizations previously marked by
non-market cultures and rationalities, or is the attention to the
social economy more akin to creating flanking mechanisms to
compensate for problems in social reproduction that might hobble
the neoliberal project. Both the Foucauldian and the regulationist
accounts provide useful critical entres to understanding the
development of the social economy, but they share similar
structuralist shortcomings. In looking for how the social economy
translates or relates to a broader neoliberal project or programme,
there is a tendency to overstate processes that reproduce
neoliberalism, and to ignores the potentials for the social economy
to serve as an element of a settlement that might break with
neoliberalism. This is not so much a strategy of introducing agency
so as to then adopt an excessive voluntarism, as one of keeping an
analytical door open to possibilities of change. KNOWLEDGE
PRODUCTIONS 25. Education, Neoliberalism, Human Capital: Prudential
Rationality and Homo Economicus as Entrepreneur of Himself Michael
Peters (University of Waikato) - [email protected]
Neoliberalism is a changing dynamic phenomenon crystalising as an
idea and insipient ideology in the prewar period, becoming
internationalized and institutionalized as a credo for the Mt
Pelerin Society (was to be Acton-Tocqueville society) in 1947, and
a set of policies in the service of economic liberalism with the
ascendancy to power of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in
1979-1980 (Peters, 2011). One of the main forms of economic
liberalism analyzed by Michel Foucault (2008) in his historical
treatment of the birth of neoliberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics
was American neoliberalism represented especially by the late Gary
Becker (1962) who on the basis of Schultz work and others
introduced the concept and theory of human capital into political
economy privileging education in his analysis. This chapter traces
the inception of human capital theory and analyses it in terms of
Foucaults analysis that Becker developed an approach that is not a
conception of labour power so much as a capital-ability that
Foucault captures in the following comment: the
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replacement every time of homo economicus as partner of exchange
with a homo economicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for
himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being
for himself the source of his earnings. 26. The Rise of Neoliberal
Reasoning in Universities: Subjects, Objects and Globalized
Academic Knowledge Production. Lawrence Berg (University of British
Columbia, Okanagan) - [email protected] The chapter will examine
the rise of neoliberal reasoning in universities, as a system of
ideologies and policies designed to govern academia, and as a form
of governmentality that produces neoliberalizing subjects in the
academy. The chapter will then go on to examine the implications
that such neoliberal policies, ideologies and governmentalities
have for the production of both knowing subjects, and the knowledge
that they produce. 27. The Pedagogy of Neoliberalism Sheila Macrine
(University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth) - [email protected]
The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the Pedagogy of
Neoliberalism. First, it provides an analytical framework for
understanding how the pedagogy of neoliberalism is a pervasive
educational tool mediating a construction of consent and coercion
between centers of power and the common citizen. Further the
chapter takes up this notion of the pedagogy of neoliberalism and
allows us to step back from the onslaught of its predatory
practices and examine how the hegemony of neoliberalisms pedagogy
teaches us to accept our oppression. Giroux (2004, p. 106)
succinctly declares neoliberalism as a culture of corporate public
pedagogy that cancels out or devalues gender, class-specific, and
racial injustices of the existing social order by absorbing the
democratic impulses and practices of civil society within narrow
economic relations. This construction of consent legitimizes the
widespread dismantling of welfare state policies and validates the
neoliberal rhetoric of individual freedoms and personal
responsibility through meritocracy. Understanding the pedagogy of
neoliberalism helps illuminate how neoliberal governments
psychologically police citizens to become enterprising-selves
irrespective of class barriers (Rose, 1990). Under the guise of the
pedagogy of neoliberalism, individuals are told to either work
harder or suffer the consequences of failure with no one to blame
but themselves. Here the Pedagogy of Neoliberalism is seen as a
hegemonic system that involves the uncritical promotion of values
of enterprise and entrepreneurship in developing the ideological
apparatus of neoliberalism across the world (McCafferty, 2010). To
challenge this Pedagogy of Neoliberalism, this chapter argues for
the development of a critical counter-hegemonic pedagogy in order
to explore and create alternative pedagogical sites to supplant
neoliberalisms savage capitalism. 28. Neoliberalism, business
schools and financial economics: Legitimating corporate monopoly?
Kean Birch (York University) [email protected] Neoliberalism is seen as
a market-centred order in which markets are characterized as the
key ordering mechanism for economy, society and polity. What this
description belies, however, is the rise and importance of
corporate monopoly since the 1970s. This presents a problem for how
we understand neoliberalism since markets and monopoly sit uneasily
together; it might even suggest that neoliberalism is not a
market-based order after all. With
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this in mind, it is important to examine how business and
corporate forms and governance have evolved during the so-called
neoliberal era. What this illustrates is the importance of two
things to the reproduction of neoliberal order: on the one hand,
new business and financial knowledges that legitimate the expansion
of corporate monopoly through the reworking of the firm as a nexus
of contracts; and, on the other hand, business schools as centres
of the production of these new business and financial knowledges.
29. Neoliberalism Everywhere: Mobile Neoliberal Policy Russell
Prince (Massey University) - [email protected] One of the
remarkable features of neoliberalism is its ubiquity: it seems to
be everywhere (Peck and Tickell, 2002: 380). It manifests in policy
at all levels, from the local to the supranational, and across
international space, from the richest global cities of Europe and
America to the poorest communities of the developing world. From a
certain point of view, this convergence means the neoliberalisation
of our global economy and society. But when we look closely, there
is remarkable diversity across time and space between policy
programmes that are otherwise reasonably described as neoliberal.
By tracing the connections between geographically separate
neoliberal policy programmes and focusing on how they get
transferred across space we can grasp how this variegated
neoliberalisation proceeds. These transfers can be effected in a
variety of ways, from deliberate strategy on the part of neoliberal
policy actors who often harness the power of governmental
institutions to construct fast policy networks that sell neoliberal
ideas of crisis and solution, to the softer inculcation of
policy-makers with neoliberal common sense through the circulation
of certain technocratic knowledges and experts. But the politics of
these transfers means that the policies mutate as they move and
circulate in order to be made to fit different contexts and
conditions. The dynamic ability of neoliberalism to change and
adapt can be observed in these transfers, and this helps explain
its ubiquity. 30. Science, Innovation and Neoliberalism David
Tyfield (Lancaster University) - [email protected]
Science and innovation (S&I) have been tasked with
kick-starting the moribund global economy, underpinning a new
techno-economic paradigm, while also tackling multiple, overlapping
global challenges, such as climate change, food security or energy
security. But the cultural and political role of science and the
political economy of its funding in the form of its ongoing
commercialization, and its disruption by fiscal crisis and
austerity of public support (at least in the global north),
continuing globalisation and the emergence of web 2.0-enabled open
science are currently in a state of unprecedented upheaval. Both of
these phenomena the intensified and particularly challenging
demands placed on S&I, and its transforming political economy
are intimately related to neoliberalism. Indeed, conceiving of
neoliberalism as a political project founded upon a fundamentalism
of the market as the optimal epistemic device, S&I and the
transformation of their political economy in recent decades
provides a singular window into the trajectory of neoliberalism
both past and regarding the emerging present. In particular, on the
one hand, by exploring how a neoliberal-conditioned system of
knowledge production generates intensifying crises in this key
aspect of contemporary political economy, crucial tensions and even
limits to neoliberalism that are currently being played out are
illuminated. While, on the other, trends in the further
transformation of knowledge production, from contemporary efforts
to
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circumnavigate these problems, afford informed speculation
regarding emerging political economic models and projects that may
be designated post-neoliberal. 31. Performing Neoliberalism:
Practices, Power and Subject Formation Michael Glass (University of
Pittsburgh) - [email protected] This chapter provides a critical
perspective on neoliberalism rooted in theories of performativitya
term in contemporary social theory that argues the use of language
is a form of social action with material consequences.
Neoliberalism is considered a defining feature of late capitalist
society, serving as a political-economic concept that explains
effects through policies and practices on specific scales from the
individual body to the supra-national. A performative perspective
holds that as with any concept, neoliberalism was neither
discovered as a fully-formed subject for geographic analysis, nor
can neoliberalism do anything without actants. There are multiple
actants at play here who produce and perform neoliberalism,
including those who define and carry out the political and economic
policies considered neoliberal, those recipients of policy who must
determine how to respond, and those who assess the influences of
neoliberalism and make claims about its value. These sets of
actants are discussed with reference to three key issues used by
geographers in research on neoliberalism: practices, power, and
subject formation. Through this survey, I emphasize how the concept
of neoliberalism is produced in scholarly and policy discourse and
is transferred and resisted in specific contexts. The conclusion
argues this production can never be completed, creating the space
for resistance. 32. Neoliberalism as Austerity: The Theory,
Practice, and Purpose of Fiscal Restraint Since the 1970s Heather
Whiteside (University of British Columbia) -
[email protected] Austerity through fiscal restraint
government debt reduction and deficit elimination is en vogue once
again. As of 2012, all but four members of the G-20 have declared
this to be a leading policy priority and one which is scheduled to
take precedence well into the current decade. Far from
technocratic, the politics of austerity are entrenching,
reasserting, and unrolling processes of neoliberalization at
global, national, and urban scales, much as they did during earlier
iterations of fiscal restraint beginning in the 1970s. In this
sense, the history and hegemony of neoliberalism is intrinsically
intertwined with that of austerity, and the recent return of fiscal
consolidation is a contemporary manifestation of a longer
historical trend. Austerity is a signature of the neoliberal era
much as neoliberalism can be understood as austerity. This paper
examines the connection between neoliberalism and austerity since
the late 1970s in terms of their discursive, institutional, and
material attributes. Attention will be paid to temporal dynamics
(the appeal of and to austerity over time), spatial effects (the
scalar impact of austerity, particularly downloading onto municipal
or local authorities), and socio-institutional reforms (policies
and programs). Neoliberal-era fiscal restraint works in lockstep
with other key aspects of the neoliberal political economy such as
financialization, privatization, and marketization, and these
connections will also be highlighted. As an overview analysis, the
discussion aims for wide applicability although examples will be
drawn on from the global North and South where appropriate.
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33. Think Tanks, Neoliberalism, and the Production of Ignorance
Tom Slater (University of Edinburgh) - [email protected] This
chapter explores and analyses the role of right wing think tanks in
processes of neoliberalisation. Think tanks lie at the intersection
of academic, journalistic, policy and economic fields, and they
play a substantial role in buttressing the crafting, mutation and
expansion of the neoliberal state. As non-state agencies, they
purport to be 'independent', but they rely on generous donations
from corporations, institutions and individuals with clear
political agendas, resulting in profound state effects. Neoliberal
politicians rarely consult published academic research unless it
supports the policies they want to pursue; instead, they deploy
neat sound bites, accessible catchphrases and statistical nuggets
from think tank surveys that measure nothing more than the
worldview of the think tank that commissions them. As an
illustration of this practice, I explore the methods and influence
of two right-wing think tanks in the UK, Policy Exchange and the
Centre for Social Justice, which have been highly influential in
housing and welfare policies respectively. Their glossy and
authoritative publications, their fast channels of access to
authority and opinion-makers, and their speechwriters and
researchers have provided the 'evidence base' for the mobilization
of state power in the extension of conservative dogma; they
actively produce ignorance to appease their funders, shielding
politicians and their audiences from viable alternatives, and
inoculating them against the critique of autonomous scholarship. I
argue that the dominance of neoliberalism can be explained partly
by the right wing think tank mastery of decision-based evidence
making, which requires exposure and critical analysis. SPACES 34.
Urban Neoliberalism Roger Keil (York University) -
[email protected]
This chapter will trace the histories of the intersection of
urbanization and neoliberalization. It will demonstrate that the
current urban age often portrayed as an almost natural demographic,
morphological and economic force -- has in many ways been a product
of, and has been productive of neoliberalization. While urbanism
and neoliberalism are mostly open-ended ideological formations,
urbanization and neoliberalization are material and discursive
processes that lead to real (and imagined) constellations through
which modern capitalist societies are being reproduced. I will look
at roll-back-, roll-out-, and roll-with-it neoliberalization
through urbanization and will discuss the ways in which those have
led to what Brenner, Peck and Theodore, among others, have called
variegated forms of neoliberalization. For illustration, I will
look specifically at the neoliberalization of urban peripheries as
the prime landscapes of neoliberal urbanism. I will also look at
the pitfalls and possibilities in post-neoliberal urbanization as I
contemplate the political opportunities springing from the
horizontalization of the urban polity in the period of
(post)neoliberalism. 35. Neoliberalism and Rural Change Cristobal
Kay (SOAS, University of London) - [email protected] This chapter
analyses the key features of neoliberalism as related to the rural
spaces. During the 1970s the statist development paradigm followed
by most developing countries became increasingly under fire from
neoliberal thinkers. The statist development strategy
prioritized
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industrialization based on import-substitution and the urban
areas often neglecting the development of agriculture and the rural
areas. The debt crisis of the 1980s provided the opportunity for
multilateral institutions like the World Bank to push for the
adoption of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) in developing
countries as a condition for receiving loans and development aid.
The SAPs contained the key elements of the neoliberal policy
proposals aimed at reducing the role of the State in the economy
and giving free reign to market forces, especially by removing
protectionist measures and opening the economy to the competitive
forces of the world market. Later during the 1990s the so-called
Washington Consensus emerged which further emphasized aspects of
the neoliberal paradigm. The liberalization policies profoundly
restructured the rural spaces and the agricultural sector as
exports based on natural resources gained new prominence. The
salient features of the great transformation in the countryside are
discussed such as (a) the shift from traditional commodity exports
to non-traditional agricultural exports; (b) the concentration of
natural resources, land and capital; (c) the dominance of
agribusiness and transnational enterprises; (d) the shift to
temporary, casual and flexible working conditions and the
feminization of the workforce; (e) poverty and income inequality;
(f) the increasing rural-urban linkages and reconfiguration of
rural spaces; and (g) the growing reach of the global corporate
food regime. Due to rising poverty and inequality the neoliberal
paradigm was contested by scholars, activists, NGOs, peasant
organizations and landless rural workers. Some key debates are
discussed focusing on issues like land reform, food sovereignty,
agribusiness versus peasant farming, agroecology and land grabbing.
36. The Heartlands of Neoliberalism Bob Jessop (Lancaster
University) - [email protected] This chapter adopts a
regulation- and state-theoretical variegated capitalism approach to
the genealogy and subsequent development of neoliberalism. It
distinguishes four kinds of neoliberal project: post-socialist
system transformation, principled neoliberal regime shifts,
pragmatic neoliberal policy adjustment, and neoliberal structural
adjustment regimes. The heartlands of neoliberalism are
characterized by principled neoliberal regime shifts, typified by
the USA and UK but with variations in Canada, Eire, Australia, New
Zealand, and Iceland. I consider the periodization of neoliberal
regime shifts in the USA and UK and comment on similarities and
differences with other cases. I then consider the extent to which
pragmatic neoliberal policy adjustments can cumulate, over time,
through ratchet-like effects, to produce de facto rather than
principled neoliberal regime shifts. Here I also consider two cases
the Federal Republic of Germany, in which neoliberal policy
adjustments serve a neo-mercantilist economic strategy but have
consolidated into a more neoliberal regime shift, and Sweden, where
a glass half-full, glass half-empty ambivalence exists as a result
of the steady cumulation of neoliberal policy adjustments but much
of the Swedish social democratic model has been retained. Finally,
I consider the implications of neoliberal regime shifts in the
heartlands in terms of (1) core-periphery relations within the
heartlands themselves, associated with intensified uneven
development and (2) the repercussions of neoliberal regime shifts
in the heartlands for the overall dynamic of a world market
organized in the shadow of neoliberalism. 37. The Peripheries of
Neoliberalism Warwick Murray and Jon Overton (Victoria University
of Wellington) - [email protected],
[email protected]
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Peripheries of the global economy have been deeply engaged in,
and affected by, neoliberalism. Politically, neoliberal reforms
were encouraged and often forced on countries removed from the
centres of global power. This occurred both in peripheral
developing economies, as in sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America
through the mechanism of structural adjustment programmes, and in
more affluent New World economies, such as Australia and New
Zealand. The result was change that was usually more severe and
deep-seated than elsewhere. Such extremes of neoliberal policy
continue to the present, as in the stringent conditions forced upon
latecomers to WTO accession. Political change has been followed by
economic perturbations through neoliberalism. Opened to the global
economy, resource peripheries have faced both enhanced
opportunities for trade and growth, as during the commodity boom of
the early 2000s, and marked economic contraction when commodity
prices fell following the global financial crisis of 2007-08. Yet,
although peripheries appear to be mere appendages of the global
economy and subject to neoliberal pressures beyond their control,
there are signs that forms of resistance to neoliberalism, or at
least attempts to steer and limit its effects, are evident and
growing in peripheral regions. 38. Neoliberal Migrations Maureen
Hickey (National University of Singapore) - [email protected] It is
difficult to overstate the impact that neoliberalism has hand on
human mobility over the past half-century. During this period all
forms of migration, but particularly labor migration, have
intensified and diversified worldwide; a phenomenon that cross-cuts
geographic scales and has led some scholars to declare that we are
entering a new age of global migration. This chapter provides a
brief critical overview of the relationship between neoliberalism
and migration in three key areas. First, it examines the
restructuring of global markets and the emergence of the New
International Division of Labor (NIDL). Transnational Corporations
(TNCs) were able to leverage spatial inequalities, particularly at
the international scale, in order to relocate production to take
advantage of cheaper labor and less stringent regulations in many
countries in Less Developed countries (LDCs). This shift,
epitomized by new forms of spatial organization such as Export
Process Zones (EPZs), has led to the emergence of new migration
trajectories both within and between countries. Second, we explore
how successive waves of global economic crises, together with the
neoliberal policy responses of international financial institutions
and development agencies which have consistently promoted
restructuring packages based on fiscal austerity, deregulation and
trade liberalization have shaped current international migration
streams, most notably the increasing flows of less-skilled labor
from the Global South to the Global North. Finally, new forms of
enclosure and dispossession under neoliberal regimes, including
privitisation, deregulation, intensive resource extraction and
environmental degradation (including climate change), have led to
new and growing streams of involuntary migration; a trend that is
poised to grow in importance in the decades ahead. 39. Neoliberal
Re-regulation: The Simultaneous Opening and Hardening of National
Territorial Boundaries Joseph Nevins (Vassar College) -
[email protected] As many analysts have noted, the age of
globalization was supposed to be a time of disappearing territorial
boundaries, but, instead, they are proliferating. Indeed,
territorial boundary control regimes around the world have become
considerably more formidable over the last two decades. Since 1998,
for example, boundary walls or fences have arisen in
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almost thirty binational borderlands where they had not
previously existed according to geographer Reece Jones. If
neoliberalism is, among other things, a regime characterized by the
liberalization and de-regulation of national economies and
increasing flows of capital and commodities between them, it is
also marked by intensifying regulation of immigration and boundary
controls. This is particularly true in the borderlands that divide
and bring together the relatively rich and poor, privileged and
disadvantaged, white and nonwhite. Thus, while the neoliberal era
has seen a marked increase in transboundary mobility by the
relatively affluent, it has also seen a simultaneous hardening of
territorial boundaries for those deemed less than desirable
migrants by receiving countries. As geographer David Delaney
observes, territories both reflect and produce the social orders to
which they are tied. In this regard, the growing filter-like aspect
of national territorial boundaries is inextricably tied to the
neoliberal era. This chapter explores these matters via a focus on
the boundary and immigration control regimes of the United States
and the European Union. 40. Home: Object and Technology of
Neoliberal Governmentalities Rae Dufty-Jones (University of Western
Sydney) - [email protected] For some time housing has been
an object of government and governance. It is not surprising
therefore that housing is an important focus for analyses of
neoliberalisation, particularly the socio-spatial implications of
neoliberal policies, programs and processes. Indeed, neoliberalism
has become a key explanatory tool when examining the changes to how
housing is produced and consumed and the policy settings guiding
this economic activity in the twenty-first century. From analyses
of privatisation processes of social housing to tracing the
antecedents and fall-out of the Global Financial Crisis the
connections between neoliberalisation and housing are now
well-established. This chapter examines the myriad of links between
neoliberalisation and housing. In particularly it seeks to show the
way in which housing is not only an object of neoliberal governance
but is also an important technology employed in the pursuit of
various neoliberal governmentalities. The chapter reviews the
neoliberalisation of housing at a variety of scales from the
neighbourhood (e.g. master-planned estates, policies of social-mix)
to the nation-state (e.g. processes of domicide). The chapter
concludes with a reflection on how housing is not just a static
tool in neoliberal governing strategies but also key to producing
mobile behaviours. 41. Space, Place, and the Cultural Landscapes of
Neoliberalism Reuben Rose-Redwood (University of Victoria) and
Maral Sotoudehnia (University of Victoria)- [email protected],
[email protected] This chapter examines how neoliberal modes
of governance are reshaping the spatial imaginaries of place
through the refashioning of cultural landscapes into branded and
commodified spaces. We begin by providing an overview of key
debates associated with the rise of place branding and the
performative enactment of place-images as marketing devices within
the context of the shift towards entrepreneurial governance
regimes. Next, we explore the internal contradictions of neoliberal
rationalities that underpin both the marketing of place-images as
distinct brands, on the one hand, and the commodification of
place-identities, on the other hand. These political-economic
practices are often viewed interchangeably yet they can also work
at cross-purposes, particularly when the corporate branding of
place-identities detracts from efforts to produce a unique
place-image or place-brand. We therefore consider how the
contradictory strategies of neoliberal place-making
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have opened new terrains within which the value of space and
place is contested. The chapter then concludes by highlighting the
limits of neoliberal spatial imaginaries as well as the prospects
for working towards a politics of place that revalorizes the
cultural landscape as a political arena of spatial justice. NATURES
AND ENVIRONMENTS 42. Neoliberal Environmental Governance in the
Anthropocene Jessica Dempsey (University of Victoria) and
Rosemary-Claire Collard - [email protected],
[email protected] The project of governing the environment
is increasingly complex. How is rule achieved? What actors,
processes and dynamics must we account for to understand
environmental governance, today? Are the interventions into
environments changing under neoliberalism? How? This essay will
focus on reviewing neoliberal environmental governance literature
in geography to understand the various approaches to the question
of governing nature. We pay particular attention to the stakes and
effects of neoliberal environmental rule. How are distinctively
neoliberal political-economies remaking socioecologies? And what
evidence do we have for this? In this analysis, it is important to
recall that neoliberal environments diverge and also build from
historical liberal, capitalist environments. Thus while there is
value to the terminology neoliberalism, our primary interest in
this paper is to draw out consistencies and divergences in the
project of Western environmental governance and environmentalism.
We identify logics of calculation, domination, quantification and
accumulation that persist across liberal-neoliberal regimes, logics
long involved in the production of socioecologies. Finally, we will
link the debates and tensions in the environmental governance
literature to discussions around the governing in the so-called
Anthropocene. Bold popular and academic claims of the age of humans
and the environment is what we make it are resonating in many ways
with neoliberalisms instrumentalist and entrepreneurial zeal, and
also with the modus operandi of rational, scientific management.
Such intersections bear scrutiny by critics of neoliberal natures.
43. Neoliberalisms Climate Larry Lohmann (The Corner House) -
[email protected] Popular unrest over climate change is a
threat to capital accumulation in that it implicitly challenges the
amplified labour exploitation and speedier circulation that became
possible in the 19th century through thermodynamic energy and
fossil fuels. The cobbled-together official responses to this
challenge that have emerged in the past two decades pre-eminently,
national and international carbon markets partake of virtually all
of the characteristic elements of neoliberalism. They assume that
tackling social issues is largely a matter of discovering prices
inhering in new commodities developed for the purpose (in this case
pollution allowances and offsets). The commodities themselves are
treated, via a typically neoliberal fetish, as if they created and
produced themselves automatically (or as if they were unproblematic
translations of ecological or social goods into a quantifiable and
circulatable form), while at the same time the most strenuous and
violent efforts are devoted to constructing the institutions needed
to define, maintain and defend them through dispossession and
exploitation. Given the role of the state in creating demand,
guaranteeing
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supply, and underwriting the profits of a galaxy of
private-sector partners, contractors, consultants and technocrats
who carry out most of the work of producing, circulating,
standardizing and regulating the new commodities, conventional
dualisms opposing state and market have become of as little use in
analyzing climate policy as they are in understanding other areas
of neoliberal policy. Not least, the new markets follow the general
thrust of neoliberalism in that they help both state and corporate
actors evade much of the burden of addressing the social problems
that the markets are advertised as cheaply solving, while
simultaneously holding out the promise of expanding and deepening
opportunities for capital accumulation at a time of deep crisis and
sclerosis.
44. Neoliberal Energies: Crisis, Governance, and Hegemony Matt
Huber (Syracuse University) - [email protected] The shift to
neoliberalism has also correlated with profound shifts in the
political economy of energy. This chapter is meant to provide an
overview of the different ways to conceptualize the relations
between energy and neoliberalism. First, energy is central to the
historical emergence of neoliberal hegemony in the 1970s. The
energy crisis did not only overlap with wider ideological shifts
toward neoliberalism; it reinforced such shifts and provided
empirical case studies for wider logics and arguments about the
government inefficiency and market distortions (e.g. price
controls, OPEC, Big Oil). Second, neoliberal policies were in large
part implemented in the field of energy governance. After a wave of
resource nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, energy price collapse
and neoliberal policy forced many developing nations to implement
policies meant to attract foreign energy capital (low taxes/royalty
rates, privatization of national oil companies, state security, and
accumulation by dispossession of local communities). Third, while
neoliberalism is often envisioned as applying to specific empirical
slices of policy reality (e.g., environment, housing, energy, or
whatever), it is less common to theorize the social and ecological
relations of neoliberal hegemony itself. In this regard, everyday
lived practices of energy consumption - specifically in relation to
the privatization of housing and automobility can be seen as
underpinning a variety of populist neoliberal logics (e.g.,
hostility to taxes). I argue that the geography of life in (often
suburban contexts) reinforced what Foucault isolated as the core of
the neoliberal project the enterprise form. Thus, we need not only
think of the neoliberalism of energy, but also how energy fuels
neoliberalism. 45. Water and Neoliberalism Alex Loftus (Kings
College) and Jessica Budds (University of East Anglia) -
[email protected], [email protected] Water is both a lens
through which we might gain a better understanding of the shifts in
state-society relations associated with neoliberalism and also an
elemental material through which those shifts have been made
possible. This chapter will begin by tracing the emergence of
neoliberalism back to the Chicago Boys Chilean laboratory, before
demonstrating how the development of water markets in the Chilean
context were crucial to a range of neoliberal environmental
strategies. The second part of the chapter will look in more detail
at the intimate relationships established between new forms of
water governance, domestic water technologies and shifting
subjectivities, understood in relation to water provision. We will
argue that the shifting citizen-consumer nexus, so often associated
with neoliberal governance strategies, is most clearly exemplified
in changing relationships to water established through forms of
compulsory metering, privatization and
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financialisation. The household and the body have become central
to both the production of the neoliberal subject and the
accumulation strategies that seek to displace our most recent
financial crisis. The journey embarked on in this chapter will
trace the translation of neoliberal water governance strategies
from Chile to Europe and South Africa, enabling both South-South
and South-North comparative research. 46. The Neoliberalization of
Agriculture: Regimes, Resistance, and Resilience Jamey Essex
(University of Windsor) - [email protected] Neoliberalism has
profoundly altered agricultural practices and systems since the
late 1970s. From the production of food and fiber in innumerable
diffuse sites around the world to the highly uneven and unequal
systems of trade, speculation, and consumption through which the
world's population feeds and clothes itself, agriculture has proven
a vital but highly contentious arena of neoliberalization. This
chapter covers the neoliberalization of agriculture with an
emphasis on how neoliberalism has entered into the metabolic
relations and processes of agroecological production, and attempted
to bend these to the needs of speculative global capital. Of
particular focus is the food regime approach to understanding the
neoliberalization of global agriculture, as well as the debate this
approach has sparked in critical assessments of neoliberalism. The
food regime approach stems from regulation theory, and concentrates
on global systems and historic shifts in the regulation of
capitalism. In doing so, it provides powerful insight into the
development of a corporate-dominated and market-oriented neoliberal
system of agricultural production, trade, and consumption. Critics
contend, however, that it also limits our ability to examine the
variegated and often haphazard nature of agroecological adaptation
and crisis under neoliberalism, as well as the diverse forms of
compromise, resistance, and resilience that have developed among
agrarian movements and alternative forms of agriculture. This
chapter this highlights this theoretical and practical diversity
and the limits of neoliberal agriculture. 47. Sustainability and
Neoliberalism Byron Miller (University of Calgary) -
[email protected] While neoliberalism might be succinctly
defined as market fundamentalism, sustainability is a far more
amorphous concept. Definitions of sustainability abound, but most
commonly address inter-generational equity, e.g., the Brundtland
Reports definition, and a tri-partite notion of what is to be
sustained: the natural environment, economic growth, and social
equity. Produced in the wake of the economic, environmental, and
social crises of late/post-Fordist capitalism, discourses of
sustainability have resonated broadly in virtually all sectors of
society, with critiques rarely found. While the problems
sustainability references are real, the concept provides virtually
no road map of the processes and power relations that produced
them, perhaps explaining its appeal to widely divergent interest
groups. Central to the concept of sustainability is the notion of
global biophysical limits that must be respected. These limits, in
turn, mean that there must be ways of rationing the consumption of
resources and controlling the production of waste. Lacking an
analysis of the power relations and dynamics of capitalism,
sustainability policies and programs readily fall back upon
capitalist market mechanisms as their primary means of limiting
consumption and controlling environmental impacts. Markets, indeed,
can be an effective means of creating/regulating scarcity while
providing new opportunities for capital accumulation. While et. al.
(2004) and Gibbs and Krueger (2007) have argued that sustainability
fixes
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have become a fundamental component of contemporary capital
accumulation strategies. But reliance on market mechanisms gives
short shrift to the social dimension of sustainability and fails to
address the fundamental question of sustainability for whom? Rising
prices and scarcity disproportionately affect those with little
purchasing power, leaving the wealthy to continue unsustainable
practices. An uncritical reliance on market mechanisms, moreover,
implies the rejection of democratic alternatives that would not
necessarily favour the most economically privileged. Neoliberal
policies have had some success moderating environmental
externalities and furthering capital accumulation, while leaving in
place the core mechanisms that produce the problems of social,
environmental, and economic sustainability. 48. Property, Object
and Labour: Commodification in the Bioeconomy Maria Fannin
(University of Bristol) - [email protected] This essay reviews
scholarship on bodily commodification in light of new technologies
in the biosciences. Much of the work analysing late 20th century
developments in the life sciences and medicine highlight their
increasingly marketised character: the blurring of boundaries
between publicly funded and for-profit research, the inducement to
scientists to approach their work as entrepreneurs and to patients
to approach their healthcare as consumers. These developments are
underwritten by the conjunction of market-oriented political
economic structures with scientific epistemologies that emphasise
the flexible, competitive, and promissory nature of biological
processes. This essay revisits theories of commodification in light
of these developments, highlighting how new technologies in the
biosciences rework notions of objectification, fetishism, and the
making of living bodies and body parts into property. It draws on
three cases as illustration. The first examines the practices of
dispossession that underwrite regimes of intellectual property,
most markedly in relation to indigenous populations. The second
explores the collection, use, storage and exchange of bodily
tissues for research and potential therapy and the increasing scale
and scope of biobanking as a key site for the making of new kinds
of bodily commodities. Finally, the essay considers recent feminist
theorisations of the political economies of reproductive
technologies in which the social dynamics of
technologically-mediated reproduction complicate conventional
critiques of commodification. This work also highlights how the
bodys biological processes are put to work in experimental
settings, in which what is commodified is access to the body and
its 'living labour.' 49. The Global Division of Labour/Nature under
Neoliberalism: Extractivism and Productivism Sonja
Killoran-McKibbin (York University) and Anna Zalik (York
University) and - [email protected], [email protected]
The new millennium has seen an enormous growth in the global
reach and intensity of extractive activities. This growth has been
associated with intensified geopolitical maneuvering for mineral
resource access since 9/11 and, following the 2008 financial crash,
a move into commodities over finance as an outlet for accumulated
capital. The extensification and intensification of extraction has
provoked increasing localized conflicts at sites of industrial
activity. Concurrently the organization of extraction globally
demonstrates the persistence of divisions between Global North and
South as well rapid shifts in the extractive economy associated
with both financialization and the rise of the BRICS. The chapter
explores two mutually constituted process which manifest how the
global division of
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nature is persistent in the organization of economies viewed as
relatively productivist and relatively extractivist: 1) the
relationship between the organization of productive processes
(including labour/nature) in creating more or less amenable
extractive environments via more or less sovereigntist regulatory
and fiscal structures; and conversely 2) the extent to which
typically productive enterprises ranging from agriculture to
textiles take on an extractive character under neoliberalism. We
argue for greater attention to a specifically extractive form of
neoliberalism and for a broader understanding of extraction as it
relates to human labour and the environment as co-constituted
categories. Indeed, the extractive frontier in many ways embodies
practices of neoliberalization as it is a powerful force of
commodification of the natural environment and in its enclosure of
territory and association with financialization, exemplifies
characteristics of what some understand as contemporary
accumulation by dispossession. AFTERMATHS 50. The Crisis of
Neoliberalism Grard Dumnil (University of Paris West) and Dominique
Lvy (Paris School of Economics) - [email protected],
[email protected] The new phase in which capitalism entered at the
beginning of the 1980s has been the object of various diverging
interpretations. The emphasis was, notably, placed on the
opposition between governments and markets, or a specific model of
accumulation where demand is stimulated by the wealth of the
richest fractions of the population. There is obviously a
neoliberal ideology and a role played by governments in its
establishment, both matching the features of the new social order.
Neoliberalism is not, however, a mere ideology of free markets or a
new governmental rationality in the Foucaldian sense of the term.
In the mid-1990s we gave a class interpretation of neoliberalism as
a social order, whose basic feature is the restoration of the power
and income of capitalist classes in alliance with the classes of
managers. Following the neoliberal (counter)revolution, sharp
transformations in the functioning of capitalism were observed,
with the new discipline imposed on workers, the new forms of
management targeted to the maximizing of stock-market indices, the
advance of financial mechanisms (the power of financial
institutions), free trade and the free movements of capital (as in
globalization), and the corresponding rise of the in