For a Critical Cultural Political Economy

This paper argues that, if cultural political economy is to be worthwhile, it needs to be critical of its object. In order to develop its critical understanding of contemporary society, it needs to do at least three things. Firstly, while the cultural turn has corrected and sometimes inverted economic reductionism's dismissive treatment of culture and the lifeworld, it needs to avoid reducing economic systems to the lifeworld in which they are embedded, so that the extent to which systems are responsible for economic and cultural effects—good or bad—is not obscured. Secondly, it needs to take a more critical look at the social and cultural embedding of economic activities, and at the way system mechanisms of capital accumulation and uneven development have powerful dis embedding and disruptive effects. Thirdly, it needs to reconsider, rather than ignore, classical political economy, which was always cultural and is still of relevance today, even though it failed to anticipate new issues of cultural and political significance, such as the politics of identity.     

Sustainable Development, Rolled‐out Neoliberalism and Sustainable Communities

Recent contributions by geographers on the relationships between states and citizens have documented the rise of rolled‐out neoliberalism. Development agendas are, it is argued, increasingly dominated by the principles of market‐driven reforms, social inequality, and a drive towards enhancing the economic competitiveness of the supply side of the economy. However, at the same time, a parallel set of discourses has emerged in the development literature which argues that it is principles of sustainable development that have, in practice, become dominant. The emphasis is, instead, on democratic empowerment, environmental conservation, and social justice. This paper examines the relationships between these ostensibly very different interpretations of contemporary development with an assessment of one of the Labour government's most ambitious planning agendas—the publication in February 2003 of the document Sustainable Communities: Building for the Future . The proposals are promoted as a "step change" in the planning system with a new emphasis on tackling shortages of housing in the South East and reviving the economy of the Thames Gateway area. The paper assesses the different ways in which such programmes can be interpreted and argues that contemporary development practices in countries such as Britain are constituted by a hybridity of approaches and rationalities and cannot be reduced to simple characterisations of rolled‐out neoliberalism or sustainable development.     

Problem Drug Use and the Political Economy of Urban Restructuring: Heroin, Class and Governance in Dublin

This paper offers an exploration of problem drug use in the urban environment, connecting with broader concerns about the progress and contradictions of city redevelopment and change. The discussion is situated within some recent theoretical debates about the political economy of uneven development, urban restructuring and neoliberal governance. The empirical discussion is based on studies of economic and social change, conflict and grassroots praxis in the inner city of Dublin, Ireland, wherein a heroin crisis has impacted for the last few decades, affecting in particular working‐class communities disadvantaged by broader patterns of economic restructuring and urban renewal. This provides some important analytical and political insights from a city that has undergone rapid and intense transformation and deepening patterns of inequality over recent decades, alongside the emergence of new forms of urban governance and community organization and contestation. The paper concludes with some considerations about the place and meaning of problem drug use in the city based on the foregoing theoretical and empirical discussion.     

The Cultural Economy of Soil and Water Conservation: Market Principles and Social Networks in Eastern Burkina Faso

Soil and water conservation interventions in Africa have had a chequered history, calling into question the way in which soil and water conservation technologies have been studied in the past. This article draws on a case study from eastern Burkina Faso to explore an area usually ignored by soil and water conservation studies — the role of social institutions in guiding decisions regarding the use of technologies. It looks at soil and water conservation through the historical development of what the authors call the ‘cultural economy’, that is, a system of exchange in which a market economy has mixed with pre‐existing forms of exchange. The approach adopted by the authors identifies concepts on which the cultural economy is based and uses these ideas to analyse institutions that affect the choice of soil and water conservation technologies. The article shows how this approach leads to a reconceptualization of the ways in which soil and water conservation technologies are to be considered.     

The Urban Village,Agrarian Transformation,and Rentier Capitalism in Gurgaon,India

Gurgaon, India's “millennium city”, is today synonymous with India's embrace of global real estate capital and private sector‐led urban development. This paper asserts that Gurgaon's spectacular urbanisation has been fundamentally underpinned by an uneven process of land acquisition, exemption and agrarian transformation. Shifting away from dispossession‐centred analyses of contemporary urbanisation in India, this paper explores Gurgaon's “urban villages” to consider the uneven integration of agrarian classes into emerging urban real estate markets. Through an examination of differential experiences of land acquisition and agrarian social change among Gurgaon's landowning classes, the paper seeks to trace complex and nonlinear processes of agrarian transformation which make possible landscapes of global accumulation.     

Intergenerational Inequality? Labour,Capital, and Housing Through the Ages

This article examines the relevance of generational relations to emerging patterns of inequality in advanced capitalist societies, with a particular focus on inequalities related to housing wealth. At its heart is a critique of the increasingly prevalent argument that generational difference is a crucial axis of inequality today. It argues that while contemporary capitalist societies are certainly characterized by marked inequalities between generations and that the latter are manifested inter alia in housing ownership, understanding such inequalities principally in generational terms is problematic because they reflect deeper, more fundamental, structural inequalities and should therefore be conceptualized as such. The article suggests that the principal significance of generational relations to contemporary inequality dynamics actually concerns economic transfers rather than differences between generations. Within‐family transfers of wealth, especially housing‐related wealth, from older generations to younger ones tend to reproduce pronounced, structurally generated existing patterns of intra‐generational inequality.     

Causes and Consequences of Inequality in Egypt

This study presents an analysis of various facets of inequality in Egypt using a political economy approach to understand how inequalities are reproduced in the Egyptian economy. It examines the drivers of income and wealth inequality, and the impact of uneven taxation. The paper highlights how the mismeasurement of top incomes can skew the measurement of inequality, and shows how Egypt has one of the biggest wealth gaps in the world. It investigates educational, gender, and healthcare inequalities and how they are reproduced across generations. The paper also highlights the disparity between urban and rural areas, which further contributes to inequality. It assesses why economic growth in Egypt has had limited success in reducing poverty and inequality, and analyzes how state and military interference in markets hampers the growth of the private sector. The paper concludes by examining how inequality, combined with a number of challenges that Egypt is facing, including increased authoritarianism, climate change, demographic pressures, and water security will likely exacerbate many of the country’s socioeconomic and political problems. Overall, the study argues that inequality remains a key concern that, if left unaddressed, may lead to social unrest and instability in the long term.     

War as Feminized Labour in the Global Political Economy of Neoimperialism

ABSTRACT

This article examines the structures of international relations that facilitate political violence in postcolonial states. It explores the intersections of patriarchy and imperialism in the contemporary political economy to understand how armed conflict and political violence in postcolonial states form an integral element of the global economy of accumulation in deeply gendered ways. By focusing on the structural level of analysis, this article argues that the siting of armed conflict in postcolonial contexts serves to maintain neo-colonial relations of exploitation between the West and non-West, and is made both possible and effective through the gendering of political identities and types of work performed in the global economy. I argue here that armed conflict is a form of feminized labour in the global economy. Despite the fact that performing violence is a physically masculine form of labour, the outsourcing of armed conflict as labour in the political economy is ‘feminized’ in that it represents the flexibilization of labour and informalization of market participation. So while at the same time that this work is fulfilling hegemonic ideals of militarized masculinity within the domestic context, at the international level it actually demonstrates the ‘weakness’ or ‘otherness’ of the ‘failed’/feminized state in which this violence occurs, and legitimizes and hence re-entrenches the hegemonic relations between the core and periphery on the basis of problematizing the ‘weak’ state’s masculinity. It is through the discursive construction of the non-Western world as the site of contemporary political violence that mainstream international relations reproduces an orientalist approach to both understanding and addressing the ‘war puzzle’.     

A Brave New World,or the Same Old Story with New Characters?

Capitalism has always been a global system, but not in fixed ways. Different national powers have emerged and become dominant over the centuries, but the fundamental processes underlying the uneven development of global capitalism have not altered; they continue to be driven by imperialism — the struggle of large capital over economic territory of various kinds. Since the late 1960s, only the East Asian region has shown notable increases in its share of global GDP, and for the last two decades this has been dominated by the rise of China. This is directly related to the ability of the Chinese state to control the economy and to implement heterodox policies with very high investment rates. However, the Chinese case is exceptional: few other developing countries have followed a trajectory anything like that of China. Meanwhile, internal inequalities have increased across the world, as the bargaining power of capital vis‐à‐vis labour has increased dramatically in every country. This reflects the changed form of 21^st century imperialism, which relies increasingly on the international legal and regulatory architecture as fortified by various multilateral, plurilateral and bilateral agreements that establish the hegemony of global capital in different ways.     

Declining Food Security in a Philippine Oil Palm Frontier: The Changing Role of Cooperatives

The long‐held redistributive function of agricultural cooperatives — one of moral economy and poverty alleviation — has changed dramatically as they emerge as core brokers for agro‐industrial development in the so‐called ‘green economy’. This article examines the changing role of cooperatives involved in brokering oil palm production and its impact upon the food security and livelihoods of smallholders who labour in plantation regimes situated in historically uneven agrarian political economies. Findings show how, increasingly, cooperatives reinforce uneven agrarian social relations of production and exchange in which indigenous smallholders experience loss of land, poor wage labour conditions tinged with insecurity and prejudice, and mounting debt in an expanding oil palm complex. The article suggests that these changes in agrarian social relations negatively influence indigenous farmers’ food security pathways, with their access to and use of appropriate foods diminishing. It asserts that understanding the impacts of cooperatives on food security pathways requires a relational and situated analysis of livelihood change and agrarian relations in extractive frontiers.     

Political Economy of Income Distribution: A Comparative Study of Taiwan and Mexico

Both Taiwan and Mexico have experienced remarkable economic growth since the 1960s. Taiwan demonstrates that higher income level can be accompanied by falling income inequalities. However, unlike Taiwan, the course of economic growth in Mexico has left the country with a very unequal distribution of income. This paper compares the government policies of income distribution in Mexico and Taiwan and identifies the factors contributing to the success of Taiwan and to the highly uneven income distribution in Mexico. The paper concludes that market-oriented growth does not automatically reduce inequality or poverty. The prospects for better income equity and sustainable economic development would be greatly enhanced through implementation of policies aimed at redistributing land and skills, facilitating small enterprises, and increasing domestic saving.     

Migration,the Urban Periphery,and the Politics of Migrant Lives

This paper explores the politics of migration through a focus on labor migration regimes and the urban lives of migrants in the Seoul Metropolitan Region of South Korea. In particular, it draws attention to the ways in which migrant lives highlight the limits of the contemporary emphasis on control in migration management regimes. The paper contends that while migration management certainly reworks the socio‐legal status of migrants, the desire for control is often displaced in the everyday presence and practices of migrants as urban residents. In order to develop this argument I focus on the notion of the urban periphery as a spatio‐temporal configuration that manifests marginalization but is also potentially generative, innovative and destabilizing. The paper proceeds by exploring three dimensions of the periphery: (1) the mobile commons that emerges in everyday life; (2) the process of becoming undocumented and the subversion of control; and (3) the tactics of recognition that challenge the peripheral location of migrants. In each case the focus on the urban periphery draws attention to the importance of visibility and invisibility in migration, to the uneven spatio‐temporal configuration of migrant lives in the city, and to the ways in which migrant desires constitute a politics that exceeds what is normatively expected of them.     

The Spirits are Crying: Dispossessing Land and Possessing Bodies in Rural Cambodia

In 2009, a land spirit disrupted plantation development within a contested Economic Land Concession in Cambodia. The spirit, along with efforts of a monk and NGO, ultimately persuaded state officials to return 5 ha of land to the local temple. In this paper, we bring together literature on the anthropology of religion, political economy of land possession, and critical development studies; we demonstrate that land spirits continue as members of political patronage chains at both the state and the local level, and show how the non‐capitalist logics of spirit negotiations both challenged and legitimized large‐scale land acquisition projects. The spirit was not subsumed by, but rather shaped, contemporary capitalist expansion in ways that call for a critical examination of the ontological certainty that all land is designed for human production and consumption.     

At Once the Saviours and the Saved: “Diaspora Girls”, Dangerous Places,and Smart Power

This article explores how racially marked young women and girls are sought to be discursively and materially incorporated into markets and imperial economic and geopolitical strategies in spatially differentiated ways, through an examination of a series of media productions which portray the engagement of young racialised British citizens with their countries of heritage. I propose the term “diaspora girls” to refer to the protagonists of these media productions, who are understood as embodying “British” post‐feminist gender values and heroically carrying them to “dangerous” spaces of gender oppression and violence. In the context of current constructions of diasporas as agents of development, alongside the framing of migration as a “security threat” to the global North, these British citizens are viewed as ideally positioned to further the contemporary imperialist project. Their perceived empowerment is understood to be fragile and contingent, however, because of their affective connection with these spaces. Further, for those who are Muslim in particular, their perceived Britishness is understood as requiring continual reaffirmation and proof, thus reinforcing racialised structures of citizenship, and legitimising a border regime which reinscribes permanent North–South inequality.     

The Role of Networking in the New Political Economy of Regional Development

During the last 25 years there have been some fundamental changes to the international political economy. The decline of Fordism, globalization and technical innovations have altered the ways in which firms operate and interact with each other and other economic agents. Corporate strategy and organization and public policy have all been affected. Of particular relevance has been the development of a new form of governance viz. networking. Although often seen as a new phenomenon, it has in fact a long history going all the way back to Marshall. What is new however, are attempts by development agencies to capture the advantages presented by these externalities as a deliberate objective of regional development policy. This paper examines the case of Wales in some detail and concludes that although such a policy does work with the grain of modern political economy, it is only really scratching the surface of the problem and in fact contains an inherent contradiction in terms of market behaviour.     

The Iranian Economy in the Twentieth Century: A Global Perspective

This paper examines the transformation of the Iranian economy through the twentieth century within a global context. At the start of that century, the Iranian economy had long remained stagnant, poor, and largely agrarian, with a marginal role in the world economy. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Iran had transformed into a complex and relatively large economy with important consequences for the economies of the Middle East and other parts of the world. While the initial conditions and the evolution of domestic institutions and resources played major roles in the pace and nature of that transformation, relations with the rest of the world had crucial influences as well. This paper focuses on the latter forces, while taking account of their interactions with domestic factors in shaping the particular form of economic development in Iran. We study the ways in which the development of the Iranian economy has been affected by international price movements and by the ebbs and flows of trade, investment, and economic growth in the rest of the world. In considering these effects, we also analyze the role of domestic political economy factors and policies in enhancing or hindering the ability of domestic producers to respond to external challenges and opportunities.     

Feminism and its ‘other’: representing the ‘new woman’ of Bangladesh

This essay examines women's oppression and organizing against gender violence in contemporary Bangladesh through the lens of television. I argue that the telefilm Ayna (The Mirror, 2006), written and directed by popular film actor and women's rights activist Kabari Sarwar, offers a window into the changing social and economic landscape of contemporary Bangladesh and the complex negotiations of power and inequality across gender, class and community. Furthermore, it offers an opportunity to unpack the social messages underlying development and modernization initiatives, the new kinds of alliances as well as dependencies engendered by them, and their multiple and uneven consequences. An investigation of the representations of competing and contradictory notions of women's subjectivity and agency in this telefilm allows us to understand how these intersect with shifting notions of local/global patriarchies, feminist solidarity and women's empowerment in Bangladesh today. Further, this essay illuminates the disjunctures between representations of the ‘new woman’ circulated through development and certain feminist advocacy narratives with women's lived realities of oppression, and survival.     

邓小平旅游经济思想与当代中国旅游经济的发展

邓小平的旅游经济思想 ,立足于我国社会主义初级阶段旅游业初创时期的实际 ,科学地回答和解决了当代中国为什么发展旅游业和怎样发展旅游业的重大理论问题 ,体现了他对旅游经济规律的深入理解和正确把握 ,为我国旅游业的崛起和腾飞奠定了政策框架的根基 ,是推动我国旅游业发展的强大思想理论武器 ,促进了旅游生产力的全面增长和旅游经济的全面发展 ;邓小平旅游经济思想 ,是邓小平经济理论宝库中极具特色的篇章 ,学习、研究和实践邓小平旅游经济思想 ,对推动中国旅游经济的发展具有重要的理论意义和实践意义     

Bringing Development Back into Development Studies

This article challenges Horner and Hulme's call to move from ‘international development’ to ‘global development’ with a reaffirmation of the classical traditions of development studies. With some adaptation to fit the changing contemporary context, these traditions not only remain relevant but also recover vital insights that have been obscured in the various fashionable re‐imaginings of development. In particular, development thinking and agendas in the past were much more radical and ambitious in addressing the imperatives of redistribution and progressive forms of transformation in the context of stark asymmetries of wealth and power. Such ambition is still needed to address the nature and scale of challenges that continue to face the bulk of countries in the world, particularly given the persistence if not deepening of asymmetries. This reaffirmation is elaborated by addressing three major weaknesses in Horner and Hulme's arguments. First, they do not actually define development, but instead treat it as simply poverty and inequality dynamics, which are better understood as outcomes rather than causes. Second, despite their assertion that the study of (international) development was primarily concerned with between‐country inequalities, this is not true. Domestic inequality was in fact central to both development theory and policy since the origins of the field. Third, the authors ignore the rise of neoliberalism from the late 1970s onwards and the profound crisis that this caused to development outside of East Asia and perhaps India, which the jargon of ‘global’ implicitly obfuscates and even condones. Rather, the experiences of East Asia and in particular China arguably vindicate classical approaches in development studies.     

Beyond Kuznets: Inequality and the size and distribution of cities

As countries develop the percentage of population living in urban areas tends to increase. As this happens, inequality is expected first to increase and then to decline in what is known as the Kuznets inverted‐U. But the literature has not paid much attention to differences in the absolute size of cities potentially affecting economy‐wide inequality. Building on insights from the urban economics literature, this paper studies the relationship between the size and distribution of cities and income inequality at country level. Results show that beyond Kuznets’ hypothesis there is a U‐shaped relationship between average city size and inequality; inequality first falls and then increases with average city size. This result is robust to a long list of controls, different estimation techniques, and identification strategies.