Financial Inclusion or Subordination? The Monetary Politics of Debt in Cambodia

Financial inclusion is a leading driver of household debt across the global South. Although critical geographers have analysed this debt through the lens of financialisation, few have examined it in terms of monetary politics. This is a salient issue, because poorer nations often have limited control over their monetary policy due to their dependence on foreign currencies, which can adversely affect the structure of their financial markets. Building on the concept of monetary dependency from scholarship on financial subordination, I analyse the monetary politics of debt in Cambodia. Drawing on elite interviews and ethnographic research, I argue that Cambodia's extreme monetary dependence on the US dollar has shaped monetary and fiscal policies that compel poorer households to take on private debt to pay for their basic needs. This paper advances critical geographies of debt and development by studying financial subordination and its impact on financial inclusion in the global South.     

ASEAN as a “Rules-based Community”: Business as Usual

Abstract

In establishing the ASEAN Economic Community, ASEAN political elites emphasised their commitment to the rule of law. The definition of the rule of law adopted in the ASEAN Charter mirrored UN reforms that recognised the rule of law as interlinked with democracy and human rights. This commitment raises questions, given the various tactics employed by the grouping’s authoritarian and post-authoritarian regimes to silence dissent. This article critically assesses this apparent shift in regional governance. It first maps the inclusion of rule of law rhetoric in agreements since ASEAN’s foundation, and then examines the form and implementation of dispute settlement mechanisms. It finds that dispute settlement mechanisms have consistently retained the scope for protracted political and bureaucratic negotiation between disputing parties, and “opt out” clauses that enable their contingent application. These findings undermine claims regarding the development of a “rules-based community”, and indicate the continuation of rule by law rather than rule of law. The emphasis placed on ASEAN’s rule of law reforms by elites suggests, then, the rebranding of this political project in support of the ASEAN Economic Community so as to create confidence for investors in the region’s juridical environment.     

San Juan,the Fragile City: Finance Capital,Class, and the Making of Puerto Rico's Economic Crisis

This paper narrates Puerto Rico's fiscal and financial crisis through a reading of San Juan's urban landscape. We underscore the role of capital in the city, primarily embodied by the local capitalist class (the Criollo bloc) and foreign capitalists. Historically excluded from the manufacturing sector (dominated by US capitalists), the Criollo bloc accumulates its wealth by concentrating financial assets in the city. In times of crisis, the Criollo bloc resorts to the acquisition of new assets and asset exchange with foreign capitalists to remain solvent and provide short‐term solutions to the state's fiscal and financial limits. The survival of the local capitalist class, we demonstrate, is dependent on asset stripping. Drawing on Clyde Woods, we document how asset stripping unevenly redistributes wealth and risks along class and racial lines within a colonial economy. The finance capital/asset stripping basis of San Juan's economy renders it an extremely fragile city, we contend.     

Hierarchies of trade in Yiwu and Dushanbe: The case of an Uzbek merchant family from Tajikistan

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the trading trajectory of an Uzbek family of merchants from Tajikistan. This family runs businesses in both Tajikistan’s capital, Dushanbe, and China’s famous international trading city: Yiwu. The analysis is centred on the accounts placed by Tajikistan’s Uzbek merchants about their historically sustained experience, often across several generations, in trading activities. These merchants’ claims of belonging to a ‘historical’ trading community rather than being ‘newcomers’ to long-distance commerce are articulated in relation to notions of ‘hierarchies of trade’ as they evolve in a twofold relational model linking Yiwu’s Changchun neighbourhood and Dushanbe. I suggest that the forms of conviviality enacted in Yiwu’s Changchun neighbourhood need to be understood in terms of the historical, multinational and transregional contacts that have occurred within the spaces of the former Soviet Union, as well as along the China-Russia and China-Central Asian borders. Equally, the hierarchies of trade of Uzbek merchants from Tajikistan in Yiwu’s Changchun neighbourhood cut-across markers of identity that juxtapose the roles of Tajik and Uzbek communities in Tajikistan’s contemporary politics and economics.     

A trade balance: litigation and negotiation in the World Trade Organization's dispute settlement system

The establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been widely accepted as representing the legalisation of world trading rules. However, it is important to reflect on the limits of this legalisation thesis in terms of the interface between international and domestic policy processes. By locating trading disputes in a political analysis of policy implementation, it is argued that it is difficult to establish conceptually how the WTO dispute settlement system could have authority separate from and above the conventional international politics of trade policy relations. Instead, the article argues that case outcomes should be expected to be largely the product of domestic political institutions and policy processes, and how these intersect with developments in the WTO dispute settlement system. Brief studies of the Australian government's dispute settlement strategy and two high-profile WTO disputes—the US upland cotton and European Union sugar cases—serve to suggest that the authority of international trade law is not as significant as assumed by the legalisation thesis. Rather, domestic politics and institutions have an important impact on the outcome of trade disputes.     

论中国朝野对新银行团的回应

1920年10月,美国倡议组成了新银行团。新银行团正式成立后长期无所作为,并逐步表现出更为明显的垄断性,中国朝野期望值逐渐降低,对其所体现的强权政治色彩愈益有了清醒的认识。中国民族主义的目标更加集中于政治层面,废除不平等条约的要求取代了关于铁路外债利弊的讨论。     

Bookshelf

Between 1491 and 1520 the Abbey of Sainte-Croix in Poitiers, France, suffered two major assaults on its community of nuns. First, armed troops compromised the election of Abbess Jeanne de Couhé and occupied the abbey for months as her rivals contested her claim to the position. Second, Jeanne's successor, her niece Marie Berland, was removed from office under threat of violence and replaced by a candidate selected by the king of France. These two shocking disputes demonstrate the growing power of the French monarchy over religious institutions, the dangerous strength of family connections to – and family politicking in – the monastery and the influence of the fifteenth-century monastic-reform movement on shifting control over institutions for religious women.     

Financialization of hotel corporations in Spain

One of the cutting-edge topics being currently debated in social sciences is the impact of financialization on corporations and on different geographical contexts. Surprisingly enough, there have been very few studies that have explicitly dealt with this issue within tourism studies. In this paper, the issue of financialization within tourism is addressed through an analysis of hotel corporations. Taking a case-study approach, it is argued that Spanish hotel chains are increasingly becoming financialized since a minimization of the impact of global financial crisis on these corporations is urgently required. The argument is not that hotel corporations’ financialization is necessarily new, but rather that the impact of the global financial crisis has led to an intensification of this very process. Taking as case studies the three largest Spanish hotel corporations (Meliá Hotels International, NH Hoteles and Grupo Barceló), the current crisis-led hotel financialization is dealt through four interrelated spheres: (1) built environment (hotel buildings property becoming controlled by financial funds), (2) actors (emergence of new agents as a result of hotel corporations intertwining with financial corporations), (3) hotel profit extraction (reliance on the secondary circuit of capital), (4) financial engineering instruments (forms of fictitious capital that are new in the context of hotel corporations). The article shows how the process of financialization of hotel corporations illustrates broad trends of both financialization and capital accumulation. Specifically, the main findings are on one hand, that financialization not only fixes capital on the ground, but also creates liquidity. On the other hand, that the selling of property titles is an increasing profit niche with differentiated geographical locations. The last significant finding is that financialization helps to improve profitability of non-financia corporations such as hotel chains.     

The Symbolic Politics of Belonging and Community in Peri‐urban Environmental Disputes: the Traveston Crossing Dam in Queensland,Australia

This paper examines a recent dispute generated by the Queensland State Government proposal to build the Traveston Crossing Dam on the Mary River in southeast Queensland, Australia. It is particularly concerned with the ways in which interrelated issues of belonging, community identity, and social diversity were negotiated during the anti‐dam campaign. As an unusual alliance of farmers, environmentalists, urban retirees, some Aboriginal people and others, it takes a view of the anti‐Traveston Crossing Dam campaign as a fluid network of people and approaches the notion of community identity as the symbolic construction of similarity. Locally specific, the paper describes pertinent aspects of community politics in the context of rural socioeconomic change, and the mobilisation of heritage. With regard to local senses of belonging, it also discusses the involvement of Aboriginal people during the campaign. More broadly then, this paper attempts to make an ethnographic contribution to the study of environmental disputes and the politics of alliance in peri‐urban areas of settler‐descendant societies such as Australia.     

A Time to Speak

Abstract

This article explores the significance of resonance as a mode of social causality in response to William Connolly's book, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. While applauding Connolly's identification of "affinities of spirituality" as effective in forming American politics, it suggests that the character structure of ressentiment that is encountered in right-wing Christianity and politics may be the result of instability. Examining the economic basis for growth and instability in the creation of dollars in the form of debt lacking an underlying guarantee, it suggests that this instability is felt throughout American society in everyday experiences of credit and debt.