
Poliko (David Karas)
Explorez tous les épisodes de Poliko
Date | Titre | Durée | |
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06 May 2022 | The African Programme on Rethinking Development Economics with Nicolas Pons-Vignon (Part 1): Neoliberal Restructuring in South Africa | 00:45:50 | |
Today’s episode is the first part of a conversation with Nicolas Pons-Vignon who played an instrumental role in setting up Aporde, the African Programme on Rethinking Development Economics, a unique training programme teaching heterodox development economics in South Africa. In this episode, we explore Nicolas’ personal research background and his outlook on South Africa’s post-apartheid developmental trajectory. We talk about some of the root causes of South African deindustrialization, the reception of neoliberal ideas by policymakers, the policy impact of neoclassical orthodoxy in economics departments, and the need for alternative, heterodox educational programs to broaden the horizons of policymakers in developing countries. After contextualising the reception of neoliberal ideas and policy templates in South Africa, we will continue this conversation with Nicolas in the subsequent episode by exploring how Aporde sought to offer an alternative educational model. To dig deeper, check out the texts included in the shared folder below! | |||
11 Mar 2021 | Episode 01. The Making of Illiberal Hegemony in Hungary with Gábor Scheiring and Kristóf Szombati | 00:57:04 | |
In this episode, I am joined by two Hungarian scholars, Gábor Scheiring from Bocconi University and Kristóf Szombati from the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Gábor and Kristóf have worked extensively together in opposition politics but also in academia, co-authoring multiple papers on the political economy of Hungary. We discuss together the ideology and class-coalitions sustaining Hungary’s current authoritarian regime. We talk about racism, labor exploitation, democratic suppression - but also social policy initiatives such as the Public Works Program, which solved unemployment by making the state an employer of last resort… with far-reaching political consequences. Join us! Szombati, Kristóf, and Anna Szilágyi. 2020. Enemy in the Making. The Language of “Anti-Sorosism” in the U.S. and Hungary. Political Research Associates. Available at: https://tinyurl.com/39kkkm6t
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25 Mar 2021 | Episode 02. Marxist State Theory for De-Orientalizing State Capitalism with Ilias Alami | 00:43:41 | |
State capitalism is today a label often applied to China, Russia or the Arab Gulf as a model threatening to displace Western liberal conceptions of insulated markets driven by fair competition and minimal state interventions. In this episode, I'm asking Ilias Alami from Maastricht University to unpack the concept: Rejecting a Western liberal Orientalizing discourse, which locates state capitalism beyond the West, Ilias argues on the contrary that the concept can be useful for understanding a restructuring of the State in both advanced and emerging market economies. Ilias points to Marxist state theory as a rich tradition for contextualizing contemporary state capitalism as an answer to ongoing crises of capitalist accumulation. Alami, I., & Dixon, A. D. (2019). State capitalism(s) redux? Theories, tensions, controversies. Competition & Change. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/1024529419881949 Alami, I., & Dixon, A. D. (2020). The strange geographies of the “new” state capitalism. Political Geography, 82. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102237 Wright, M., Wood, G., Musacchio, A., Okhmatovskiy, I., Grosman, A., & Doh, J. P. (2021). State Capitalism in International Context: Varieties and Variations. Journal of World Business, 56(2). doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jwb.2020.101160 | |||
08 Apr 2021 | Episode 03. The Geopolitical Economy of China's BRI in Central Asia with Niva Yau Tsz Yan | 00:49:13 | |
Today I am talking about China’s engagement in Central Asia with Niva Yau Tsz Yan from the OSCE Academy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. A region often overlooked by Western media and academic research, Central Asia plays a central role in China's Belt and Road Initiative. Niva clarifies the relationship between China’s BRI projects in Central Asia and the militarisation of the South China Sea, and how Central Asia functions as a testing ground for initiatives that China seeks to export even further. She points out that the BRI is more than gigantic construction projects: digital soft infrastructure, ITC technologies such as Smart Cities and 5G, but also financial de-dollarization and education are core aspects which are materially and culturally changing the political economy of Central Asia. Niva’s ongoing research also sheds light on how Chinese projects in the region might affect regional and domestic politics, by pacifying inter-state relations marred by energy disputes, while on the other hand antagonizing political relations between local communities and national political elites. Interestingly, she argues that far from passive rule-takers, Central Asian states and elites have significant political autonomy and are conscious of the leverage they have vis a vis their giant neighbour. | |||
24 Apr 2021 | Episode 04. The Transperiphery Movement Exhibition: Towards a Global History of Peripheral Connections with Zoltán Ginelli | 01:00:18 | |
I am talking today with Zoltán Ginelli, a Hungarian critical geographer whose research repositions the semi-peripheral experience of Hungarian modernization in a global context, by studying the many points of connections linking peoples, ideas, expertise, institutions and political utopias in Hungary to other peripheries in the postcolonial Global South. Zoltán has co-curated a fantastic exhibition in Budapest entitled Transperiphery Movement, where he examines these trans-peripheral connections in collaboration with a host of artists and scholars. We talk about Zoltán’s own research on postcoloniality, race and global history from an Eastern European perspective, and the themes through which the exhibition examines these topics. | |||
05 May 2021 | Episode 05. Socialize Data! Beyond the Anti-Politics of Digital Rentier Capitalism with Jathan Sadowski | 00:49:41 | |
Today I’m talking with Jathan Sadowski from Monash University about the economic and political dimensions of digital capitalism. An emerging consensus sees digital data, its extraction and the concentration of Big Tech as signalling a dramatic shift towards a new age of “digital feudalism”: The story goes that digital services with minimal marginal costs enabled unprecedented market concentration in the hands of giant corporations, which thrive on capturing rents in the form of data they mine from end users. For many liberal scholars, this marks a dysfunctional phase of capitalism where innovation and competition are stifled, whereas profit-driven "socially legitimate" accumulation is displaced by rentierism. Jathan argues on the contrary that contemporary forms of digital value capture sit in the continuity of capitalist accumulation strategies. We talk about the Internet of Things, smart devices and energy grids, platform-based services, new forms of territorial sovereignty exerted by private companies which own digital urban infrastructures... but also about socialist alternatives to the dystopian present, which would necessitate socializing data and managing it as a public good. | |||
20 May 2021 | Episode 06. Rwanda’s “Growth Miracle” in Context: Industrial Policy and State-Business Relations in Sub-Saharan Africa with Pritish Behuria | 00:46:52 | |
Pritish Behuria from the University of Manchester has a long expertise in studying industrial policy and comparative developmental trajectories in Sub-Saharan Africa. In today’s episode, we first talk about the broader context of a supposedly post-neoliberal developmental framework where industrial policy is again on the agenda - even though problems such as fiscal space, structural change, access to technology and dependency on foreign capital have changed little if at all. Pritish also shares his analysis of the Rwandan case - the apparent success story of a "growth miracle", which some explain with robust Weberian state capacities, while others brandish it as a model of financial liberalisation and good governance. Pritish analyzes a domestic political economy, where market liberalisation marginalised domestic capitalists, who couldn’t as a result play an active role in diversification and structural change. Far from the miracle narrative, the Rwandan trajectory thus illustrates the inherent tensions and contradictions which traverse developmental strategies of state-led development at the current juncture. | |||
02 Jun 2021 | Public Banks: Decarbonisation, Definancialisation and Democratisation by Thomas Marois (Book Preview) | 00:43:10 | |
Today I am joined with Thomas Marois from the School of Oriental and African Studies to discuss the backdrop to his latest book "Public Banks. Decarbonisation, Definancialisation and Democratisation" which is coming out with Cambridge University Press in May 2021. Critical social scientists have abundantly analyzed the ideas, institutions and power relations sustaining financialization - as well as the social and environmental dislocations it produces. Concrete, normative propositions about institutions that could offer alternatives are much rarer: Tom’s new book synthesizes his long empirical research on the institutional structures and politics of public banks in both the Global South and North, but also his normative stance on how public financial institutions could re-embed finance in society and leverage financial capital for politically just, socially productive and environmentally sound uses. https://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff52287.php https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/people/thomas-marois
McDonald, D.A. and Marois, T. and Spronk, S. (2021) 'Public Banks + Public Water = SDG 6?'. Water Alternatives, (14) 1, pp 117-134. Marois, T. and Güngen, A.R. (2016) ‘Credibility and Class in the Evolution of Turkey’s Public Banks’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 43(6): 1285-1309. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1176023
https://www.publicbankinginstitute.org/ https://www.tni.org/en/publicfinance | |||
29 Jun 2021 | Displacements, Surplus Workers and Surplus Capital: Discussing Urban Displacements by Susanne Soederberg (Book Preview) | 00:57:12 | |
In today’s episode, we examine the interdependence between urban displacements, surplus populations and surplus capital in Susanne Soederberg’s recent book “Urban Displacements. Governing Surplus and Survival in Global Capitalism” published in late 2020 with Routledge. We explore the links between surplus money and surplus workers, social and rental housing, precarious work and urban poverty under capitalism, but also the political role of state actors in the reproduction of surplus capital and surplus populations producing cycles of urban displacements. | |||
30 Nov 2021 | The World Development Report 2020 Or How To Shore Up Fracturing Neoliberalism with Jennifer Bair and Benjamin Selwyn | 00:53:06 | |
In this episode, I invited Jennifer Bair and Benjamin Selwyn to share their insights on the World Bank’s 2020 World Development Report. The WDR is the World Bank’s flagship publication, which aims at defining a hegemonic framework for thinking about development. In 2020, the WDR was entitled “Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains”. Jennifer and Benjamin both recently published critical papers on the WDR 2020: We talk about the methodological and theoretical contradictions of the WDR, what it says about the strange non-death of neoliberalism, but also how the Global Value Chain (GVC) concept can be reclaimed by organized labor at a transnational level. | |||
18 Jan 2022 | The Crisis of the Liberal International Order with Ayşe Zarakol | 00:36:36 | |
In today’s episode, I’m talking with Ayşe Zarakol from Cambridge University about the crisis of the Liberal International Order (LIO). Ayşe's work explores the contradictions of the LIO as a hierarchical order premised on the notions of freedom, rationality and equal participation: she examines how anti-liberal discontents in the western Core blame it for undermining their status in the global World System, while conversely critics on the Semi-Periphery see it as reproducing power asymmetries benefiting the Core. Ayşe examines the surprising connections and hyridization of these seemingly antithetical discourses, while her recent work compares the rise and fall of Eastern World Orders in the early modern period with the current crises of the LIO. |