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This paper examines the recent process of transformation within the World Bank as a series of reactive mediations to the crisis-laden course of capitalist development on a global scale over the last two decades. Two aspects of the Bank?s attempt to construct a new development agenda as a response to contradictions emergent within neoliberal-style social restructuring are highlighted. First, it has embraced the theoretical trends and policy implications of institutional economics. Second, it has refashioned its relations with client countries and their civil societies under the rubrics of ?ownership?, ?participation? and ?empowerment?. The paper proceeds to indicate why the Bank?s current reformulation of development theory presents itself within mainstream theoretical paradigms as an appropriate prescription to counter the crisis of neoliberal-style social restructuring. Concurrently, on the basis of a materialist critique of capitalist development, the paper proceeds to indicate the substantive limits to these present reforms by indicating their theoretical weaknesses and their practical contradictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migration has become a central issue for global social movements seeking alternatives to neoliberal globalization. Many critics of globalization argue that neoliberal capitalist relations contribute to the displacement of millions of people, especially in the Global South. At the same time, Western states have opted to securitize migration, implementing risk profiling technologies in order to further exclude and marginalize migrants. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that many campaigns on behalf of migrants subsume the experience of migration within a discourse of victimage, and fail to take into account migrants’ agency in the migration process. Recent developments, ranging from the refugee protests in Australia to the Migrants Assembly at the European Social Forum in Florence, suggest the emergence of a complex politics where migrants are positioning themselves as key players in global/local political activism. By challenging the state’s prerogative to distinguish between insiders and outsiders, political movements by and in support of undocumented migrants force the matter of sovereignty to the forefront of their political strategy. This paper examines the activism of politicized migrants and their relationship with the sovereign state system. Focusing in particular on the emerging movement of undocumented migrants in Canada, this paper assesses the implications of this activism in terms of how it is reshaping the possibilities for global political identity and practice today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging from the globalization debate, the second wave in comparative political economy literature (Hall and Soskice, Scharpf and Schmidt, Schmidt) has emphasized the resilience of divergent varieties of capitalism in the face of pressures of convergence. This paper contributes to this literature, while critically examining some its assumptions. Taking national response strategies to constitute the dependent variable and the pressures of international competitiveness as the independent variable, three questions are analyzed. First, are the divergent trajectories in macroeconomic policy since the 1970s indeed responses to external pressures? Second, what role does globalization play as compared to the role of foreign influence in the form of policy transfer and the diffusion of ideas through epistemic communities? Third, in assessing such response strategies, is it fruitful to distinguish between models and varieties of capitalism, or are there indications functional convergence on a redefined role of the state, a competition state model? Is the functional output of coordinated capitalist systems thus roughly similar to that of liberal capitalist systems? At the microlevel, this neo-institutionally inspired analysis examines the role of key actors, the institutional configuration of the political system, central politico-economic interest groups, and other civil society actors in the implementation of embedded liberalism. The analysis drawn on evidence from a diverse sample of previously understudied countries, including two countries that have embraced liberal market economics (Chile, New Zealand) and two others that have traditionally been associated with Social Democratic neocorporatist economic governance (Austria and Norway). While much effort has been previously devoted to sketching contours of globalization, relatively scant attention has been paid to such response strategies and the question as to whether some, if not most, of the impetus for change originates domestically, rather than at the global level. The paper addresses this set of issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development and regulation of high technology are defining features of modern capitalist economies. The U.S. and the European Union represent the richest markets for technological innovation, and transatlantic disputes over technology-related issues ? such as nuclear power, biotechnology, and information technology - make headlines on a regular basis. These disputes also reveal fundamental differences in thinking about risk management and the role of American hegemony in governing risk. America is often responsible for the creation and global diffusion of new technologies, and it deliberately attempts to impose its own free-market, science-based approach to the regulation of technology-related risks. Europe offers a competing approach, largely based on the precautionary principle, which involves a broader societal-based conception of risk. This paper investigates this principled debate by first developing a comprehensive analytical framework for the major competing approaches to governing such technologies. It then applies this framework to the question of America’s potential and real power (hegemonic or otherwise) to influence global technology governance. The paper also assesses the possible challenges America faces in this domain from Europe and other countries, particularly in the developing world. It concludes by examining the extent to which the U.S. and Europe will be able to reconcile their differences and thus facilitate a global regime for balancing knowledge diffusion and technology regulation, possibly through the use of technological fixes, public-private partnerships, and transnational actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses the highly uneven and conflictual outcomes of neo-liberal reforms in Russia. Three major deficiencies of the ‘transition economics’ are identified. First, transitology fails to take intro account the influence of the global political economy on change in the countries of the formers USSR. Second, orthodox economics tends to discuss and evaluate the results of reform in terms of two or three macroeconomic indicators, failing to consider the impact and role of the historical, social and political factors on change. Third, the neo-liberal reform blueprint has so far failed to allow for a diversity of ‘transition’ outcomes, assuming that shock therapy methods would transform Russia into a ‘normal’, Western-type capitalist society. Today, however, Russia is faced with the reality of many already established and functioning elements of the new system that significantly deviate and contradict the principles of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. The paper draws on examples from a number of areas and levels of political economy: the state and economy; society and culture; the legal system. The symbiosis of these forces, heavily influenced by Russia’s pre-revolutionary history, Communism and contemporary geopolitics, signify that the country has embarked on the road to capitalism of a distinctly indigenous, non-Western type. Some elements of the new system, such as financial sphere, are unavoidably subject to global imperatives of financial accumulation and thus are similar to the contemporary changes in the countries of Anglo-Saxon and Continental capitalism. At the same time, it is clear that a re-emergence of a strong Russian state, the re-prioritisation of domestic economic production and a restoration of national identity and ideology should constitute the core of any alternative developmental project for the new Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization is portrayed by some analysts as forcing convergence to a liberal norm, while others argue for the continued efficacy of organized market forms of capitalism, to use Peter Hall’s description, despite globalization. Has there been a general move toward liberal market structures among European economies? And are there discernable differences in economic performance that can be traced to these transformations (or lack thereof)? This paper seeks to explore these questions empirically through an examination of institutional change and economic performance in six advanced industrial economies that offer a mix of liberal and coordinated economic structures (i.e., the United States, Britain, and Ireland on the liberal side; France, Germany, and the Netherlands as coordinated economies). The convergence question is often posed strictly in economic policy terms, an unfortunate limitation given that globalization reduces states’ ability to control economic change. The key question is how the broader institutions of economic and social regulation -- society rather than government -- respond to globalization. As such this paper first produces an empirical index based on capital mobility, labor relationships, economic regulation, and social attitudes for gauging whether markets in these states have largely liberalized or remain relatively coordinated. Comparative economic performance since 1989 (marking both the fall of the Berlin Wall and the introduction of the World Wide Web) will then be examined to see if there is any correlation between political-economic responses to globalization and economic outcomes. The hypothesis is that there will be more diversity among European capitalist economies than the mainstream reading of globalization would predict, but that more coordinated economies face rising opportunity costs that will comparatively hinder economic performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The virtue of the ‘variety of capitalism’ approach (Hall & Sockice, 2001) is that it challenges the notion that capitalist globalisation apparently entails the growing impotence of nation states and the increasing homogenisation of social formations. There are, however, a number of analytic problems with this approach, which this identifies. Apart from an inadequate and misleading conceptualisation of the relationship between state and market in the era of globalisation, the most severe problem is to treat all the advanced capitalist states as equal units of analysis. This occludes the overwhelming power and penetrative capacity of the American state and capital vis a vis even the other leading capitalist states in the world today. On the basis of this critique, the paper argues that European capitalism must be theorised within the framework of American neo-imperialism. In this light, the paper critically examines various recent attempts to theorise the nature of American empire and points the way to a more adequate theorisation. The paper presents historical and empirical evidence that challenges the presumption that the material base for the maintenance of American hegemony has eroded. But this does not mean that contradictions for the American imperium and neo-liberal globalisation do not exist. But strategic advance for the left in this context will have to entail far more than defending or extolling existing European models of capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The changes brought on by the transition to a market economy imply a fundamental restructuring of the relationship between the state and society, a transformation that inherently generates conflicts. While all social groups are affected by these changes, the costs and benefits of economic reform are not distributed evenly. While some benefit from the changes, others quickly find themselves struggling to cope in this new environment. Consequently, different groups mobilize, organize and attempt to influence those policies that are perceived as threatening their well-being. This paper explores a set of conflicts set off by marketization and structural adjustment. In particular, it examines how states and social groups approach these conflicts and what strategies and resources they employ in pursuit of their often divergent goals. I examine these dynamics by focusing on the role that one interest group, labor unions, and one central reform measure, privatization, in order to explore when, why and in what ways labor unions are able to gain a meaningful voice in these policy debates. The paper argues that what best predicts labor unions’ ability to influence the design and implementation of privatization policies are the pre-reform legacies of state-labor relations. By examining the experiences of countries that have undergone a simultaneous transition to democracy and market economy (Poland and the Czech Republic) and countries that have undertaken economic reform prior to political opening (Egypt and Mexico), this paper argues that to understand whether labor unions will play a greater or lesser role in the privatization policies design and implementation, it is necessary to examine the relationship of organized labor and state in the period prior to the initiation of reform. The degree of autonomy that labor was able to establish prior to reform initiation will have direct impact on its ability to influence reform strategies - the more independent organized labor was of the government prior to economic restructuring, the more likely it will be to become an important player in the process of economic reforms. In other words, this paper argues that in order to understand the outcomes of conflicts generated by economic restructuring it is important to analyze the institutional resources of parties who engage in these struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of western assistance in the process of East European transition has recently stimulated much research. However, determining the role such programs play in post-communist reform is not easy. A mixed record of foreign aid failure and success and growing discontent with transition to democracy and market economy among East Europeans make the usefulness of western assistance increasingly questionable. To undertake a critical analysis of transitional processes and to demonstrate how aid has shaped contemporary developments in the region, this paper will focus on transition as a strategy implemented by Western donors. It will demonstrate that even though aid consultants often acknowledged the distinctiveness of post-socialist world, they did not envision any alternative aid model. Despite the fact that Marshall Plan ideas prevailed in the rhetoric of donors at the early stage of transition, the Third World models were actually implemented. The attempts of western donors to (re)build/strengthen democracy and foster market reforms were clearly in line with popular aspirations in Eastern Europe. What went largely ignored amidst the democratization/marketization efforts was that liberal models of capitalism were themselves the products of a lengthy unique evolution of the western societies. When applied in societies with distinct cultural, socio-economic and political characteristics, they proved dramatically inadequate. I will analyze the fusion of abstract Western models with the real-world situation in the former socialist world from a critical constructivist perspective. The key argument to emerge is that by disregarding cultural frames and codes, especially those shaped by socialist legacies, aid proved incapable of performing many of the objectives it was intended to achieve. Values and perceptions, norms and implicit understandings are to be taken seriously. The paper will demonstrate that inter-subjective beliefs shared by the members of society may facilitate or constrain what they actually think and do, and thus lead to broader socio-political consequences. The reference will be made specifically to the case of aid experience in Ukraine. However, many of the lessons from this study may be transferable to the entire East European region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that, in drawing predominantly upon Marxist approaches, existing critical accounts of European integration suffer from the problem of economic determinism. Whilst such accounts have enriched our understanding of European integration through their considerations of capitalism, therefore, they have nevertheless been unable to provide a feasible explanation for the relationship between the two processes. The paper argues for a turn to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, which provides insights into how we might consider the relationship between capitalism and political institutions, whilst avoiding the depiction of one as determining of the other. In doing so, it argues that European integration can be understood to have overseen the re-centring of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the 'capitalist axiomatic', in the attempt by Europe's political elite to enable, represent, and repress the connections of desire that constitute the contemporary European social assemblage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the idea of patrimonial capitalism and its application to Russia. The paper problematises the view that the form of political economy -often described as a version of state capitalism- developed in Russia in the Putin era can lead Russia out of its economic torpor. It is argued that the form of Russia's political economy is the problem and not the solution. Before the crisis this patrimonial capitalist system supported itself on the back of high hydrocarbon prices and looked for its development to global capital mixed with national resource wealth. These sources of investment capital are, of course, now much shrunken. Under these conditions the political risks of creating a developmental regime and breaking with the patrimonial capitalist system are high since they mean an attack on that system rather than its transmutation through development in which there are resources both for 'partners' in patrimonialism and for the establishment of new economic sectors that can, in time, replace as sources of political power those natural resource and other sectors that are the bedrock of patrimonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do small states use international organizations to manage the consequences of exogenous shocks? This paper examines this question through exploring how small states negotiate with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for crisis management support during a period of 'disaster capitalism'. Focusing on the case of Iceland, the paper argues that while small states can potentially build scale economies in specialist sectors such as banking, the risks inherent in rapid financial expansion greatly increase their vulnerability to external shocks. In such circumstances, small states are likely to struggle to level the playing field in their attempts to negotiate the constraints and opportunities provided by engagement with the IMF during international crises, when they face higher stakes compared with larger economies and have a narrower policy choice set at their disposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that human security is intimately tied to social reproduction and the protection and enhancement of the capabilities that allow men and women to create and shape their own well-being over space and time. However, neo-liberal governance frameworks prioritize and privilege the security and rights of large capital over basic human security needs of the mass of humanity. This contradicts democratic determination of needs and social priorities. Indeed, notions of citizenship are being reconstituted along market-oriented lines, with a number of impacts on gender orders. The paper links these issues to two aspects of social reproduction the reproduction of the labor force and provisioning and caring needs in the context of Canada. Canada is used as an example not only because of its multi-level system of governance and its position in the global hierarchy of capitalist states, but also because Canada has consistently ranked at the top of the UN’s Human Development Index. If such transformations threaten human security in Canada, then logically, they are likely to be uncovered in other societies who have adopted neoliberal governance structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two decades on from the collapse of Soviet dominance in Central and Eastern Europe and the flourishing cottage industry of 'transitological' studies attempting to explain the transitions in the region have reached a peculiar confluence concerning the relative importance of internal and external causes. Most analyses have focused on how best to achieve the practical transformation of the construction of functioning democracies and moribund planned economic institutions while acknowledging the significance of the global context in which capitalism was reconfigured in the region only incidentally. This paper develops a critique of this confluencebased on a Gramscian critical economy. The paper explores how the social transformation associated with the emergence of neoliberalism arose in the global political economy and then deploys an understanding of this in order to offer a more nuanced grasp of the historical emergence of transition, primarily in Poland, but to some degree throughout Central and Eastern Europe, as Poland's Shock Therapy approach to transition has been the paradigmatic exemplar and as such has significant ramifications throughout the region. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite discussions about China's rise as a global manufacturing titan and the world's third largest trading economy, few notice the unevenness of China's integration into the world economy. While some Chinese export producers have shown signs of climbing up the global value chain, most others are still trapped in a downward spiral of "race to the bottom" competition based on cheap prices. What accounts for this local variation despite the availability of cheap labor throughout coastal areas? Based on comparative case studies, the paper finds that contrary to the expectation of both neoclassical economics and state-led development theory, export upgrading was neither a natural product of market competition nor a sheer outcome of deliberate government promotion of capital-intensive investment. Rather it resulted from the complex interaction between foreign capital on the one hand and local export institutions that took root before the entrance of FDI on the other hand. While local institutions heavily influenced the direction and the magnitude of FDI's impact on local export activities, the influx of FDI at a particular period also revised the institutional arrangements governing the behavior of local governments and export businesses. This produced intended and unintended effects on the likelihood of ruinous competition or export upgrading. The paper concludes that in a transformed eraâ??one in which outsourcing and offshore production has increasingly segregated the source of proprietary knowledge from manufacturing, one should go beyond the pure focus on the amount of capital-intensive exports and high-tech investment, and should devote more attention to the important role of social coordination in overcoming ruinous competition and in nurturing the indigenous capacity for innovation and upgrading. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will explore the contradictions between the necessary conditions for the political construction of sustainable and counter-hegemonic economic alternatives to the market-driven global economy and the requirements for maintaining a consistent ethico-critical position against all institutionalized forms of global order. The logic of hegemonic politics defines a whole, an all, a bloc by positing a constitutive exception embodied in the body of a populist leader, an ideal, or a privileged agent. Within the bounds of this delimited set, all kinds of differences are permittedâ€"with the proviso that the constitutive exception remains unquestioned. In contrast, the non-all logic of axiomatic ethics refuses to posit an exception at the expense of failing to constitute a coherent whole. In fact, the radical democratic ethics always implies the refusal of the institution of an unquestionable exception. In this manner, while the political logic of exception strives to institute a stabilized field of difference where the contingency is supposed to be substituted by the necessity, the axiomatic ethics of non-all opens itself up to the indeterminancy of the contingent. This paper aims to explore this antinomy of post-Marxist political thought (Laclau, Badiou) in the context of the Marxian political economy of surplus labour and ask whether communism is a hegemonic nodal point that defines and institutes a communist-all as an alternative to the capitalist-all or an ethical axiom that disrupts not only the logic of capitalist-all as embodied in multi-national corporations but all regimes of appropriation of surplus based on an unquestionable exception? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explore the relation between contemporary forms of capitalism and the extensive disciplinary and penal apparatuses that tend to appear in the most thoroughly liberal capitalist states. Specifically, this paper will build on the work of Michel Foucault who noted over three decades ago that modern technologies of discipline and punishment, designed to control the consciousness and subjectivity of individuals, to foster processes of self-regulation and to produce docile bodies, emerged in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Europe in conjunction with capitalist social relations. However, it will move beyond Foucault in further elucidating the ways in which the criminalization and disciplining of the poor has historically been and continues to be constitutive of the (re)production of capitalism. Using the United States as the primary case study, it will argue that the successful reproduction of capitalism crucially depends on a number of mechanisms traditionally ignored by political economists. In particular, this paper will draw attention to the ways in which capitalism (both historically and at the contemporary moment) has benefited from the criminalization of the poor and racial minorities; the increasing subsumption of discourses concerning the social origins of crime to neoliberal discourses emphasizing crime as choice; the production of the disciplined labourer within institutions (both materially, through the highly exploitative prison labour, and discursively as the criminal is increasingly portrayed as an independent, empowered individual capable of responsible self-governance); and through the (re)production of social hierarchies based on class, gender and race. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes that the development dilemmas of the 21st century are related to what the developed world wants of the developing world and prescribes as solutions for them. These dilemmas arise from philosophies and ideals not originating in those countries seeking development. For small-island, developing states, these dilemmas lead to socio-economic confusion and conflict. The first part of the paper discusses three global philosophies or ideals - development, market forces also known as laissez-faire, and capitalism also known as market capitalism. The second part of the paper focuses on dilemmas facing The Bahamas. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an assessment of the prospects for the US dollar to continue acting as the world’s premier reserve currency. It utilizes a theoretical framework grounded in a stylized reading of Fernand Braudel’s classic analysis of capitalism between the 15th and 18th centuries. This analysis draws our attention to the particular ways in which capitalism is organized around and through overlapping social arenas of economy, state, civilization and mentalitié. This is a form of historical political economy which is well-suited to examining the underlying structural support for the continued role of the US dollar as an international reserve currency. The principal argument of the paper is that while many economic analyses underplay the gathering fragility of the exchange rate of the dollar and the potential havoc a sudden downturn in its value could bring to international currency markets, many political analyses give inadequate attention to the peculiar fusion of economic, political, social and ideational forces that have powered the US dollar to its current role as the world’s premier reserve currency. A Braudelian framework, focused on what he terms the longue durée, allows us to assess the robustness of these sources of support for the continued role of the dollar. Thus the counter-intuitive argument that the US dollar will continue as the main international reserve currency for some time yet. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper places Michel Foucault's analyses of the role of circulation in modernity in the context of the rationality of political economy that Foucault deemed essential for the deployment of biopolitics. Governing social and political problems by managing circulation does not expand an ideal of unimpeded circulation, but constitutes and reproduces boundaries between proper and improper circulation. Starting in the eighteenth century, proper circulation has increasingly defined processes of capitalist expansion and global governmentality. Governing social and political problems deploys technologies to govern circulatory processes and capitalism is increasingly seen as dependent on circulatory processes, with the role of labour replaced by risk (Lee and LiPuma 2006). We argue that in order to unpack the security dispositif that gains prominence starting from the 18th century, we need to understand circulation as a moment of a complex totality (Postone 1986). By replacing circulation within a reading of political economy, the paper reconceptualises security as crisis management. Crises manifest themselves in circulation: yet, they concern the interruption of the self-valorisation of capital. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the role of social reproductive arrangements in reproducing the capitalist mode of production. It questions how our organization of domestic labour, care work, family and state structures effect the broader social relations of society at large. To this end, the paper tries to come to a deeper understanding of the relationship between capitalism and a gender oppressive form of social reproduction by investigating the continuities and ruptures between pre-capitalist forms of social reproduction and its current organization in global capitalism. The paper contends that the sexual division of labour under the current Empire is not a structural requirement of capitalism but a phenomenon that has been achieved and sustained through violent projects to discipline class, sexuality, gender norms, and bodies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on how leaders in Japan, Russia, and Western countries talk about the "war on terrorism." The paper discusses the difficulties of defining "terrorism," because, unlike Marxism or capitalism, "terrorism" is not an ideology. Instead the term may be used to designate actions that are used by members of non-governmental organizations against civilian targets. In the case of the "war on terrorism," the signifier, "terrorism," is used widely. However, the signified, the perpetrators and what they do, are quite different. Because the designation of the signified depends upon the speaker, the concept of terrorism seems to be subjective and fluid. The signified switches radically both by context and over time, while the only aspect that is stable is the signifier, "terrorism." The paper goes on to analyze the "war on terrorism" as an ontological metaphor. The paper concludes by arguing that although figures of speech contribute to the cognitive dimension of meaning by helping us to recognize the equivalence to which we are committed and suggesting new equivalences, metaphors like the "war on terrorism" raise problems and do little to increase our understanding. Considering different cultural codes and world views, this type of metaphor is highly counterproductive for communication on the global level. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that 'traditional' social democratic parties are/were characterised by (a) being constituted by relations of representation, and (b) their accommodation of the relations of capitalism. As such, they are both unable to transcend the capital-labour relation, and seek to secure the subordination of constituents' demands to the process of representation. Nevertheless, 'traditional' social democratic representation is itself problematized by the context of capitalist production within which it is set. In an attempt to respond to this dilemma, 'traditional' social democratic party elites have increasingly sought to limit the demands of their electoral constituents, a process which has itself been justified in terms of the lack of any available, superior, alternative. Moreover, given that 'traditional' social democratic constituents have historically defined themselves in terms of their commitment to the process of representation, they have been largely unsuccessful in their attempts to resist this process of moderation; because to do so successfully would itself require a transcendence of the relations of representation. We should not, therefore, this paper argues, be surprised by the moderation, modernization and transformation of 'traditional' social democracy and its mutation into 'third way', or 'new', social democracy and, moreover, we should not expect that this process can be reversed by those social relationships which comprise contemporary social democratic parties. This argument is made with reference to the British Labour Party and the German SPD. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The earliest scholarly debates on the prospects of successful post-socialist transitions to capitalism occurring in Central East Europe have overwhelmingly emphasized the importance of free markets and clear and robust property rights. More recently, David Stark and László Bruszt have argued that while such factors are important, networks of “deliberative association” are even more crucial because they fulfill crucial coordination and accountability functions without which capitalism cannot thrive. This paper explores how the different processes of extrication from socialism in post-1989 Central East Europe and post-1978 China have impacted the dynamics and structure of these networks. In contrast to Stark and Bruszt’s study, this paper will use China’s rural enterprises to not only examine how the blurred boundaries between the public and private spheres have transformed inter-organizational relationships, but intra-organizational structures and processes as well. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Twenty Years Crisis, internationalism was at the leading edge of liberal and radical politics. For generations it had been one of the Left’s central motivating ideas and most treasured inheritances, while nationalism was largely an expression of the propertied classes. Around the time of the Second World War, however, there occurred a sharp and profound “double movement,” in which the relationships between capital and labour, and the national and the international, were reversed. How and why did this happen? This paper addresses this “capitalist turn” in internationalism, which has received little attention in IR. It argues that the this oversight can be explained in part because attempts to theorize internationalism typically have been structured by a commitment to the sovereign and territorial liberal democratic state as the central unit of analysis. IR’s embedded statism has forced analyses of internationalism to use the very limited model of interstate relations. As a result, they treat internationalism as essentially a-historical and a-political, failing to engage with the changing social relations and contradictions that characterize capitalist modernity. However, a growing body of work in IR uses historical-materialist approaches to establish the foundational role played by multiple forms of sovereignty in modernity. This paper falls within that tradition, making empirical and theoretical contributions to a historical sociology of internationalism, one that includes in its analyses manifestations of the idea of internationalism not mediated through the state. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporate Responsibility (CR) firms engagement for social and environmental ends beyond the legally mandated minimum is probably the dominant rhetorical frame for the legitimation of contemporary capitalism. In my paper, I ask why CR has become salient at different times and has assumed different qualities across various European countries since 1980. Great Britain and Germany are my in-depth country cases, for it is claimed they represent extremes in the contemporary CR landscape. Britain, it is claimed, is European (if not global) CR leader, while Germany is a laggard among large European countries. My paper describes the institutionalization of CR in both countries in order to understand what factors contributed to these outcomes. Three stand out. First, urban dereliction and social unrest helped to bring CR up to speed in the UK in the 1980s; these pressures were largely absent in Germany. Second, the importance of state officials and policy entrepreneurs for promoting and subsidizing CR cannot be underestimated. Ironically, the British state has been very activist in this regard, while its German counterpart has remained largely inactive. Third, firms perceptions of their regulatory and welfare-state environment have a strong influence on the nature of their CR engagement, with perceived institutional constraints inversely related to engagement. Thus, CR gained momentum as Thatcher freed British businesses from their fetters, while this dynamic has only recently taken hold in Germany. Notwithstanding the insistence of mainstream CR literature that business objectives and societal responsibility imply and necessitate each other, sociological ambivalence a concept which focuses on the ways in which ambivalence comes to be built on to the structure of social statuses and roles is useful for highlighting some of the neglected contours of the CR landscape across Europe. Ambivalences are especially apparent where corporate responsibilities have tended to be institutionalized, legally binding, and constraining, as they have been in Germany. Corporate association officials there have at times pushed for the retrenchment of institutionalized forms of responsibility, such as corporate taxation, co-determination, and the welfare state, at the same time as they proclaim their far-reaching voluntary engagements as corporate citizens. As the substance if not always the form of institutions become ever more market-conforming and market-driven, these demands may become less audible. But firms may find that they have won a pyrrhic victory, as reconciling societal demands for responsibility with capitalism's imperative of profit maximization and its tendency to externalize costs is difficult without the hard backing of of˜beneficial constraints. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last few years several attempts have been made to introduce the Varieties of Capitalism approach in Central and Eastern Europe. We find references to either the Anglo-Saxon or the continental European model of corporate governance being adopted in this region. This paper argues that we are not witnessing convergence to either one of these models, but rather the rise of a specific type of capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe. This paper focuses on the Czech Republic in which -just like in other countries in the region- foreign investment plays a crucial role. The political and economic developments of transition have led to a situation in which foreign banks and corporations own a large part of the Czech economy. These actors fundamentally influence corporate governance regulation. The paper turns its focus on the role of the EU in the establishment of this economic regulation. It argues that securing foreign investors an equal opportunity to invest has been a key issue on its agenda and that the successful attempt to influence the lock-in of newly established property rights through corporate governance regulation is an important illustration of this desire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many have noted that the Bush administration?s new security strategy has reformulated many of the tactics of American Grand Strategy, few have attempted to establish a connection between militant liberalism, the reduction of risk and transnational accumulation. In this paper I argue that US mobilizations for a perpetual Global War on Terror (GWOT) might best be understood as a coercive insurance policy for a globalizing capitalism. In this context, while the discourse of global new constitutionalism may serve to secure aspects of transnational accumulation by law, its more coercive counterpart may be found in the evolving strategic thought of global dominance planners who not only seek to insure American preeminence throughout the twenty-first century but who also seek to guarantee the very life-basis of American dominance by a perpetual war fought on many fronts and with a diversity of tactics. Part of why this insurance program has been operationalzied, I argue, is not to reduce the risks to life in general, as contemporary students of biopolitics might suggest, but to a particular way of life ordered, reordered, and reproduced in certain ways and not others. In this sense, I understand the Global War on Terror as animated by the discourse of militant liberalism, a more coercive yet complementary discourse to disciplinary liberalism. The ultimate aim is to instantiate a worldwide liberal revolution and by extension a global liberal zone of peace. According to this logic, the greatest risks to the universal project of free-enterprise capitalism are those regions of the globe that have yet to be assimilated by its ?normalizing? disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unipolarity is a concept which characterizes the distribution of power capabilities among states; however, it says little about the quality of those capabilities and nothing about the nature of the actors who possess them or their strategies for converting them into power. It is commonly agreed that the United States is a preeminent actor in a unipolar system. But there is much disagreement as to what kind of preeminence the United States likely to exert in the post-Cold War World. Different writers use very different terms to capture America’s role in the world. Some authors argue that the United States as an empire and see the US role as an imperial one. Others claim that the USA is a hegemon and interpret its behavior as that of a preeminent actor in a hegemonic system. Members of the conservative Bush administration see the USA as a leading state in a democratic ‘zone of peace’. Radical opponents of the administration view the USA as a core actor in a capitalist world-economy. This paper will first clarify these different concepts in the light of US foreign-policy praxis. It will then discuss more closely the relationship between the two popular concepts of empire and hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores whether we can understand the new forms and locations of violence, amounting in various rhetorics to ‘World War IV’ as a consequence of a crisis in the hegemony forms of democratic desiring. I ask, first, then, how democracy becomes hegemonic in modernity by 1) looking at the constitutive connections of modern democracy and state territoriality, and 2) examining the techniques democratic states have deployed to limit and contain the flows of world capitalism. I then trace out the ways in which global capitalism and changing meanings of territoriality challenge the institutionalization and legitimation of liberal democracy. In short, I argue that democracy is not able to constitute itself seemlessly as a modern constitution within current -- rapidly changing -- spatial hierarchies and social relations. This has unleashed democratic desirings, both progressive aspirations for post-liberal freedom (the Zapatistas for example) and repressive or what we might call ‘state-secured’ democracies. Hence, ‘World War IV’ takes the form of a ‘war of position’ among new (and sometimes old and revived) forms of political desire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Official ‘Eurospeak’ and mainstream European integration theory holds the completion of the 3rd stage of the European Monetary Union to represent a high point of achievement of forging ‘an ever closer union’ or a new novel ‘multileveled polity’. Whilst not incorrect in a formal sense, this is an extremely one-sided perspective, which disregards the more important disintegrative effects the EURO is having on the configuration of social accords that underpin European welfare capitalism. The paper will demonstrate that the EMU has systematically been configured into a structurally subordinate relation to the US Dollar in the neo-liberal transnational financial order, which seriously circumscribes the capacity of European state apparatuses to manage social antagonisms that are unleashed in the current process of capitalist restructuring. This is in contrast to the American case, where the capacity to turn debt into capital, makes it possible to draw on the financial order for these purposes. It is argued, therefore, that the EMU is ridden with crisis tendencies. Their actual and potential manifestations are explored, including the rise of right wing populism as well as prospective European challenges to current American hegemony, which might constitute a ‘blowback’ in Chalmers Johnson’s sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explore the international political economy of Puerto Rico. I am interest to address contradictory discourses toward hegemony and self-determination. How the Puerto Rican identity challenge the traditional capitalist protestant ethic, but at the same time, is able to compete in global markets? The relationship between local and global scenarios create potential opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benjamin Cohen prominently criticized, that scholars of IPE were caught wrong-footed by the recent financial and economic crisis. They failed to anticipate this crisis because they were too reluctant to ask the „big systemic questions" about the global economy and the role of finance. At the same time, a burgeoning literature on „financialization" has emerged - mainly outside IPE - drawing on contributions from heterodox economics, sociology, economic geography and critical management studies. Financialization explicitly engages with the growing dominance of finance and the multifaceted transformation of modern capitalism during the past decades that have been at the heart of the crisis. In this paper we discuss the contributions of this research program to the study of finance in IPE.We argue that both literatures have much to gain from stronger engagement with each other - IPE in particular, because financialization raises the "big systemic questions", demanded by Cohen. The financialization research program puts the study of political economy again centre stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mainstream analyses on the geopolitics of the interstate system and globalisation have run out of steam, commonly holding to outmoded views that there is either an unchanging essence to the states-system, despite the background conditions of globalisation, or that the condition of hyperglobalism has withered away the capacity of states as effective political actors in the global arena. Despite persistent disciplinary marginalisation, greater vitality has been witnessed in recent historical materialist debate on the uneven and combined development of the geopolitics of the states-system and capitalist accumulation. This paper delivers a comprehensive overview and critique of prevalent historical materialist positions on the territoriality of the interstate system and capitalism. The widespread pitfall across many historical materialist approaches remains a syncopated, rather than synchronous, analysis of the 'twin logics' of geopolitical territoriality and capitalist accumulation. An alternate assessment, proposing the presence of a transnational state in securing global capitalism is equally revealed to be misleading. The transnational state is no more than an illusive will-o'-the-wisp. Instead, a different conceptualisation is sought by understanding the internal relationship between the contemporary interstate system and capitalist accumulation. As a result, a more convincing account can be conveyed, relevant to clarifying key differences between the historical emergence of capitalism within a prior states-system and the contemporary geopolitical structure of capitalist space that is today still fragmented into a polity of states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2006 Bolivian nationalization of hydrocarbons marked a range of measures by the government that had as its ultimate goal a rupture with the logic of colonial rule, reproduced for the past decades in the domination of neoliberal markets. In that sense, the control by the state of natural resources symbolizes a double movement: on the one hand, it would represent the reaffirmation of people's sovereignty, diminished by centuries of exploration. On the other, nationalization would also serve to foster Bolivia's development as the increase of income is redistributed among people. In that context, poverty reduction and progress, issues historically treated by liberal thinkers, appear also as part of a project implemented by an anti-neoliberal administration. So, what are the prospects of rupture for Bolivia? In this paper, I argue that, besides the government discourse and people's beliefs, Bolivia could not yet break with the logic of modern times, because that move requires a rupture with the logic of capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of capitalist space and the spatial relations between those spaces necessitates a profound conceptualisation of the general conditions of the development of the social relations of capitalist production and the nation-state that represents the totality of those relations. In particular geographies the development of capitalism materialised in a peculiar form parallel to their geographical conditioning. In understanding this peculiar development of capitalist space and the capitalist mode of production in peripheral geographies the theory of uneven and combined development manifests itself as the structuring condition and the intrinsic law of the production of capitalist space. The theory of uneven and combined development explains particularly the production of capitalist space that transcends the separation of town and country. To maintain the constant accumulation and the circulation of capital, certain amount of capital needs to be fixed in a defined geography while simultaneously it has to be mobile to take advantage of the higher profit rates in marginal spaces -that particularly located in the immediate periphery. Therefore, the circulation/expansion of capital and its unevenness is the focal point of the historical materialist analysis of the contemporary space and spatial relations -in other words of the formation of the capitalist geographies. The use of the theory of uneven and combined development reinforces the Gramscian concept of 'passive revolution' which is a very strategic concept in understanding the peculiarities of the production of the capitalist space in a particular time, in a particular peripheral geography. The spatiality of Turkey which shaped the uneven and combined development of capitalist space, spatial practices and spatial representations structured the passive revolution of Turkey between 1908 and 1923 and determined the transition to the capitalist modernity in the form of nation-state. Therefore, this paper argues that the peripheral space formation of Turkey and its spatial relations should be analysed in terms of the uneven and combined development of capitalism which followed by the passive revolution that secured the production of capitalist space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will review the main debates surrounding organ transfer and its potential to become either market or state controlled, and use Giorgio Agamben's distinction between the sacred and profane and the movement of things between these two spheres in hopes of widening IR's theoretical reach and its ability to respond to emerging issues in global politics. It will pair profanation with the debates about organ transplantation and organ procurement in order to speak to the challenges facing IR theory in light of global realities and ask this question: Does Giorgio Agamben's theory help in reflecting on these changes in the world in a meaningful manner? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the ways in which criminal law and penal practices were crucial disciplinary mechanisms used to secure the emergence of a class of paid workers in the sphere of production and unpaid workers in the sphere of social reproduction. Spec ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 30 years, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has transformed itself into a major actor in the international economy. This paper considers the extent to which China's growing economic power translates into political influence over the foreign policy priorities, behavior, and perceptions of its economic partners. I test quantitatively whether different types of economic exchange with China are correlated with a particular country's leadership travel to China, that country's willingness to recognize China as a market economy, and its public perceptions of China. Findings are mixed, but suggest on balance that bilateral economic ties are more closely correlated with behavior (recognition of China as a market economy) and public perceptions than they are with priorities (leadership travel to China). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates "postcolonial capitalism" and the "structure-subject-ideology" conjunction from a psychoanalyticstandpoint. It argues that in the midst of globalization, subjectivities are empowered by performing the logic of interpretationthat renders capital's materiality as "inescapable", "natural", even"objective". I center a postcolonial (transnational) middle class inIndia and the diaspora as the spectral subject-agents of the globaleconomy. Practices of self-representation, self-recognition, and theimpossible desire of the Other produces a fragmented and conflictedconstruction of a self seeking incorporation into the structure of theOther, the ideological materiality of recognition. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The late nineties have seen convergence of political economies in Central and Eastern Europe. Foreign-led economies have emerged in the region. State strategies have been reoriented towards distinctive types of the competition state. I characterize the state strategy in the Visegrad Four states as Porterian competition state, which aims at upgrading industrial base by attracting foreign direct investment and clustering in the locality.This paper explains the process of convergence of state strategies. It examines political and institutional support of the competition state in Eastern Europe. It also analyses resistance to competition-state strategies.The aim of the analysis is (1) to arrive at a better understanding of transformation of state strategies in the globalizing capitalism, (2) investigate the uneven process of state internationalization in the European periphery, and (3) to contribute to writing another chapter of political-economic history of the region by focusing on an under-research topic of the politics of the rise of foreign-led economies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have attributed the development of democracy to the rise of Protestantism, capitalism and the middle class. Democracy has been associated with industrialization, education and globalization. Thomas Jefferson believed democracy depended on freehold land owning yeomen and staunchly rural, independent farmers to thrive. Others argued unions or urbanization have driven its ascendance. The causes of democracy have beenattributed to the scientific revolution, natural law theory, constitutionalism, free trade and capitalist competition. Limited government, rule of law, human rights, property rights, equality and meritocracy have been asserted as values inseparable from its practice. None of these explanations has provoked a consensus of opinion as to the fundamental causes of democratic development. Democracy building has hence been a hit or miss affair, dependent on everything, so scholars assert, from Burke’s thesis that democracy developed from the inimitable forces of history and culture to Friedman’s hypothesis of democracy being an inevitable concomitant of modernization advancing first economicdevelopment, then democracy, within a competitive free trade environment. Various disciplines have proposed discipline-dependent explanations of democracy’s success or failure. Historians have proposed it was a product of the fortuitous history of European medieval kingdoms hitting upon the benefits of limited government in their contests for superiority. Geographers have declared democracy failed to appear in many areas because semi-desert farming dependent on vast irrigation networks necessitated dictatorial centralism, and thus its opposite, independent farmers in temperate zones of abundant rainfall were a necessary foundation to its rise. Democracy has been asserted to be both robust and fragile, either imperilled or irresistible, and both uniquely difficult to achieve and broadly imitable. Obviously any phenomenon with so many explanations and such a diverse array of opinions about its origins and essential nature has no single cause; and so the academy has fallen back on listing out actors and arguing about which are primary or secondary and which are necessary or sufficient. With the failure of democratization in Iraq and in other places such as Singapore where the circumstances appear more favourable to its development but where democracy as commonly understood has not arisen, a reconsideration of the fundamental nature and driving forces of democratization is more than called for. This paper is based on a 20 year on-site longitudinal study of democratic development in Hong Kong and China. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the idea of the green state has emerged as a way of understanding the state in the context of the international relations of the environment. By assuming the role of a public environmental trustee and responsible global environmental citizen, states can achieve changes at the international and domestic levels. However, for changes to be sustained and deep, policy needs to challenge rather than support the logic of ecologically destructive competitive capitalism and hierarchical globalization. This paper argues that Canada's historical commitment to green multilateralism makes it well-positioned to move toward the role of a green state, but that a major barrier remains Canada's continuing support of inequitable and unsustainable global relations of economic exchange based on competitiveness. Rather than forming a single coherent strategy on climate change, for example, two distinct and competing principles vie for dominance in Canadian international environmental policy: competitiveness and protection. As a result, Canada's climate change policies have been irregular and inconsistent. For example, Canada has recently departed from multilateral commitments agreed at Kyoto, while simultaneously claiming to take decisive action to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the War on Terror, there is no doubt that from the Middle East there emanates one of the most potent ‘politics of resistance’ to the prevailing neo-liberal paradigm of world order. Yet, the sources of this politics of resistance and its links with neo-liberalism are poorly understood. Following the research agenda set out in a recently published book that has, at a theoretical level, offered a framework of analysis of these linkages through Robert W. Cox’s and Jeffrey Harrod’s conception of ‘unprotected workers’ (Davies & Ryner, 2006), this paper proposes a pilot study that explores these linkages. This study tests the hypothesis that the European Mediterranean Partnership (EMP), far from contributing to ‘good governance’, is promoting a disposition of consciousness that is conducive to a millennialist variant of Islam that is hostile to liberal democracy. The EMP facilitates the displacing of agrarian-based social relations, without engendering effective industrial capitalism (e.g. Knio, 2006), thus leading to the growth a ‘casual pattern of social relations of production’. This hypothesis is explored with reference to its ‘toughest’ and therefore ‘critical’ case (cf. Eckstein, 1976), namely Tunisia, which is held up as a neo-liberal ‘success-story’. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we make worlds? More specifically: how do defend, extend and create ‘other worlds’ against the one world that neoliberal globalisation has been creating? The alterglobalisation movement had made its name and fame around the turn of the millennium proclaiming that other worlds were possible. Against the seeming lack of alternatives proclaimed by the neoliberal offensive (TINA: There Is No Alternative, Thatcher’s dictum); against the creation of a world where difference would always be subordinate to the global sameness of the value form; against this world we posited the possibility of, as the Zapatistas put it, a world into which many worlds fit.Easier said than done: for if contemporary anticapitalist practice consists merely in the creation of so many “places of anti-capital”, how can we answer David Harvey’s challenge, when he suggests that capital defeats all alternative, ‘placed’ challenges through its control of ‘space’, of the relations and connections between places, how can we link our places in a way that respects their difference and yet makes them strong enough to withstand (re-)absorption by capital?Following a recent strand of autonomist literature that identifies ‘the! commons’ as the locus proper of anticapitalist practice (de Angelis, Dyer-Witheford), I will ask how decentralised commons can develop, first, sufficiently strong networks to develop self-sustaining social feedback processes alternative to those of capital; and second, ‘Clastrian machines’ that would guard against the rearticulation of these emerging alternative, ‘commonistic’ (Dyer-Witheford) networks into circuits of capital accumulation.My paper will seek to both develop new theoretical proposals concerning the possibilities of constructing a ‘decentred counterhegemony’ (a world into which fit many worlds), and to further these theoretical discussions through inclusion of materials from radical ethnographies and engaged research in movement practices. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the post Cold War era and accelerating after 9/11, Canada adopted a more aggresive militaristic role in order to secure a more intimate and ultimately rewarding position beside the US as a subdominant player in the expanding New World Order - a states system Wood evocatively labels the Empire of Capital. In this paper, I theorize the more aggressive militaristic role of the Canadian state within this Empire of Capital. First, I examine geopolitical and economic rationales for the war in Afghanistan. Second, I examine ideologies of race, class, and gender undergirding the militarism of the empire. Third, I examine how the Bush and R2P doctrines instituionalize and legitimize empire. Finally, I examine the mythology that Canada is a peaceful state. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1970s and 1980s, neo-liberal market capitalism replaced Keynesian capitalism as the dominant international norm on economics (outside the fading state socialist bloc). In Latin America, one of the striking developments from the late 1980s through the 1990s was the degree to which these neo-liberal norms came to be accepted across the political spectrum. In a region known for ISI protectionist (and even socialist) development strategies and assertions of nationalism, the historical competitors to market capitalism went mute. Indeed, some of the most ambitious neo-liberal programs of the 1990s in Latin America were implemented by leaders of parties that for many decades had been major proponents of nationalist-statist capitalism. As these political elites â€" responding to the dominant global economic norms and domestic and international structures â€" dramatically reoriented policy, they also appeared to win over publics that were expected to be resistant to market capitalism. Public opinion in the 1990s generally approved market reforms and voters re-elected many of the reformers. Yet beginning in the late 1990s and during the first half-decade of the 21st century, the Latin American tide has turned once again. Many national citizenries in the region elected leaders who were skeptical, if not downright critical, of neo-liberal norms and public opinion indicated increasing skepticism of market-oriented policies. What explains the implementation without internalization of neo-liberalism in Latin America in the 1990s? This paper (comparative but with special reference to ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Africa has embarked on a new phase of capitalist development, powered in large part by Chinese investment. After three decades of stagnation, the continent as a whole is witnessing growth rates of five percent per year and becoming once again a focal point of geopolitical dispute. This paper will focus on the Sino-African relationship and ask two questions in particular: what is China's strategy in Africa? And what is its likely developmental impact? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central concern of Marxist International Relations scholarship is to internally relate global capitalism and the states-system without reducing one of these systems to an epiphenomenon of the other. A recent attempt to do this is Justin Rosenberg's reformulation of Leon Trotsky's idea of uneven and combined development. This article examines the internal relations of 'unevenness' and 'combination' as presented by Trotsky and reworked by Rosenberg. From this anatomisation of the concept, we offer an interpretation of Rosenberg's use of the concept as a 'general abstraction' to be incorporated into our already existing social theories. Furthermore, in examining the theoretical standing of uneven and combined development as a 'transhistorical' abstraction, we argue that while the uneven and combined nature of social development represents a truly transhistorical phenomenon, its distinct causal determinations, articulated and expressed through inter-societal competition, are only fully activated under the specific socio-historical conditions of generalised commodity production. From this perspective, we examine the systematisation of uneven and combined development in the capitalist epoch as a basis for critiquing (neo-)Marxist arguments (particularly as presented by William I. Robinson) regarding the so-called processes of transnational capitalist class and state formation. Note: This paper is a re-worked version of a piece co-written with Jamie C. Allinson. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a genealogy of the politico-strategic rationality that currently underpins what I call the discourse of militant liberalism. By situating the Bush II administration's militant foreign policy within the longue durée of liberal capitalism, it is possible to construct a more comprehensive framework for conceptualizing the tactics and technologies of liberal power -- including the liberal rationale for the use of violent force. I propose that this could be investigated by probing the series: liberty, security, property and argue that the liberal 'art of government' is expressly designed to secure property and its evolving interpretations rather than human life. However, the technologies of force deployed by agencies of liberal power are not simply mobilized to repress and destroy populations but more importantly, to invest in and reproduce liberal forms of lifestyle and governmentality. The transnationalization of liberal forms of governmentality, it is further argued, is intimately linked up with the transnationalization of capital and its accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]