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textabstractThroughout the past two decades, Bob Jessop has drawn considerable attention to the compatibility between French Regulation (FR) and Critical Realist approaches (CR), arguing that FR implicitly works within a critical realist ontology, epistemology and methodology. Inspired by his insights, I argue that a Spinozian-led Immanent Causality Morphogenetic Approach (ICMA) provides a fruitful avenue for further regulationist research and represents a promising effort to ground FR in (meta)theory, whereby, ontologically speaking, the ICMA explores how structure and agency emerge, intertwine and redefine each other in and over time. The two approaches mutually reinforce each other: ICMA is able to provide FR with a solid theoretical and metatheoretical foundation, while FR, can enrich the ICMA with its direct engagement with capitalism related studies and a well-developed terminology in the field. The value added of ICMA can be seen in four points: it (1) clarifies the distinction between extensive and intensive regimes of accumulation and the speed of technological change, (2) specifies the problematique of hierarchy and stability of the dominant bloc, (3) fleshes out the problematique of endometabolism and hybridity, and (4) provides the researcher with a methodological framework to absent the necessary relations at the level of conditioning.

In this article, I discuss the importance of ontology and its implications, demonstrated in the examples of different approaches to neoliberalism. The lack of careful ontological considerations leads to confusing and often contradictory usages of the term ‘neoliberalism’, obfuscating its usefulness. Instead, I suggest a cartography which consists of integrating two ontological debates - structure-agency and material-ideational - through the interplay between the problematiques of structuration and semiosis, and the operational debate on ideas/interests. In so doing, this cartography can provide readers with various heuristic devices to understand the making of theories, why and how conceptualizations of neoliberalism differ between and within theories and pinpoint the thematic implications of these differences. The translation of this cartography helps to achieve two things, (1) to move beyond the static analyses of neoliberalism and endorse the dynamic understand of neoliberalization processes, (2) to understand why systemic process-based understandings of neoliberalization can create distinctions between analytical understandings of neoliberalism in terms of either the commodification of marketization processes or the marketization of commodification processes.

Recent contributions to the study of neoliberalism have made considerable advances in transcending the dichotomy between understandings of the concept either as an ‘ideology’ or as a monolithic ‘st...

The concluding chapter reviews our arguments in Part One in the light of the other contributions to this volume. The general significance of these contributions was explored in Chapter 1 and, rather than repeat that exercise, we focus here on specific lessons. Likewise, we will not return to the important question posed by Jane Roitman regarding whether it is scientifically and practically appropriate to treat the modern period in general as crisis prone and/or to assume that specific events and processes can best be defined as (symptoms of) crisis to the neglect of alternative ways of interpreting them. For we are not interested in highlighting crisis as a description or self-description of modern times as if this captures the Zeitgeist (spirit of the times) nor do we consider crisis can be the taken-for-granted form of Zeitdiagnostik, an approach that privileges crisis as an explanandum and/or explanans for historical and contemporary analyses of the modern period. Similarly, we do not consider the conditions of possibility of a general theory of crisis. For, while accepting that there are real crisis tendencies and actual crises, we are not interested in developing a general theory of crises or identifying the features of crisis in general. Indeed, there is no crisis in general or general crisis: only particular crises in and/or of particular sets of social relations and the totality of crises in a given conjuncture.2 Thus, any serious approach to crises must define the specific mix of crisis tendencies that create the abstract conditions of possibility for a given type of crisis and the specific features that define the specificity of a particular crisis, whether considered as an event and/or as a process. This is illustrated by the diversity of the case studies in this volume.

textabstractThe morphogenetic approach as powered by analytical dualism offers an appealing account of the processes whereby people - through their reflexivities - reflect back on structures and cultures during the double and triple morphogenesis of agency. However, in order to further specify an account of social change, this paper argues that it would be helpful to provide an account of what occurs in the other direction as well: from the direction of structures and cultures, between each other and towards people, also at the points of double and triple morphogenesis of agency. This article is therefore a theoretical piece that proposes a reading of the morphogenetic model imbued with an enlightened understanding of immanent causality, driven by the Spinozian doctrine of parallelism and operationalized by his understanding of the two expressive roles of ideas.

“Neo-liberalism” is one of those expressions that rise to the surface when contemporary debates about socio-economic restructuring processes take place. Within the mounting scholarly attention give...

China’s strategy for claiming sovereignty in the South China Sea, based on UNCLOS which it has signed and ratified, is to be seen as an evolving process of interaction. Periodic adjustments to various situational logics are apparent: the material conditions on the mainland; the tenor of international relations shaped by China’s rise; China’s relationship with ASEAN as a regional organization and with its individual members. China’s understanding of ‘maritime borders’ tends to conflate the notion of a ‘nation’ with that of a Confucian ‘family’. The application of this to foreign diplomacy is baulked by a form of nationalism derived from a neo-Confucian interpretation of culture and identity. The framing of territorial sovereignty in terms of a lineage to support its claim to exclusive rights and authority over this maritime area faces the litmus test of successful institutional building with “Chinese characteristics” over a culturally hybrid sea space in order to achieve peaceful coexistence.

This chapter uses a simplified version of Foucault’s genealogical method to trace the emergence of the South China Sea as a ‘complex’ in international relations. It demonstrates how different knowledge systems and the ways of using and claiming this maritime area are interlinked and transformed through time. The mechanisms of power that have transmogrified a ‘common’ into something that holds the characteristics of a ‘territory’, with multiple sovereignty claims and conflicts, call for reflection on the value of independent institutions in bilateral diplomacy.

This chapter argues that that Critical Realism, a philosophy of science, when applied in combination with the morphogenetic approach in historical and social research, can contribute to a deeper understanding of social transformation and help to disentangle the structure–agency relations in the maritime disputes in the South China Sea. The ways in which a society (or a group of people) understands maritime space, adopts practices of demarcating borders, and negotiates disputes, cannot be taken as given. Making them subject to historical and social analysis is both scientifically significant and politically relevant, especially with respect to the role of self-reflexivity in social science research into peaceful transformation.

The literature on governance has recently witnessed a growing tension between a techno-managerial account of governance and a power-sensitive approach. This article argues that the downgrading of power relations by the techno-managerial approach is significantly problematic and counterproductive. Building on the case of the Euro-Mediterranean Development Bank, the article shows how the EU's articulation of the techno-managerial approach has had serious negative implications. On the one hand, it re-emphasised the embedded long-term power asymmetries that have characterised the EU's general governance attitude relationship with its Mediterranean partners. On the other hand, it compromised the credibility of EU policies in addressing and pressing for further reforms in the Mediterranean region.

This article addresses the consequences of Washington Consensus and more recently post-Washington Consensus policy for democratic good governance in Africa. It acknowledges the increased focus in recent years of policy-makers on poverty as an important force in world politics. Despite this increased concern the authors argue that International Relations as a discipline fails to offer a suitable framework for understanding poverty as a social force. The article proposes a revival of Robert W. Cox and Jeffrey Harrod's approach based on ‘patterns of social relations of production’. This offers a disaggregation of the condition that is often referred to in the literature as ‘the poor’ or ‘the informal sector’. The article then outlines a comparative research agenda based on the cases of Tunisia and South Africa. It demonstrates how these cases provide the sternest test for assessing the authors' scepticism of the prospects of reconciling market-led development with good governance, whilst also offeri...

Politics in Lebanon has consistently been associated with political instability and ongoing military conflicts since the mid-1970s. Once hailed as the ‘Switzerland of the Middle East’ and the ‘beac...

The assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, on 14 February 2005, has once again transposed this enigmatic Middle Eastern state into a political quagmire. The death of the...

This book offers an innovative approach to the analysis of the current crisis in the South China Sea. Moving beyond the spirit of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the mechanisms of which are limited to physical geography, it demonstrates how epistemological insights from the field of critical realist philosophy can reveal the importance of cultural and structural conditioning processes in social interactions, processes which shape the conditions for the emergence of crisis points along a spectrum of conflict and cooperation. The potential for conflict resolution and the emergence of new regions in Pacific Asia much depends on the nature of such interactions at many levels (political-economic, semiotic and cultural) based on perceptions of what constitutes the "common" versus a Sinicised version of "Lebensraum."

Theoretically, the European Union’s (EU’s) policy approach towards the Mediterranean region has proudly hailed cultural sensitivity, but this socioeconomic dedication and foundational principle remains marginal in reality. At this juncture, I will present two case studies to demonstrate that the EU’s institutional structure imbues the governing body with a set of economic priorities, despite the use of a post-Washington Consensus (WC) rhetoric to indicate otherwise. The first case study will reveal how the EU has historically justified its policy rollout and the second case study will unravel the role of ideas in the genesis and activities of the European Development Bank (Knio 2010).

In the previous chapter, we have explored how the need to contain the deleterious effects of illegal immigration prompted several players within the European Community to review the core of its long historical relationship with the Mediterranean countries. In this vein, the post-Essen European Council meeting introduced a novel precedent to Euro-Mediterranean relations by highlighting two important developments. First, the European Union (EU) was interested, for the first time, in linking the economic, political and social spheres into one coherent whole. Second, the EU’s economic philosophy under these new arrangements significantly differed from past practices since they explicitly adopted a market-led approach of development celebrating the ability of open free trade areas to simultaneously provide sustainable peace, economic development and prosperity. These two new developments epitomize what I call the ‘Model’ which characterizes all EU policies initiated after the European-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP). In this chapter, I will first highlight the main components of the EMP agreement with a focus on policies that consolidated this ‘Barcelona Process’ vision through the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), Barcelona 2005 initiative and, most recently, the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM).

The complexity and interdependency that characterize the European-Mediterranean relationship could not have been more succinctly captured. In this statement, the European Commission has summarized a long trajectory of political, economic and societal interactions that have manifested within the diverse European-Mediterranean regional space. In the last few decades, the European Community (EC) has been continuously trying, at least rhetorically, to revive its fading post-colonial political relations with its Mediterranean counterparts. The ramification of post-1956 relations meant that the Community had to ensure more political presence in the region in order to counterbalance the hegemonic position articulated by the USA. From an economic perspective, EC’s interests in the region alternated between the need to secure vital energy supplies such as oil and natural gas and the drive to promote trade networks with large, nascent, profitable markets. In recent years, the exacerbation of social problems such as mass illegal immigration anchored the EC’s developmental role in the region and motivated a revision of the content and style of its Mediterranean policies.

The importance of the Mediterranean region to the European Union (EU) has been succinctly captured by the European Commission itself. In fact, the Mediterranean basin is important to the EU for a whole range of reasons, relating to not only geographical proximity but also mutual interests and colonial links. Thus, the Mediterranean is perceived as a politically and strategically important area in the Community’s own backyard where ‘the aim … is the creation of a sphere of influence’ (Corbet, in Pomfret, 1986, p. xii).

Attempts at classifying the political phenomenon have taken on different theoretical forms over the years. Political Science, as we know it today, was previously viewed as part of philosophical, historical and even legal deliberations — all of which have been unable to sufficiently shed light on the nuances of a given political system. Political Science has, to a large extent, been based on the study of sovereign, territorial states and the Westphalian state system. However, the hierarchical role that the political centre plays within each state and its interactions with different bodies of governance continue to undergo major transformations from genesis to institutional consolidation. This trend therefore implies that there is a need for new ways of describing how authority, rights, obligations, interactions, experiences and resources are organized, beyond mere hierarchies and markets. To this end, this chapter will analyse the historical trajectory of institutionalism, starting with Old Institutionalism (OI), and then map the evolution of the Behavioural and Rational Choice (RC) Schools to the New Institutionalism (NI) revolution. This neoinstitutionalist counter-revolution has evolved into a broad church of thinking in itself, as one can easily distinguish nowadays between seven or nine variations across all fields.

The role and nature of Hezbollah’s involvement in Lebanese politics has been an omnipresent topic in Middle Eastern studies. The recent ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings further accentuated this complex role, given the party’s support for every single popular resistance movement in the Arab world, with the exception of Syria, its major political ally in the region. This stark contradiction highlights once again the question of how far Hezbollah should be perceived as a proxy client of both Iran and Syria or whether it represents an intrinsic and genuine local resistance movement. In this article I argue that scholarly treatment of Hezbollah’s nature, which has oscillated between structure-led, agency-led and dualistic types of analyses, is problematic. The article proposes a historically situated dialectical analysis of structure–agency which can potentially explain better how a legitimate social force can still be understood within the premises of proxy client politics.

Governments began to give fuller attention to remittances in the 1990’s when their sum total topped the level of Official Development Assistance (ODA) and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) (Meissner 1993). A decade later remittances had become a new development ‘mantra’ in global policy frameworks. Following the Post G-8 summit of 2004 in Sea Island there was sudden worldwide activity to improve the infrastructure for remittances and ensure swift safe transfers. In 2007 the World Bank’s Committee on Payment and Settlement Systems (CPSS) brought out the General Principles for International Remittance Services which were later endorsed by the G-8, the G-20 and the Financial Stability Forum.

Since its inception in 1982, Hizbollah has never been an ordinary player in Lebanese local politics. Apart from orchestrating a successful guerilla warfare type of military resistance against Israel, the Party of God—as the translation from Arabic suggests—gradually shifted from being a rigid ideological party seeking to establish an Islamic republic in a sectarian war-torn Lebanon, to a fully fledged integrated political party representing the historically marginalized Shiite community in this complex Middle Eastern country. From this perspective, the party’s evolutionary nature elicited a large body of analysis that aimed to conceptualize Hiz-bollah’s multiple roles, identities and raison d’etre (Alagha 2001; Byman 2003; El-Hokayem 2007; Hamzeh 1993, 2004; Harb and Leenders 2005; Harik 2004; Goldberg 2002; Norton 1999, 2008, Saad-Ghorayeb 2002).