Poliko – Details, episodes & analysis

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!

Aporde's website:
http://www.aporde.co.za/

Nicolas' institutional website: https://www.supsi.ch/home_en/strumenti/rubrica/dettaglio.29083.backLink.79718207-24d5-44ab-8cec-be3898389703.html

Readings on Industrial Restructuring and Developmental Policy in South Africa:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1m5aDsqbo-veqW7FEMDNfolzVEj7AyA6V?usp=sharing

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.

You can follow Ayşe on Twitter @AyseZarakol

Ayşe's Academia webpage: https://cambridge.academia.edu/AyseZarakol

The link to the article we discuss in the episode:
https://tinyurl.com/2p8zubvs

The link to Ayşe's upcoming book on Eastern World Orders:  https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/before-the-west/78E4B5CE511AA928B2C650AF1CDFE3CA

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!

You can follow Gábor's work at: www.gaborscheiring.com and @gscheiring on Twitter

You can follow Kristóf's work at: https://eth-mpg.academia.edu/KristofSzombati?fbclid=IwAR2dr07TBsar124dpiOnYtudKV5pSJyzRoaWxOKE3t4boTdXHR6fYR6c1og

Check out their respective books:

https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030487515

https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/SzombatiRevolt

... And recent publications:

Scheiring, G., and  Szombati, K. (2020) 'From Neoliberal Disembedding to Authoritarian Re-embedding: The Making of Illiberal Hegemony in Hungary.'  International Sociology 35 (6):721-738. Available at: https://tinyurl.com/fbnu2ary

Scheiring, G. (2020) ‘Left Behind in the Hungarian Rustbelt: The Cultural Political Economy of Working-Class Neo-Nationalism’, Sociology, 54, 6, pp. 1159–1177. Available at: https://tinyurl.com/3ssbzchc

Scheiring, G. (2019) ‘Dependent Development and Authoritarian State Capitalism: Democratic Backsliding and the Rise of the Accumulative State in Hungary’, Geoforum, Published online: 5 September 2019. Available at: https://tinyurl.com/2yctuuep

Feischmidt, Margit, and Kristóf Szombati. 2016. "Understanding the rise of the far right from a local perspective: Structural and cultural conditions of ethno-traditionalist inclusion and racial exclusion in rural Hungary."  Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 24 (3):1-19. Available at: https://tinyurl.com/y3mvufsk

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

Further Readings:

Mudge, S. L. (2018) Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press).

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.

To access the two papers we discuss:

http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/98024/

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0308518X211006718

You can follow Jennifer's work at:

https://twitter.com/BairJenn

https://sociology.as.virginia.edu/people/profile/jlb5md

To follow Benjamin's work:

https://sussex.academia.edu/BenSelwyn

To read more on the topic:

https://monthlyreview.org/2021/11/01/world-development-under-monopoly-capitalism/

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/dech.12132 

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.

Check out Susanne's book "Urban Displacements. Governing Surplus and Survival in Global Capitalism"

Available at: https://www.routledge.com/Urban-Displacements-Governing-Surplus-and-Survival-in-Global-Capitalism/Soederberg/p/book/9780367236199

You can follow Susanne on Twitter @soederberg1

Susanne's departmental webpage:  https://www.queensu.ca/devs/susanne-soederberg

Susanne's publications on Researchgate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Susanne-Soederberg/research

For a sample of Susanne's previous work

Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mono/10.4324/9781315761954/debtfare-states-poverty-industry-susanne-soederberg

Evictions: A Global Capitalist Phenomenon
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/dech.12383

Other readings recommended by Susanne

The Financialization of Housing by Manuel Aalbers
https://www.routledge.com/The-Financialization-of-Housing-A-political-economy-approach/Aalbers/p/book/9781138092907

In Defence of Housing by David Madden and Peter Marcuse
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2111-in-defense-of-housing

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.

Check out Tom's book here:

http://cambridge.org/9781108839150

You may use the following discount code if you want to purchase it: MAROIS21


You can follow Thomas online here:

Twitter @Thomas_Marois

https://chicons.academia.edu/ThomasMarois

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Thomas-Marois 

https://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff52287.php 

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/people/thomas-marois 

Check out Tom's recent research:

Marois, T. (2021) A Dynamic Theory of Public Banks (and Why it Matters). Review of Political Economy. Published online.

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 

Progressive Initiatives on Public Banks:

https://publicbankscovid19.org/ 

https://www.publicbankinginstitute.org/ 

https://www.eurodad.org/ 

https://www.tni.org/en/publicfinance

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.

You can follow Pritish at:

@pritishbehuria on Twitter

https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/pritish.behuria.html

https://manchester.academia.edu/PritishBehuria


Check out  Recent Work by Pritish:

Behuria P (2021) The curious case of domestic capitalists in Africa: towards a political economy of diversified business groups. Journal of Contemporary African Studies. DOI: 10.1080/02589001.2021.1899144. 1-17. Based on: https://www.effective-states.org/wp-content/uploads/working_papers/final-pdfs/esid_wp_115_behuria.pdf

Behuria P (2019) Twenty-first Century Industrial Policy in a Small Developing Country: The Challenges of Reviving Manufacturing in Rwanda. Development and Change 50(4): 1033-1062. Available at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/dech.12498

Behuria P (2018) Learning from Role Models in Rwanda: Incoherent Emulation in the Construction of a Neoliberal Developmental State. New Political Economy 23(4): 422-440. Available at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2017.1371123

References recommended by Pritish:

Kimonyo J-P (2019) Transforming Rwanda. Challenges on the Road to Reconstruction. Lynne Rienner Publishers.  Available at: https://www.rienner.com/title/Transforming_Rwanda_Challenges_on_the_Road_to_Reconstruction

Oqubay A (2015) Made in Africa: Industrial Policy in Ethiopia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at: https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198739890.001.0001/acprof-9780198739890

Cramer C, Sender J and Oqubay A (2020) African Economic Development. Evidence, Theory, Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Open Access Available at: https://fdslive.oup.com/www.oup.com/academic/pdf/openaccess/9780198832331.pdf

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.

You can follow Jathan on Twitter at: @jathansadowski

Check out Jathan's personal website: http://www.jathansadowski.com/

Jathan's recent book on Digital Capitalism with MIT Press:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/too-smart

Jathan's recent academic papers on Digital Capitalism:

When Data is Capital
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053951718820549

The Internet of Landlords
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/anti.12595

Other references recommended by Jathan:

Why the Luddites were right
https://www.versobooks.com/books/3184-breaking-things-at-work

Democratic Data
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3727562

Statecraft in the Digital Age
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3k16c24g

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.

The Transperiphery Movement Exhibition:

https://offbiennale.hu/en/2021/projects/transzperiferia-mozgalom?fbclid=IwAR2UgccwXbjkYhLNjuF5NkXKO34WjNyAM0slS42L8FyVcWWtqjBXMo0O2FI

https://transperiphery.com/

https://www.facebook.com/transperiphery

Instagram: transperiphery

twitter: @transperiphery

The Decolonizing Eastern Europe Facebook Group:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/257972308642861

https://twitter.com/DecolonizingE

Zoltán's Research:

http://mezosfera.org/hungarian-experts-in-nkrumahs-ghana/?fbclid=IwAR00EnV45B6JI2TXnsCj4YCUC1adZtgHirT0h3_wbB_EFQQs-DzIvhbsUGw

https://kritikaifoldrajz.hu/2020/04/02/postcolonial-hungary-eastern-european-semiperipheral-positioning-in-global-colonialism/?fbclid=IwAR2ArmVUEAgbcSB-pDf4ohp3cUjm6qEbEUAjZaduhI5i0_G5e8jpVVClsNM

https://uni-leipzig1.academia.edu/Zolt%C3%A1nGinelli

Other References:

https://iupress.org/9780253046512/alternative-globalizations/?fbclid=IwAR1mgnD_T1NIj2PDqPMBlhlHHTj2wLOLRwurPGQPpTPzZ4zb4BPXzfo9JJg

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.

You can follow Niva on Twitter at: @nivayautszyan


You can check some of Niva's research output below :

https://www.fpri.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/cap-1-yau.pdf

http://www.osce-academy.net/upload/file/Niva_brief.pdf

https://thediplomat.com/2020/12/chinas-policy-banks-are-lending-differently-not-less/


Other resources recommended by Niva:

Research by Raffaello Pantucci available at: https://rusi.org/people/pantucci

Research by  Dirk van der Kley on Twitter at @dvanderkley

He B (2019) The Domestic Politics of the Belt and Road Initiative and its Implications. Journal of Contemporary China. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2018.1511391.(116): 180-195.