Toward a Feminist Political Economy of Wartime Sexual Violence

This article examines ways in which nationalism, as a concept, is gendered and the impact that that perspective had on women in the Balkans during the wars in the 1990s. The impact on women was especially severe, given the number who were raped or displaced by the wars. In this article, the authors address the ways in which (male) nationalist leaders used citizenship and the imagery of women to alter the perception that the state and society had toward women in general, and to those in ethnically

mixed marriages in particular. Importantly, paying attention to the lives of women in ethnically mixed marriages can shed light on the dynamics of civil wars, on their consequences and on the very politics of state-defined citizenship.     

Organizational Political Economy and Environmental Pollution

Environmental scholars have made important progress explaining the social forces associated with pollution. Although important exceptions exist, insufficient attention has been given to organizations, which is where most environmental pollution is produced. Even less attentions has been given to parent companies, which have ultimate decision‐making authority over their polluting facilities. To file this gap in the literature, this paper develops an organizational political economy perspective to advance our understanding of how organizational and political‐legal arrangements affect parent companies' capacity to externalize their pollution costs to society. Organizational political economy maintains that corporations' organizational complexity, financial characteristics, management operating systems, political embeddedness in subnational states, and the degree of compliance with national and subnational environmental policies affect their capacity to externalize pollution costs. This perspective also shows how the exercise of organizational power to externalize pollution costs subsidizes the managerial and investor classes by the middle and working classes, whose taxes pay for a large share of environmental clean‐up costs, thereby contributing to economic inequality that goes beyond standard inequality measurements.     

The Political Economy of Social Science Funding

This article examines recent economic and political trends constraining the production of social science knowledge. Particular attention is given to the Reagan Administration's attempt to contract public sector programs and curtail financial support for social science research. Trends in the private economy, especially within the publishing industry, that affect the production of social science knowledge are also discussed. Over the past few years, the market for social science knowledge has seriously eroded. The erosion of this market is examined within the larger framework of a shift in public policy from legitimation to capital accumulation, a shift that has accompanied right-wing ascendancy in American politics. This shift has created political and economic incentives encouraging the social science community to align more closely with conservatives.     

Financialisation and the Malaysian Political Economy

This paper argues that taking a short-term look at Malaysia's response to the financial crisis of 1997–1998 does not adequately assess the socio-economic transformation that was propagated by the crisis. Most importantly, it falls short of accounting for the shift from a bank-based to a capital market-based financial system that occurred in post-crisis Malaysia and the ensuing increasing financialisation of Malaysian capitalism. This shift has significantly affected both corporate and individual financial cultures and led to the emergence of a new politics of debt. It coincides with rising levels of household indebtedness. Moreover, it has set in motion a metamorphosis of the institutions set up to govern Malaysian capitalism.

Este artículo afirma que al observar a corto plazo la respuesta de Malasia a la crisis financiera de 1997–1998, no se logra evaluar la transformación socioeconómica que generó la crisis. Aún más importante, no logra explicar el cambio de un sistema financiero con base en la banca a un sistema con base de mercado de capitales, cambio que se dio durante la post crisis en Malasia, generando un incremento de la financiación del capitalismo. Este cambio afectó significativamente tanto a la cultura financiera individual, como corporativa y condujo al surgimiento de nuevas políticas de endeudamiento. Coincidió con el incremento del nivel de endeudamiento de los hogares. Es más, condujo a la metamorfosis de las instituciones establecidas para regir el capitalismo de Malasia.

     

The Political Economy of FEMA Disaster Payments

We find that presidential and congressional influences affect the rate of disaster declaration and the allocation of FEMA disaster expenditures across states. States politically important to the president have a higher rate of disaster declaration by the president, and disaster expenditures are higher in states having congressional representation on FEMA oversight committees. Election year impacts are also found. Our models predict that nearly half of all disaster relief is motivated politically rather than by need. The findings reject a purely altruistic model of FEMA assistance and question the relative effectiveness of government versus private disaster relief.     

Mexico's Political Future(s) in a Globalizing World Economy*

Dans cette étude, nous cherchons à démontrer que le devenir économique et politique du Mexique est étroitement liéà l'évolution du capitalisme mondial. Nous utilisons le concept de «réseaux ascen-dants>> pour analyser les processus qui se développent à l'échelle mondiale et nationale ainsi que leurs interactions. Notre objectif est précisément de théoriser sur ces interactions à l'échelle de l'État-nation et de décrire, en présentant plusieurs scénarios, les diverses façons dont le Mexique pourrait évoluer sur les plans économique et politique. Le Mexique s'intégrant de plus en plus au marché nord-américain, il est capital d'étudier la façon dont cette intégration va influer sur les processus à venir et sur les forces sociales susceptibles de lui faire prendre une direction plus souhaitable.
This paper proposes that the patterns of economic and political outcomes in Mexico are intimately related to global processes taking place in world capitalism. It develops a "bottom-up linkages" approach that takes into account both global and country-level processes and their interrelationships. The author's specific purpose is to theorize about the interaction of national and global processes on the political outcomes at the level of the nation-state, and to generate some future scenarios representing different combinations of more or less feasible political and economic outcomes in Mexico's future. Because Mexico is becoming increasingly integrated economically into North America, it is critical to specify the ways in which such integration affects such future processes, and to identify the social forces that might steer developments in more desirable directions.     

The Political Economy of Special Educational Needs in Britain

This article raises questions as to how far young people regarded as having special educational needs or disabilities are prepared for participation in the economy. It focuses on those aspects of the further education curriculum that emphasises skills, and the development of National Vocational Qualifications which emphasise competences. Those with special educational needs or disabilities are part of a larger group of young people to be 'managed' as a workforce if there is work, and all are urged that the way to find employment is by constant investment in the self by the acquisition of skills and competences. The article contends that those labelled as special will find more difficulty in collecting meaningful skills and competences, and those in charge of new accreditation systems have made it clear that few concessions will be offered to this group.     

Cruel Pessimism and Waiting for Belonging: Towards a Global Political Economy of Affect

Recent theorizations of affect have focused largely on Western historical, political and aesthetic contexts to distinguish between affect and emotion. Notably, these interventions offer new imaginaries to reinvigorate analysis of politics in the face of shrinking possibilities. However, much of this literature views affect as autonomous from emotion, while overlooking the political history of development and the differentiated relation to affect under colonial capitalism in other historical contexts. This paper studies subaltern engagement in activist performance in India to address these issues. It thinks through Lauren Berlant's account of the aesthetic genre and affective structure of cruel optimism, and her focus on historical contexts where people have recently lost the vision of a good life. By contrast, focusing on the historical present of those born into a pervasive and intractable sense of marginality and insecurity, I ask: what is the subject's relation to affect and activism in contexts where the loss of vision of a good life is not new under neoliberalism, but rather, reworks long-standing violence and inclusion/exclusion of colonial capitalism and nation-state histories. I argue that it is useful to understand Berlant's ‘materialist context for affect theory’ in light of uneven global histories of colonialism, development and neoliberalism. The affective experience of time is different across different spaces. As such, this paper contributes a global materialist context for affect theory, by focusing on activist theatre by a tribe called Chhara, designated ‘born criminals’ by British colonial law – a status legally denotified in 1952, but that is practically still effective in postcolonial India. Competing affective structures – sentimental optimism, cruel pessimism, betrayal and ordinary regard – shape and are shaped by Chhara negotiations with branded criminality. Ultimately, for the postcolonial subject, surviving in the neoliberal present involves vacillating among competing affective structures, only some of which generate sustained political critique.     

利比亚变局对中国海外经济利益的影响

利比亚战争使该国政权易手,国计民生皆受重创。作为利比亚重要的贸易伙伴,中国对其有能源需求和贸易往来,更有大规模的承包工程合作。利比亚变局必然对中国经济利益产生影响,给未来的中利经贸合作带来新的机遇与挑战。中国应积极应对,趋利避害,在全世界面前展现大国风范。     

Global Political Economy: Power, Labour, Politics

This discussion examines the issue of globalisation in terms of the interaction of economy, politics and power. It begins by considering the claims implied by the language of globalisation. How extensive and inclusive is the global economy? The second section goes on to outline the broad geography of globalisation in terms of a balance of power that is both highly uneven but also subject to marked changes. While the global economy as this developed since the 1970s may have reproduced established patterns of colonial and post‐war economic power, in the current century, power is shifting away from these nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century models to a new balance of regional power in which large Asian economies may dominate. Alongside these patterns of regional and national power, third, the discussion considers the uneven geography of capital and labour captured in models of an international division of labour that is organised by flows of capital investment but also of mobile workers. The final section offers an overview of the architecture of global politics, from the level of international institutions and nation‐states, to non‐governmental bodies that operate across borders to support or resist the workings of a global economy.     

A Note on Animal and Political Economy in Quesnay

In this article, I argue that François Quesnay’s physiocratic writings on economics entail the working through not only of formal principles of circulatory flow developed in his earlier physiological writings on “animal economy” but also the construction of a model of political economy that depends directly on an animal economy understood as the efficient administration of animal labor. Although the contradictions of this model already foreshadow those of today’s dominant model of economic administration, I argue that Quesnay’s economic writings nonetheless contain an invitation for us to rethink the connection between the economic and the ecological domains.