States and Citizens: Accommodation, Facilitation and Resistance to Globalization: Volume 34

We examine the national regulatory framework in Turkey and its interactions with actors at various levels that set the stage for the shift from a Fordist economy to a post-Fordist one. Industrial maize production expanded in the 2000s in the face of a decline in agricultural employment and state-supported conventional crop production. We use the corporate maize industry as a case to demonstrate the change in regulation and its impacts.

Utilizing a strategic-relational approach, we analyze descriptive statistics on agricultural markets, news, sector reports, and archives of national regulation related to agricultural production and the agri-food industry to identify key actors shaping the transformation of maize production.

Actors influencing the national regulatory framework come from international and national regulatory institutions, and transnational and national agri-food corporations. Local maize farmers have actively participated in the transformation, thereby offering consent to the process. The Turkish state manages maize production through its national regulatory regime, but the agri-food industry drives the trajectory.

Adopting a strategic-relational approach contributes to our understanding of the dynamics at work in economic restructuring by shedding light on the interactions between political authorities and economic actors. Following a post-Fordist mode of regulation, the Turkish government uses particular political devices in a strategically selective manner, not overtly to enhance the short-term interests of the agri-food industry, but according to the long-term goal of promoting adaptation of agricultural commodity producers to the post-Fordist capitalist accumulation regime.

State institutions utilize the tools of political intervention in markets to ensure the long-term sociopolitical consolidation and legitimation of the post-Fordist accumulation regime.

Understanding of the factors that contribute to policies diverging from neoliberal norms and accounting for situations when social movement activists prevail over the interests of more powerful opponents requires an analytical framework specifying the dimensions of interest. The case of Brazil’s pharmaceutical policies, especially those dealing with HIV/AIDS, is considered.

To understand the space and limits for progressive agency amidst contemporary globalization, previous articulations of dependent development and global capitalism require conceptual space with insights from social movement theory and normative framing.

Control over technology, political alliances, and normative appeals have changed since the concept of dependent development to today’s contemporary neoliberal globalization for understanding cases of progressive agency. Technology is based more on intangible knowledge, activism across the state-society boundary is more likely, and human rights has become the dominant idiom for naming and shaming more powerful opponents.

The analytic framework developed informs our understanding of pharmaceutical autonomy – the ability of a country to provide for the prescription drug needs of its population – in the case of Brazil. Further research of other situations requires the application of the framework to determine its merits.

A focus on technology, alliances, and norms provides a useful starting point for exploring situations of development autonomy that prevails over the interests of corporate power.

Placing expansion of oil palm plantations in Indonesia in the context of the global land grab, this paper analyzes the contemporary extent and early historical periods of plantation expansion via the theory of accumulation by dispossession (ABD).

After reviewing the empirical debate about the land grab, this paper examines the importance of ABD to understand the land grabs in general and for oil palm plantations in Indonesia in particular. Rather than a new phenomenon of the last four decades of neoliberalism, ABD has a history of several centuries.

Accumulation by dispossession (ABD) is a powerful and appropriate lens by which to understand the land conversion and social displacement occurring in Indonesia. Building on historical understanding of ABD, this paper applies the theory to the Indonesian oil palm case, making the case that the multiple and uncertain sequences of engagement with oil palm expansion are reflective of a broader struggle against dispossession.

ABD is not just a global financial process of corporate-led neoliberalization but also shaped importantly by domestic state and local elites. These elites have shaped ABD differently in colonial, authoritarian, and neoliberal periods.

This paper seeks to situate the green economy (GE) within the broader history of sustainable development (SD), bringing related lessons and insights into its fold.

We critically examine the history of SD, focusing on the relationship between SD outcomes and a variety of theoretical and political influences, such as demodernization theories, ecological modernization, neoliberalism, and state theory. We situate the GE within this broader history and identify emergent pathways to successful GE development.

We suggest that a strong GE discourse, one that prioritizes both people and the environment, provides an opportunity to revitalize the state, combat neoliberal primacy, and drive progressive economic and environmental policy.

A critical examination of SD history can provide important lessons for GE actors seeking progressive social and environmental change.

As social and environmental crises deepen, the need for developing and propagating discourses that engender economic reform and ecological protection becomes ever more evident.

The Latin American region experienced an electoral shift to the political left during the 2000s but this leftist shift did not radically alter the political economy of the region. Following Jessop’s (2008) strategic-relational approach to theorizing about the state, this paper focuses on the perspective that the structure of the state is both an outcome of prior social struggles and a structuring mechanism for the social actors that attempt to enact political and economic reforms.

After demonstrating what this has historically meant for the types of state that have existed in Latin America during the past century by reviewing some of the literature on the corporatist and bureaucratic-authoritarian states and clientelism, this paper argues that the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s constituted a new type of state – the Latin American neoliberal state. This analysis is then focused on the literature that seeks to describe the new lefts in the region, while continuing to focus on the role of the neoliberal state in structuring these new lefts’ terrain of struggle.

Understanding the new lefts in Latin America and the types of reforms that they are capable of making requires that we better understand this new type of state. Due to the structural limitations imposed by the neoliberal state, the lefts are not able to radically alter the region’s political economy.

This paper explores how racial neoliberalism is the latest evolution of race and global capitalism and is analyzed in the example of global tourism in Costa Rica. Racial neoliberalism represents two important features: colorblind ideology and new racial practices.

Two beach tourism localities in Costa Rica are investigated to identify the racial neoliberal practices that racialize tourism spaces and bodies and the ideological discourses deployed to justify racial hierarchical placement that perpetuates new forms of global and national inequality.

Three neoliberal racial practices in tourism globalization were found. First, “neoliberal networks” supported white transnational actors’ linkage to national and global tourism providers. Second, “neoliberal conservation” in beach land protection policies secured private tourism business development and impacted current and future racial community displacement. Third, “neoliberal activism” exposed how community fights to change local tourism development was demarcated along racial lines.

An inquiry into the mechanisms and logics of how racism contemporarily operates in the global economy exposes the importance of acknowledging that race has an impact on different actor’s global economic participation by organizing the distribution of material economic rewards unevenly.

As scholarship exposes how gender, ethnicity, and class are constituted through global economic arrangements it is imperative that research uncovers how race is a salient category also shaping current global inequality but experienced differently in diverse geographies and histories.

To assess how an indigenous community in Guatemala, displaced by a mining project, has collaborated with international human rights advocacy organizations to address chronic insecurity and vulnerability resulting from the violence of their displacement.

The research for this case study was gathered using unstructured interviews with Lote Ocho community members and human rights advocates as well as textual analysis of social media documents, press releases, and reports. Participant observation was conducted during a community forum. Human rights theory, post-conflict theory, disaster theory, and narrative economy frameworks informed the research.

As international human rights organizations collaborate with Lote Ocho to address the community’s displacement, intensive focus on a lawsuit between the community and a Canadian mining corporation HudBay Minerals, Inc., contributes to homogenization of the community, reinforcement of destructive power relationships, and lack of focus on long-term security.

Analysis of the potential harms of singular focus on legal action in the examined collaborations identifies areas for improvement for future collaborations in both Lote Ocho and other displaced communities.

Caal v. HudBay is the first case of its kind. Thus, the analysis presented here provides critical insight for international and community actors regarding the successes and shortcomings of collaboration in cases of development-forced displacement, identifying areas for improvement for future collaborations with displaced communities.

This chapter provides theoretical conceptualizations to (1) better understand the phenomenon of rural gentrification and (2) the links between rural gentrification and regional tourism development, using a case study in south central Appalachia.

This ethnographic study relies on the results of a series of interviews and instances of participant observation.

Affluent newcomers often implement development projects through the injection of private capital into public-seeming projects like community-based organizations (CBOs). These projects offer partial solutions to the problem of failing local economies. However, they also have the potential to reinforce class structures and push narrowly perceived development processes.

A critical evaluation of rural gentrification may be useful to CBOs and local governments leading development projects in rural areas.

The phenomenon of rural gentrification warrants critical examination of current development agendas being proposed or implemented.

This paper compares the agrarian development of two indigenous communities in the highlands of Ecuador who specialize in nontraditional agricultural exports (NTAE). It brings together the peasant theory with literature on the environmental impact of globalization.

Through a comparative ethnography, based on six months of participant observation and interviewers, I illustrate the differences in production processes and explain the divergent trajectories of agrarian modernization.

I found that NTAE impacted the two communities differently: one became more ecologically sustainable and the other became more environmentally exploitative. However, neither case fits squarely within the framework of modern/traditional or peasant/capitalist. Instead of traditional environmentalism and individualistic exploitation, we see the reverse: individualistic environmentalism and traditional exploitation. That is, ecological methods are paired with individualistic competition, and environmental exploitation takes place within a system of communal solidarity.

With buyer-driven organic certification standards, global integration does not always lead to ecological degradation. For quinoa growers, traditional production practices persist not as resistance to global capitalism but as a strategy to access high-value export markets. Broccoli farmers, although exploitative of local natural resources and their own health, do so within communal institutions that buffer against individualistic risk-taking.

This comparative case presents an alternative depiction of modernization as complex and nonlinear.

A review of recent notable research on socioeconomic inequality, including Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), Rebecca Blank’s Changing Inequality (2011), Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (2013), and Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (2010).

I critically compare the contributions of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality, Rebecca Blank’s Changing Inequality, and Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level. The comparison is focused largely on discerning analytical trends in studies of inequality and differential relationships with capitalism.

Popular scholarship on inequality is surprisingly diverse with varying analytical approaches and conclusions represented. Each of the works was consistent with regard to important role of the state as a mitigating institution.

The intent of these works was to engage the general public on the subject of economic inequality. Thus, it is important to know what information is being disseminated in a general sense and how this “public political economy” might influence popular views on inequality.

Comparative reviews of scholarship intended for general popular consumption are rare. Postrecession economic realities have driven inequality to the fore in many advanced capitalist societies making such a review timely as well.