In the 1960s, newly independent African governments asserted sovereignty over their metal and mineral resources, in a reversal of their prior colonial exploitation by European mining corporations. In this excerpt from his new book , Ben Radley shows how transnational corporations have once again become the dominant force assuming ownership and management of industrial mining projects. Radley argues this latest reversal has taken place through a three-stage process grounded in a misguided reading of African economic stagnation from the mid-1970s onwards. Recent mining code revisions in several countries have been heralded by some as marking a new era of resource nationalism. Yet the new codes remain a far cry from the earlier period of resource sovereignty. The first three chapters of the book can be downloaded for free .
Migration Governance: Moving Away from 鈥淯ncle Always Knows鈥�
Almost everyone on social media has that one Instagram friend who posts bronzed pictures in Santorini, or screenshots of champagne flutes atop the Burj Khalifa, the Dubai skyline looming in the background. To those internationals for whom travelling on holiday was an annual rite of passage, the pandemic鈥檚 travel restrictions resulted in adventures that were inopportunely thwarted. Conversely, to economic migrants everywhere, the implications of banned travel, whether by air, train, or foot, equated directly with the fundamental ability to survive. The scrambles of governments worldwide to gauge appropriate responses to COVID-19 was understandable, inasmuch the magnitude of the event was entirely unprecedented, and the need to contain its spread dire. Yet, one of the largest follies of the pandemic remains undebated: instinctive government responses moved to ban travel without duly considering the global interconnectedness of labour markets in the modern age. Belonging to one state but working in another meant that with travel bans, economic migrants were either shackled to their workplaces, away from their families; or held back from gainful employment whilst trapped at home. In most contexts, migrants are to countries like an unknown opening band at a music concert: the audience does not fundamentally care, and everybody is simply waiting for the headline act. In their origin states, migrant workers often escape the focus of governments who are more concerned with those who remain behind. In the meanwhile, the countries to which they migrate often look at them as charity, despite these workers鈥� crucial role in economic development. Since they belong to places differently, being of and from multiple geographies at once, migrant workers have shifted typical state-worker relationships to a new realm. What, therefore, does good governance look like for an individual- a migrant– who is from several places at once?
Multiple answers to this question can be gleaned from . As the title suggests, the volume focuses on the South Asia-Gulf migration nexus. There are various considerations that render this book highly topical. First, the movement of people around the world, particularly for employment, has outmoded traditional conceptions of citizenship and a worker鈥檚 relationship with a state. This necessitates the re-engineering of these traditional conceptions of citizenship in ways that account for a dynamic and modern global workforce which is constantly on the move. Second, a fitting place to start thinking about the redefinition of worker-state relations is from the lens of workers emigrating from South Asia into the Arab Gulf. These geographies are of particular significance given the staggering volume of South Asian emigrants in the Arab Gulf, with over 80 percent of the region鈥檚 labour force being comprised of migrants, as Blarel and Ennis describe in their introduction. Governing this sizeable migrant workforce is what is collectively termed Kafala, a complex set of legal and policy frameworks centred around an employer-oriented visa sponsorship system. For years now, the Kafala system has come under severe criticism from human rights groups for rendering low-wage migrant workers in various conditions of modern day slavery, most recently with the . Further compounding the importance of the South Asia-Gulf nexus is the phenomenon of South-South migration, where the Gulf鈥檚 ambitious development projects tend to drive largescale demands for a workforce that can be tailored to expand and contract as per their whimsy (Ennis and Blarel; Hamadah; Walton-Roberts et al). Above all, this volume is timely given the now universal tussle between the need for good governance and sustainable worker livelihoods on the one hand, versus competing pressures for labour market flexibility on the other (Devkota; Babar; Hamadah).
The mortgaging of land, a risky practice usually treated as just an economic and legal contract, hasneeded a broader set of perspectives for a fuller, more humanist understanding. Most of the existing scholarly literature on land and mortgages has been written by economists and legal specialists, reflecting the perspectives of their disciplinary traditions. Lacking are assessments from a wider range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, drawing upon historical experiences, cultural meanings, and locally informed perspectives.
Our recent edited volume, drawing on historical and observational research in different parts of the world, is meant to help fill that gap. It examines mortgaging as a social and cultural phenomenon to show its origins, variation, and effects on human lives and communities. Here anthropologists, historians, and economists explore archival, printed, and ethnographic evidence about mortgage. The book shows how mortgages affect people on the ground, where local forms of mutuality mix with larger bureaucracies. Tracing origins of land titling, pledging, and the mortgage in over millennia and incorporating findings from authors鈥� original field research, the book explores effects of government, bank, and aid agency attempts and impositions meant to encourage mortgage lending and borrowing. It shows how these mix in practice, in different languages, currencies, and contexts, with locally rooted understandings, and how all parties have sought, and too often failed, to make adjustments. The outcomes of mortgage in Africa, Europe, Asia, and America challenge economic development orthodoxies, calling for a human-centered exploration of this age-old institution. It must take account, we insist, of emotions, vulnerabilities, and histories of unexpected outcomes, as shown in different societies, cultures, and environmental and political conditions.
Max Ajl鈥檚聽A 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Green New Deal聽intervenes in current debates regarding green planning, green future, green stimuli, and eco-socialism. It surveys a wide range of existing literature on the ecological and social crisis, ranging from ruling-class 鈥済reat transitions,鈥� to eco-modernist聽elixirs聽of聽the聽right and聽the聽left which bank on technological solutions to today鈥檚 social and ecological problems. It then considers and聽critiques an array of liberal, left-liberal, and social democratic proposals, some of them going under the eco-socialist moniker, and shows how they rest on continued exploitation and primitive accumulation of the periphery.听
A 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Green New Deal contributions lie in, first, using frameworks of dependency theory, accumulation on a world scale, and ecologically uneven exchange to illuminate the costs and consequences of distinct approaches to the climate crisis, left and right. Second, the book鈥檚 emphasis on agriculture, land use, and agro-ecology makes it unique amongst books on the Green New Deal and parallel debates. Its emphasis on decolonization, national sovereignty, anti-imperialism, and climate debt repayments from the North to the South is a third contribution. A fourth is how it deals with technology.
This review forum assesses the contribution of聽A 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Green New Deal.听Sakshi 蝉颈迟耻补迟别蝉听APGND聽in terms of a counter-epistemology to Eurocentric and empire-blind resolutions, if not really solutions, to the social and ecological crises to which mainstream Green New Deals are addressed.听Sheetal Chhabria 补蝉蝉别蝉蝉别蝉听APGND鈥檚 contribution to thinking on a planetary scale about appropriate planning for a just transition, while criticizing the book鈥檚 uncritical embrace of certain Indian nationalist tropes. G眉ney I艧谋kara raises questions regarding political agency and organization, the role of national-level planning in any form of national-level green transition, and how to approach anti-imperialism on a world scale.听聽
Max Ajl鈥檚 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Green New Deal is a brutal reminder for the American left that even the most celebrated and progressive developments in American politics are still simply American politics, in other words they are a politics for America, and America first. Ajl situates both the longer history of environmental destruction and the response to it within a planetary frame without losing sight of geographical unevenness. The book is divided into two parts. The first part is where Ajl systematically debunks the American-centrism of the Cortez/Markey Green New Deal (GND). The second part is an imagination-widening exposition of an alternative 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Green New Deal that centers the livelihood of the majority of the world鈥檚 people by putting forth an anti-imperial and anti-capitalist framework for a just transition.
Following the resolution introduced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey, the term Green New Deal (GND) has become the gravitational center of climate action debates. On the one hand, conservatives, as well as some leftist circles, designate the AOC-Markey resolution as 鈥渟ocialist鈥�. On the other hand, the term GND was first made public by Thomas Friedman in his NY Times column as a capitalistic and patriotic project which serves as 鈥渢he basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century鈥� (p.4). It comes as no surprise that so much political confusion accrues around the concept of a GND.
Max Ajl鈥檚 A 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Green New Deal is the best leftist response I have read to the discussions whirling around this notion. It is clear-minded and well written. Politically, it constructs a consistent, uncompromising, anti-imperialist vision, well aware of the fact that tamed horizons are easily coopted and rearticulated by the ruling classes thanks to the elasticity of capital accumulation. Theoretically, its foundations are found in the 鈥渋nherently polarizing鈥� frameworks of dependency theory, world-system analysis, and (environmentally) unequal exchange (p.14).
Ajl evaluates GND proposals not only on the basis of targeted changes in physical production, but also in terms of their systemic implications. Some GNDs aim to preserve or strengthen capitalism, while others are designed to attack or abolish it (p.3). Correspondingly, the book is divided into two parts. The first one is concerned with what Ajl calls Capitalist Green Transitions (p.16) or 鈥渞uling class agendas鈥� (p.20), while the second part sketches his vision of a 笔别辞辫濒别鈥檚 Green New Deal.
In his speech before the聽聽makes the following astute observation regarding the African petite bourgeoisie and its public intellectuals:聽聽
“Our professors, engineers and economists are content simply to add a little colouring, because they have brought from the European universities of which they are the products only their diplomas and the surface smoothness of adjectives and superlatives. It is urgently necessary that our qualified personnel and those who work with ideas learn that there is no innocent writing. In these tempestuous times, we cannot leave it to our enemies of the past and of the present to think and to imagine and to create. We also must do so.”
In the same speech, Sankara continues to caution against planning for the uplifting of a nation if such plans are ignorant of, or are wilfully erasing, the disinherited masses and the wretchedness inherited by them. Sankara’s postulation, emerging from the socio-political contexts of the African continent, provides a sound theoretical foundation for knowledge production in the contemporary worlds we inhabit. The popular narratives around climate change have strived to communicate the gravity of planetary collapse and measures required to avert ecological and environmental crises worldwide. Nevertheless, the urgency of envisioning a new world shows little self-reflection as to its epistemic positions and privileges. Climate change discourses in the Global North, academic or otherwise, have largely been constrained by the desire to brave the planetary crises with limited disruption to existing race and class privileges. In terms of how the problems of climate change are identified and defined and the range of solutions to address them, the western epistemologies remain rudimentary.
Consequently, the range of green new deals or the visions for just-transition and sustainable utopias remain agnostic to the everyday realities and struggles of the Global South against imperialism and colonialism. It is unclear if Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour are better placed to partake in these futures than they are now. Max Ajl’s A People’s Green New Deal provides a refreshing and rich scholarly alternative to how an ideal green new deal should be imagined.
by Alex M. Thomas, Cambridge University Press, 2021.
This recently published introductory Macroeconomics textbook written by Alex M. Thomas provides a refreshingly novel approach to teaching Macroeconomics to undergraduate students. As the author points out in the Preface, this textbook offers a 鈥�problem-setting approach rather than a problem-solving one, as is the case with most economics textbooks鈥� (Page xvi, emphasis mine). The textbook has nine chapters, and the chapters have enough material to whet the appetite of a broad audience 鈥� Chapters 1,2,6 and 9 deal with the history and philosophy of Macroeconomics, Chapters 3-5 deal with the core economic theory of money and interest rates, output and employment levels and economic growth and Chapters 7 and 8 talk about the macroeconomic policy of achieving full employment and tackling inflation. In this review, I would focus on four issues 鈥� the commitment of the book towards enhancing pluralism in Macroeconomics, the importance given to studying macroeconomic theory, the idea of relating macroeconomic concepts to the context which is being studied and an explicit concern to make Macroeconomics accessible to an undergraduate audience residing in underdeveloped parts of the world.
麻豆直播 