Neoliberal ideologies

This paper examines capitalist imperialism both in contemporary and in historical perspective.  To do so, it draws on the classic 1953 work of the historians of British imperialism John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson and combines it with the Marxist understandings of contemporary capitalism offered by, for example, Alex Callinicos, Terry Eagleton, and David Harvey.  By doing so, continuities in the operation of capitalist imperialism, be it operated by Britain or the United States, are drawn out.  Examined via Gallagher and Robinson, such continuities include the willingness of states to engage in imperial action (regardless of public statements of anti-imperial sentiment); the use of formal and informal control to secure the frontiers of a state’s expanding economy; and the operation of imperialism through collaboration.  However, in order to avoid the problems of earlier Marxist-Leninist interpretations of British imperialism, and in order to extend the analysis to the United States of America, the concepts of ideology, ruling elites, and neoliberalism are applied.

The chapter develops themes of the book focusing on the question of  how people may make a real difference in their lives in the contemporary contexts of neoliberal authoritarianism and crisis.  It argues that making a difference necessarily involves risking theory and explanations.  As such the risking of theory and explanation is a political, rhetorical strategy requiring the development - or education - of an 'effective public' where each voice counts in decision making.  It is an approach to undertaking radical research drawing upon radical democratic theory.  The chapter draws for its data on a wide range of sources including media debates and political speeches relating to protests and the management of crisis.

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Through imaginative geographies that erase the interconnectedness of the places where violence occurs, the notion that violence is 'irrational' marks particular cultures as ‘other’. Neoliberalism exploits such imaginative geographies in constructing itself as the sole providence of nonviolence and the lone bearer of reason. Proceeding as a ‘civilizing’ project, neoliberalism positions the market as salvationary to putatively ‘irrational’ and ‘violent’ peoples. This theology of neoliberalism produces a discourse that binds violence in place. But while violence sits in places in terms of the way in which we perceive its manifestation as a localized and embodied experience, this very idea is challenged when place is reconsidered as a relational assemblage. What this re-theorization does is open up the supposed fixity, separation, and immutability of place to instead recognize it as always co-constituted by, mediated through, and integrated within the wider experiences of space. Such a radical rethinking of place fundamentally transforms the way we understand violence. No longer confined to its material expression as an isolated and localized event, violence can more appropriately be understood as an unfolding process, derived from the broader geographical phenomena and temporal patterns of the social world.""

Contemporary theorizations of neoliberalism are framed by a false dichotomy between, on the one hand, studies influenced by Foucault in emphasizing neoliberalism as a form of governmentality, and on the other hand, inquiries influenced by Marx in foregrounding neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology. This article seeks to shine some light on this division in an effort to open up new debates and recast existing ones in such a way that might lead to more flexible understandings of neoliberalism as a discourse. A discourse approach moves theorizations forward by recognizing neoliberalism is neither a ‘top down’ nor ‘bottom up’ phenomena, but rather a circuitous process of socio-spatial transformation.

Abstract This article shifts the typical analysis of the ―politics of tourism‖ to a study of the use of tourism as a mechanism of politics in an international scale. This ethnographic history presents the case of the tourism boycott of Guatemala that was organized by the International Union of Food and Allied Workers in 1979. This article analyzes the responses and effects of the boycott, whose goal was to pressure the military government to desist its violation of human rights. Significantly, the boycott, a mobilization of transnational NGOs, represents an early example of neoliberal global governmentality that successfully pushed Guatemala to adopt new neoliberal strategies of tourism development and promotion. Key Word: Neo-liberalism, governmentality, tourism politics, tourism as politics, Human Rights, tourism boycotts, heritage tourism.

The pervasiveness of neoliberalism within the field of human geography is remarkable, especially when we consider its virtual absence from the literature less than a decade ago. While the growing attention afforded to neoliberalism among geographers is new, the phenomenon of neoliberalism is not. This paper traces the intellectual history of neoliberalism and its expansions across various institutional frameworks and geographical settings. I review the primary contributions geographers have made to the literature, and specifically their recognition for neoliberalism’s variegations within existing political economic matrixes and institutional frameworks. Contra the prevailing view of neoliberalism as a pure and static end-state, geographical inquiry illuminates neoliberalism as a dynamic and unfolding process. The concept of ‘neoliberalization’ is thus seen as more appropriate to geographical theorizations insofar as it recognizes neoliberalism’s hybridized and mutated forms as it travels around our world. I also consider some of the most salient ways that neoliberalism has been theorized among human geographers. In particular, I highlight understandings of neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology, as a policy-based approach to state reform, and as a particular logic of governmentality, arguing that while there are significant differences between these various formations, it may also be important to work beyond methodological, epistemological, and ontological divides in the larger interest of social justice.

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Abstract:    Various scholars have addressed nationalism as a distinctive political ideology. The majority of them recognize it as a product of modernity and as inseparable from it. This article begins by accepting this view, identifying the spread of nationalism as part of a broader process of Westernization. However, the all-encompassing ideological dimension and common thread hovering above nationalism is identified here as modernism—that is, the sum of ideological discourses, artistic expressions and political practices gravitating around the ‘need to be modern’. Modernist notions like ‘progress’, ‘growth’, ‘advancement’ and ‘development’ have been largely conceived within national frameworks and applied within a world of ‘nation-states’. Moreover, given the selective ways in which ruling elites used the vocabulary of modernity, the very ‘perlocutionary’ effect of labelling opponents as ‘anti-modern’ often became a sufficient condition for their exclusion. The article discusses whether modernism can be identified as an ideology on its own and whether its triumph was indissociable from nationalism. It concludes that nationalism belonged to a broader modernist discourse that thoroughly accompanied the expansion of modernity.""""

The proliferation of studies on virtually every aspect of globalisation has not clarified the central terminological conundrum of the field. Globalisation studies do not share a univocal set of terms and concepts, so that the loose usage of the very term globalisation has led to polysemy and homonymy. Accordingly, ‘globalisation’ is now used to describe everything and its opposite, from the Roman Empire to WW1, from cosmopolitan behaviour to Genghis Khan’s conquests, and even the Neolithic age. The task of critical globalisation studies should thus be to re-contextualize the phenomenon and re-locate it where it belongs. In contrast, the term Americanisation has been used more sparely, therefore maintaining an autonomous conceptual strength. However, both manufactured opinion and scholarly studies tend to argue that globalisation and Americanisation are wholly distinct phenomena. Multi-National Corporations (MNCs) have adamantly defended that they are not vehicles of Americanisation and that the result of their actions in neoliberal markets is rather a form of ‘indigenization’ or ‘domestication’ through adaptation to local cultures. Similarly, much of the globalisation literature has not come to term with the unidirectional nature of globalisation in the field of culture. This article argues that both globalisation and Americanisation should be historicized, and their respective trajectories identified as beginning in distinct epochs, operating through waves of diffusion and within specific ideological frameworks, and culminating in periods of military and economic expansion. Finally, I argue that, if cultural globalisation is studied in tandem with Americanisation, it can be conceptually circumscribed and its finite nature better identified.