Alen Toplisek

University of Derby

Semi-peripheral economies are reliant on foreign capital for innovation and upgrading into higher-value-added economic activities. This characteristic of dependent development is coupled with unreliable government support for domestic businesses, resulting in fragmented state-business ties. How then did a local electrical vehicle (EV) battery start...

What factors influence governments' social policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis in East-Central Europe? We attempt to answer this question by analysing the social policy responses to the pandemic across three distinct institutional varieties and welfare states: Estonia, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Drawing on extensive analysis of qualitative and qua...

The extraordinary context of the COVID-19 crisis gave governments around the world a freer hand to reshape their socio-economic orders. Political economists studying East Central Europe have started a debate in how far democratic backsliding in the region has ushered in a more authoritarian form of capitalism. Our paper examines responses to COVID-...

This chapter provides some basic information about the Slovenian economy and traces the key economic policies and responses by different centre-left and centre-right governments to the 2008 financial crisis up until 2019. The main focus is on efforts to consolidate public finances, structural reforms and the third wave of privatisations.

The traditional literature in depoliticisation studies has treated depoliticisation chiefly as a technique of modern governance. This chapter suggests that more attention needs to be paid to the ideological/structural character of this tendency. Following a critical analysis of Colin Hay’s linear model of (de)politicisation, it provides a structura...

This paper analyses the economic dimension of populist governance in post-crisis Europe by exploring whether and in what ways populist economic policies diverge from neoliberal orthodoxy. Existing literature on contemporary populism in Central and Eastern Europe is ambivalent on this question and lacks systematic analyses of populist economic polic...

This chapter brings together the theoretical observations from previous chapters and demonstrates their relevance by examining the trajectory of the post-2011 protest movements in Europe. The author argues that the emergence of new radical left parties in Slovenia, Spain, and Greece acts as a repoliticisation of the depoliticised democratic structu...

This chapter introduces the reader to the 1970s crisis of governability debate and shows that the current crisis has already been preceded by previous debates on the crisis of democracy in the West. The author then proposes to examine the dominant conceptions of democratic politics in the academic literature and concludes that the existing democrat...

This chapter constructs a critical political economy approach through which the author analyses the impact liberalism has had on structuring the role of the state in Western market economies in the nineteenth century and after the 1970s. Through Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality, the author traces the development of liberalism and the key...

In this chapter, the author explores the possibility and conditions for resistance to neoliberal governmentality by conceptually unpacking the notion of crisis. After critically analysing the different conceptions of crisis in business and management studies, international relations, and Marxism, this chapter proceeds to examine whether the alignme...

This chapter summarises the main arguments of the book and proposes the outline for future research agenda in democratic and political theory. It raises important questions about the recent success of right-wing populists in Central and Eastern Europe, who compete with the new radical left in determining the course of the unravelling of the crisis...

This chapter seeks to reconceptualise our understanding of resistance in radical politics through the notion of power. Rejecting a romanticised view of resistance in radical politics, the author argues that resistant practices cannot operate outside of the network of power relations since they form a structural part of it. Through a critical juxtap...

This book rethinks resistance against neoliberalism in the context of the crisis of Western liberal democracy and the rise of new radical left parties in Europe. Drawing upon a wide range of methodological approaches in contemporary political and social theory, it explores how the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis represents the opening of pos...

Political accounts for the contemporary rise of populism in Western democracies generally agree that elite unresponsiveness and a wider crisis of political representation are to blame for the current political predicament. Mainstream political elites are caught between increasingly irreconcilable responsibilities bound by external constraints and i...

This chapter offers the first in-depth study of both structural and agential factors behind the emergence and electoral breakthrough of a new radical left party in Slovenia, the Left. It defines the party’s ideological profile and it analyses its tactics of party competition through a selection of concrete examples. It concludes by outlining two po...

This essay analyses the politics of horizontality—a key characteristic of recent forms of protest and activist citizenship—through the case of the 2012–2013 protests in Slovenia. The Slovenian case is illustrative because we can trace the emergence of the Initiative for Democratic Socialism and, subsequently, the United Left from protest through mo...

In Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Wendy Brown argues that neo-liberalism has undermined democracy in a hitherto unprecedented form. To be specific, neo-liberalism has undermined what is at the heart of democracy: popular sovereignty, the demos – it has, in a word, undone the demos and, hence, democracy. Analysing neo-liberal...