Susanne Soederberg

• Dr Phil
• Professor & Canada Research Chair in Just and Inclusive Cities at Queen's University

1. La crisi degli alloggi dei rifugiati a Berlino Nel 2015, l'arrivo in Europa di un numero crescente di persone costrette a fuggire dai propri paesi di origine è culminato in quella che è stata definita la "crisi dei rifugiati" 1. In quanto paese di destinazione più ambito del continente europeo la Germania è stata ampiamente elogiata per la sua c...

Louisiana’s coastal wetlands have been disappearing at an alarming rate over the past several decades, with the greatest harm experienced by vulnerable populations (poor and racialised residents). It was not until 2005 that the state legislature responded with a much‐lauded Master Plan tasked with integrating the construction of new flood control i...

Under the rubric of 'financial inclusion', lending to the poor - in both the global North and global South - has become a highly lucrative and rapidly expanding industry. A key inquiry of this book is what constitutes 'the financial' that the poor are invited to join. Instead of embracing the mainstream position that financial inclusion is a natura...

With an eye to further our understanding of everyday life in global capitalism, Urban Displacements provides the first systemic critical political economy analysis of low-income rental housing and social dislocations, combining both theoretical advancements and detailed empirical studies, centering on Berlin, Dublin and Vienna. Soederberg pushes b...

So excited about the spanish translation of my Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry by Siglo XXI in Mexico! Here's the link: https://sigloxxieditores.com.mx/tienda/ols/products/la-industria-de-la-pobreza-y-los-estados-endeudadoresxn-dinero-disciplina-y-la-poblacin-excedente-rfe

The current model of corporate governance needs reform. There is mounting evidence that the practices of shareholder primacy drive company directors and executives to adopt the same short time horizon as financial markets. Pressure to meet the demands of the financial markets drives stock buybacks, excessive dividends and a failure to invest in pro...

The book boosts the interests of international cooperation, in particular of the Worldwide Community with the EU Member States, and among the actors and stakeholders of the European Union, in order to learn more and, as far as possible, to strengthen the territorial and security systems in the Schengen area. Key perspectives on the territorial natu...

Il volume promuove gli interessi della cooperazione internazionale, in particolare con gli Stati membri, gli attori e le parti interessate dell’Unione Europea, al fine di conoscere meglio e, per quanto possibile, rafforzare i sistemi territoriali e di sicurezza nell’area Schengen. Lo spazio Schengen, attivo dagli anni 1990, viene analizzato con lo...

Global risk management (GRM) has become a central organizing framework in global development governance, yet despite its ubiquity, it has received little attention. Relatedly, few scholars have explored the connection between GRM and what has become an influential private international organization, namely: the World Economic Forum (WEF). Contribut...

A surge of forcibly displaced migrants into Europe in 2015 culminated in what has been referred to as the ‘refugee crisis’. As the continent’s top destination country, Germany has been widely praised for its welcoming culture while heavily criticized for failures of integration. This is particularly true of Berlin — a city that has absorbed the hig...

Despite its reach and impact, little scholarly attention has been granted to what is becoming a silent social tsunami of our times: evictions. Tens of millions of rental households across the globe, who are too poor to own their own dwellings, are continually exposed to the violence of contemporary capitalism marked by, among other things, a danger...

While urban inequalities have become ubiquitous globally, there is still much debate on how we might conceptualise the forces that produce, reproduce and govern them. As an introduction to this themed issue, the present essay situates its contributions as a critical intervention with the Urban Age thesis. In particular, we focus on the prevalent Ur...

Since 2010, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has urged for a redesign of global governance in which development goals and the risks therein should be managed. Global risk management (GRM) beats at the heart of this project. GRM is a broad-based institutional, ideational and regulatory framework that advocates processes and practices through which ris...

Universal access to safe and secure housing has long been a central concern of the international development community. Since 2001, this aspiration has taken the form of global benchmarking embodied in the UN Millennium Development Goal 7-11 and its successor the Sustainable Development Goal 11. Despite these targets, hundreds of millions of househ...

Critical housing studies have been slow to interrogate the role of low-income rental tenure in contemporary capitalism. Retaining insights of previous Marxian analyses, which insisted that housing is inextricably linked to the capitalist political economy, this essay sets off to revise the rental housing question: how might we explain the rising le...

This paper serves as an introduction to Risking Capitalism. To this end, I discuss the key questions, aims, and themes driving this collective project. Although the contributions differ in their use of political economy and political ecological with regard to housing, poverty, and climate change, they share a similar concern of interrogating the ma...

Spatial stigmatisation – naming spaces with high concentration of poverty as a slum or ghetto – has been well covered in the critical urban geography and sociological debates. Yet, these discussions have neglected to theorise the intersection between the production of stigmatised space and the governance of its inhabitants within the context of one...

This essay serves as an introduction to Risking Capitalism. To this end, I discuss the key questions, aims and themes driving this collective project. Although the contributions differ in their use of political economy and political ecological with regard to housing, poverty and climate change, they share a similar concern of interrogating the mate...

The official development literature is replete with studies about the alleged benefits of financial inclusion in reducing poverty in the global South. Few analyses have sought to critically explore advanced forms of financial inclusion in the global North, particularly with regard to the highly lucrative and controversial payday lending industry in...

http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2015/0515soederberg.html

Under the rubric of ‘financial inclusion’, lending to the poor –in both the global North and global South –has become a highly lucrative and rapidly expanding industry since the 1990s. A key inquiry of this book is what is ‘the financial’ in which the poor are asked to join. Instead of embracing the mainstream position that financial inclusion is a...

Winner of the bisa ipeg book prize 2015 Under the rubric of ‘financial inclusion’, lending to the poor -in both the global North and global South -has become a highly lucrative and rapidly expanding industry since the 1990s. A key inquiry of this book is what is ‘the financial’ in which the poor are asked to join. Instead of embracing the mainstrea...

Student loans represent the largest and fastest growing segment of unsecured consumer debt in the US; yet, the literature is silent on the power relations of the industry. Who benefits from the expansion and reproduction of student debt to low-income students, and how? To address these questions, I explore two key features of the industry: the high...

Mexico represents the largest market for residential mortgage-backed securitization (RMBS) in Latin America. Despite its significance to questions of development, there has been no critical analysis on the social implications and power dimensions of RMBS with regard to low-income housing in Mexico. This essay fills this gap by demystifying the tech...

This article serves as an introduction to this special issue of twq on ‘Debt and Development in the New Millennium’. It highlights the gaps in our knowledge about debt that the following contributions seek to fill and why this is important, both analytically and politically. In doing so, it discusses two core objectives of the special issue: first,...

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis the G20 leaders have attempted to universalise financial inclusion as a key development strategy Financial inclusion, which has long been championed by official development institutions as a sound and effective market-based solution to combat poverty, is also now promoted by the G20, not only as a way out of...

Credit card debt is a ubiquitous feature of neoliberal capitalism. To explain the notable growth of credit card usage in the US, I adopt a historical materialist approach that employs two key analytical concepts—cannibalistic capitalism and the debtfare state—to capture the material, institutional and ideological dimensions of this process. Viewed...

In the context of the 2008 financial crisis and how it has impacted on countries across the globe, it is striking how few scholars have critically analysed why and how past crises have created opportunities for states and capitalists to exploit the so-called 'bottom of the pyramid consumers' in the developing world. By situating the analysis within...

Business now plays an increasingly prominent role in development. While the implicit links between private actors and international development institutions have been widely debated, the explicit role of financial corporations in shaping official development policy has been less well documented. We employ a feminist Marxian analysis to examine the...

W orkers have become increasingly dependent on the economic performance of corporations for the value of their retirement savings as pension funds across the OECD area have ramped up investment in corporate stocks and bonds. This phenomenon, known as pension securitization and wrapped in the discourse of the 'empowerment' of the worker as a shareho...

One year after the 2008 crash, policy makers and international lending institutions declared the crisis over and assured the world that recovery was underway. The efforts of the Group of Twenty (G20) have been widely credited with securing economic recovery. In this article I examine the politics of representation of the crisis by the G20. I argue...

This article explores the extent to which the ‘competition state’ model has taken hold in Mexico. Applying four main characteristics of Cerny's competition state, I consider the policy directives of the Mexican state over the past several decades, from the rise of market-led reforms in the wake of the 1982 balance of payments crisis to the end of V...

Despite the influence corporations wield over all aspects of everyday life, there has been a remarkable absence of critical inquiry into the social constitution of this power. In analysing the complex relationship between corporate power and the widespread phenomenon of share ownership, this book seeks to map and define the nature of resistance and...

Over the last decade, socially responsible investing (SRI) has become one of the foremost, and according to some observers, the most effective, strategies for influencing corporate behaviour and policy. The Sudan divestment campaign in the United States (and elsewhere) represents one of the more popular and extreme forms of SRI. Given these charact...

The article has two interlocking goals: (1) to assess the past 10 years of neoliberal-led forms of financial globalization, and (2) to provide a contex-tualization of the 2008 global credit crisis. Both objectives are discussed against tJhe backdrop of the reforms implemented at the end of the Asian Crisis in 1999, that is, the so-called New Intern...

The Enron collapse in 2001 represented a high-water mark in the recent round of corporate scandals in the United States. In response to this crisis, the US government introduced the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Act or SOX) in July 2002. Until now, the debates have remained silent on the political and social dimensions of the Act. By situating the discourse...

Voluntary-based corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies have become a fashionable response of the business community and international organizations to the growing discontent over flagrant abuses of corporate power against humanity and the environment. A case in point is the Global Compact (Compact or GC), which was forged by the United Na...

One of the most striking trends in global development finance has been the growing role of Western-based, institutional investors. Pension funds in particular have played a leading part in supplying capital to publicly traded corporations in emerging market economies. An important feature of this type of financing has been the trend to make investm...

Since the 1980s, a growing number of middle-class Americans have become increasingly reliant on the stock market to augment and protect their old-age pension savings. Through its recent bid to partially privatize the Social Security program, the administration of George W. Bush (2001–present) is seeking to widen the scope of its Main Street investo...

The Argentine default at the end of 2001 highlighted the ongoing problems plaguing the existing transnational debt architecture, namely the tensions between creditor rights and human rights. While these debates have thrown important light on what needs to be done in terms of improving the transnational debt architecture, few studies have actually a...

The UN Financing for Development conference (FfD) was held in Monterrey, Mexico, in March 2002 to gain international financial and political support for the Millennium Development Goals. Various multilevel consultations were held with “equal stakeholders” ranging from the IMF and WTO to civil society organizations in order to forge a consensus-base...

One of the most predominant features of globalization, namely, the increasing mobility and power of global capital flows, has acted to constrain the scope of state intervention over the past two and a half decades, particularly in the area of economic policy formation. As we saw in the first part of this volume, within the context of the advanced i...

In March 2002 President Bush announced the creation of the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA). Under the MCA, only countries that govern justly, invest in their people, and open their economies to foreign enterprise and entrepreneurship will qualify for funding. To this end the Bush administration has devised sixteen eligibility criteria -- ranging...

In March 2002, the Bush administration unveiled what it deems to be a “new global development compact”: the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA). This new compact builds upon the Millennium Development Goals, e.g. halving world poverty by 2015, put forward by 189 countries at the Millennium General Assembly at the United Nations in September 2000. Ho...

Incl. tbles, abstract, and bib. references In March 2002 President George W. Bush announced the creation of what many insiders have heralded as a revolutionary development initiative: the Millennium Challenge Account (mca). The latter seeks to provide assistance to 79 of the world's poorest countries--many of which have been often equated with the...

While the option of constraining cross-border financial flows to emerging markets (capital controls) has taken a backseat in the official policy debates about strengthening the global financial architecture, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has ceded that certain temporary measures to limit the inflow of hot money may be beneficial in achievin...

-- This volume explores overlapping themes in radical political economy. The first section looks at the disciplinary role of capital under neoliberalism through an examination of official development policies of the US government and the World Bank, labour restructuring in Argentina, the tenuous nature of global finance, and cultural dimensions of...

In response to the recent spate of financial crises in East Asia (1997-98), the imf has established a core set of international standards to regulate market behaviour in the global South. These standards are embodied in 11 modules that comprise the imf 's Reports on the Observance of Standards and Codes ( rosc s). Both content and form of the rosc...

Aside from representing the biggest default of its kind in history, the Argentine default in December 2001 triggered several important, albeit largely neglected, debates on how best to manage future sovereign bankruptcies. These debates centre on the key policy to emerge from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the so-called Sovereign Debt Restr...

The New International Financial Architecture (NIFA) was created by powerful G-7 countries in response to the growing volatility in the developing world. Some key components of the NIFA include: the G-20, the Financial Stability Forum and the Reports on Observance of Standards and Codes, the latter involving areas such as corporate governance. The a...

After the tumultuous 1990s, capital controls are making a comeback. Although about 14 emerging markets have implemented capital constraints, the Chilean variant (1991-8) has drawn the most attention. Many scholars and policymakers, especially of the Keynesian variant, are quick to support country-level capital controls as a useful device to quell f...

This article sets out to critically explore an important dimension of the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) recent bid for economic stability, namely the transparency requirements vis-à-vis emerging market economies. The article argues that this requirement symbolises an attempt to bolster ideological obligation to neoliberalism while progressing...

This paper sets out to explore the changing political and economic landscape of the Mexican state against the backdrop of the growing disciplinary power of the globalised financial markets (e.g., capital flight and investment strikes). Specifically it asks if the general defining characteristics of a neoliberal “competition state” found in the adva...

The author raises important theoretical and empirical questions about Mexico's national antipoverty programs. She examines the Programa Nacional de Solidaridad (National Solidarity Program-PRONASOL) as part of a social-liberal passive revolution of state and civil society, arguing that it is merely a minor modification of neoliberalism to impose st...

The potential for sovereign default in Latin America has become a very real possibility. This was driven home by Argentina's recent sovereign debt crisis, which represented the largest default in history. The Argentine case sug-gests that the current market-based approach of sovereign debt management is not conducive to dealing effec-tively with th...

Zugl.: Frankfurt (Main), University, Diss., 1999. Mikrofiche-Ausg.