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Sonja Avlijaš Security for whom? Inequality and Human Dignity in Times of the Pandemic
Abstract
Desire for security is an intrinsic feature of modern capitalism, rather than contradictory to it. It is very human, and capitalist, to want to protect what one already has (including own life). Not doing it would be considered irresponsible and a form of a gamble. But some have more opportunities to protect themselves than others. Our economic and welfare policies are generally status preserving—inclined to support those who are ‘too big to fail’ and skewed towards the elderly at the expense of youth. Existing social and intergenerational inequalities are reinforced and deepened by the measures adopted to tackle the pandemic. The traditionally marginalised groups are also disproportionately burdened with social reproduction, as the state and the private sector withdraw from the provision of care services. As crises tend to exacerbate both material needs and pre-existing inequalities, should we be surprised to see a powerful and angry social pushback driven by the Black Lives Matter and associated movements? Will these challenges to the status quo lead us to a more equal and just post-pandemic world, or will we succumb to further social polarisation and conflict? Some insights may be hiding in the intersectional and interdependent effects of this pandemic.
Empirical evidence on regional integration indicates that CEFTA?s Common Regional Market (CRM) could have spatially unequalising effects across the Western Balkans. Such an outcome would be in conflict with CEFTA?s goal of inclusive regional economic integration. This article offers a roadmap to avoid that pitfall. Literature on the changing global economy in the digital era and ICT-led growth and literature on the political economy of trust and cooperation between smaller economic agents are brought into a conversation with bottom-up empirical insights from small and medium enterprises (SME) from the region. Empirical data are collected from in-depth interviews with 58 export-oriented SMEs in Bosnia & Herzegovina and Serbia. I find that smaller firms are immensely interdependent with the environments within which they operate and that their competitiveness also stems from their ability to successfully leverage on these communal resources and local public goods. Finding ways to preserve and enhance this collective infrastructure is often more of a priority for them than market expansion and technological progress. The paper concludes by arguing that designing (supranational) institutions which can facilitate local and translocal cooperation among competitive exporting SMEs would mobilise greater democratic support for the CRM project.
Social movements have often played an important role in emergencies, mobilising in defence of those rights that they perceive as being at risk or more urgently needed than ever. In general, progressive social movements develop in moments of intense change, mobilising with the aim of turning them to their advantage. the variable mix of challenges and opportunities related to a critical juncture. The specific balance of challenges and opportunities faced by progressive social movements during the Covid-19 crisis is a central question addressed in this volume. Based on existing research on the first phases of the pandemic Covid-19, this Element addresses the ways in with the health emergency had an impact on the repertoire of action, the organizational networks and the collective framing of progressive social movements that adapted to the pandemic conditions and the related crises, but also tried to transform them.
Security scholars have traditionally viewed emergency as a state of exception that triggers a struggle for survival, justifying the breaking of rules and excesses of state power. While there have been attempts to decouple security from its survivalist logic, emergency has remained an analytical blind spot in security studies. The dominance of an elite-centric, exceptionalist paradigm in the study of emergency has foreclosed the possibility of alternative conceptions of emergency and neglected the voices of structurally disempowered agents. This paper advances a vernacular contextual research agenda that is sensitive to the empirical diversity of emergency meanings and practices while foregrounding emergency claims made by non-elite actors. Challenging the idea of emergency as a form of "anti-politics," the paper contends that emergency should be understood as an intrinsic part of politics. It then recovers an alternative, "emancipatory" conception of emergency as an extraordinary moment of spontaneous beginnings that can activate the collective agency of marginalized actors. The final section establishes conceptual foundations for actor-centered, grounded empirical research into emergency politics and suggests avenues for future research. Contextualizing emergency and attuning to the voices and experiences of everyday actors is crucial to remove the key variable that ties security to the logic of survival and exception.
Reflecting the importance of inequality for individuals’ lives, the implications of labor market inequality for core elements of democracy are crucial topics in comparative politics and comparative political economy. This article critically reviews the main findings of the emerging literature on insider–outsider divides to highlight its possible contributions to adjacent fields, in particular the research on party politics, the literatures on economic voting, political participation, and democratic representation or the study of social movements. The conflict between labor market insiders and outsiders demonstrates that in today’s societies with their diversified risk structure and sophisticated welfare states, distributive conflicts are about specific social and regulatory policies that have different implications for individuals depending on their situation on the labor market. By drawing our attention to new divides within the social democratic electorate, the insider–outsider literature reveals an additional argument why the social democratic parties find it hard to mobilize their voters and to win elections. Moreover, the insider–outsider literature can help to bring the economic dimension of politics back to the study of social movements and to light on the relationship between contentious and conventional politics.
Why have neo-liberal economic ideas been so resilient since the 1980s, despite major intellectual challenges, crippling financial and political crises, and failure to deliver on their promises? Why do they repeatedly return, not only to survive but to thrive? This groundbreaking book proposes five lines of analysis to explain the dynamics of both continuity and change in neo-liberal ideas: The flexibility of neo-liberalism's core principles; the gaps between neo-liberal rhetoric and reality; the strength of neo-liberal discourse in debates; the power of interests in the strategic use of ideas; and the force of institutions in the embedding of neo-liberal ideas. The book's highly distinguished group of authors shows how these possible explanations apply across the most important domains-fiscal policy, the role of the state, welfare and labour markets, regulation of competition and financial markets, management of the Euro, and corporate governance-in the European Union and across European countries.
Growth and Welfare in Advanced Capitalist Economies takes stock of the major economic challenges that advanced industrial democracies have faced since the early 1990s and the responses by governments to them. It has three goals: firstly, to further our understanding of how political economies have transformed over the past decades; secondly, to analyse the contribution of governments to these changes, by looking at their growth strategies and thirdly, to highlight and analyse the role of the reforms of welfare systems in this transformative change.In a nutshell, this book maps and provides general understanding of the evolution of growth regimes in advanced capitalist countries. It identifies five main growth regimes in contemporary advanced capitalist economies (three export-led and two domestic demand-led ones). To do so the book combines a supply side approach to economic growth as advocated by the Varieties of Capitalism Literature (OUP, 2001) with a demand side perspective as the recent discussion on growth models has exemplified. It argues that all political economies consist of growth regimes, which are based on a set of institutions that shape the supply side of the economy as well as on demand drivers such as government spending and private consumption. Both supply and demand are heavily shaped by the welfare state which provides for skills through education systems and stimulates demand through high social spending and private pension funds. The book focuses on the analysis of welfare reforms as growth strategies pursued by governments in an era characterised by financialization and the rise of the knowledge economy.
The scientific debate on social investment (SI) is moving from an ideological and normative approach towards a more realistic one. Scholars are paying closer attention to the actual developments in social policy and to the contextual conditions and impacts of SI policies. Considering this, two main issues arise. First, that SI policies are politically feasible and likely to have positive impacts only if specific contextual conditions are met. Second, SI policies were supposed to have a positive impact on both inequalities and economic growth: a strong theoretical assumption that needs to be carefully tested. The Italian case will be used here to illustrate this new perspective and the consequences of the lack of contextual pre-conditions. For this reason, the article is divided into three parts. The first part will present our theoretical argument in the context of the most recent analytical accounts of SI policy in Europe. In particular we will argue that, given the lack of crucial structural pre-conditions, SI policies may have ambiguous and even unexpected negative impacts on both economic growth and equal opportunities. In the second and third parts, we will present empirical evidence of this ambiguity considering childcare and apprenticeship reforms in Italy. More specifically, based on empirical research carried out in Italy, we want to answer two questions: (1) Why is the Italian welfare state so ‘unfriendly’ to SI policies? What are the main factors explaining the limited room for SI policies? (2) When an SI approach is promoted in specific policy areas in Italy, what is its social and economic impact? Do these interventions achieve the positive results to be expected according to the SI approach? Finally, the last part synthesises the main arguments and aims to open a critical discussion on the structural pre-conditions of SI policies and the need for further analysis of the political economy contexts in which SI policy develops.
UK central government is said to have been one of the most prolific reformers of its public administration over the past few decades, a poster-child of 'New Public Management'. Successive reforms were accompanied by lofty claims that the changes would transform the way government worked. Government would become more efficient (delivering services more economically, for example by competition or outsourcing) or more effective and user-friendly (more responsive to citizens, for example by clearer performance frameworks, better use of information technology), or both. Despite much debate over government reforms, however, there has been remarkably little systematic evaluation of the cost and performance of UK government over the past thirty years. This book tests the claims of both proponents and detractors of government modernization programmes by carefully compiling and analysing data relating to cost and performance of UK central government over three decades. It shows that, confounding expectations of both sets of commentators, not only did the reform efforts largely fail to cut costs, but the increased spending did not result in greater fairness and consistency in government decisions. This book also shows that, despite the rhetoric of 'evidence-based policy', the way in which official records change over time makes such evidence increasingly volatile and hard to evaluate. Its findings pose an important challenge for public management in the 2010s and 2020s, when demands for government to cost less and work better are likely to intensify.
Karl Polanyi argued in The Great Transformation (2001 [1944])that the development of market societies over the past two hundred years has been shaped by a double movement. On one side is the movement of laissez faire--the efforts by a variety of groups to expand the scope and influence of self-regulating markets. On the other side has been the movement of protection–the initiatives, again by a wide range of social actors, to insulate the fabric of social life from the destructive impact of market pressures. The essay starts by laying out the broad outlines of the double movement idea, and then it elaborates the micro-foundations of the protective counter movement to explain how agents sometimes have the opportunity, the power, and the capacity to challenge and change the institutional structures of market societies. After examining barriers to the mobilization of a protective counter movement, the final section explores the possibilities of moving beyond the double movement.
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