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Agrarian Neoliberalism, Authoritarianism, and the Political Reactions from below in Southern Africa
Abstract
We are witnessing a worldwide resurgence of reactionary ideologies and movements, combined with an escalating assault on democratic institutions and structures. Nevertheless, most studies of these phenomena remain anchored in a methodological nationalism, while comparative research is almost entirely limited to the Global North. Yet, authoritarian transformations in the South — and the struggles against them — have not only been just as dramatic as those in the North but also preceded them, and consequently have been studied by Southern scholars for many years. This volume brings together the work of more than 15 scholar-activists from across the Global South, combining in-depth studies of regional processes of authoritarian transformation with a global perspective on authoritarian capitalism. With a foreword by Verónica Gago.
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This research report explores how the IMF and World Bank, in alliance with development agencies, used funding during the Covid-19 pandemic as an opportunity to impose conditions which influence policy in Mozambique through two interrelated sectors: labour and social protection; and land and agriculture.
Authoritarian populism in the early twenty-first century is rooted in a global conjuncture of convergent social and ecological crises, but the ways in which the crises shape authoritarian populist politics and vice versa vary across socio-ecological formations worldwide. An analysis of the politics behind the rise of the flex sugarcane and oil palm complexes in Guatemala since the mid-2000s shows that an authoritarian corporate populist agenda is on the rise. Authoritarian corporate populism is especially keen on manufacturing the consent of working people to the elites-led sustainability and development pathway. This involves political concessions to the underprivileged through public grants and multistakeholder governance as in other populist political regimes but additionally, and distinctively, meaningful concessions to working people and the environment in the sphere of private relations of production. Although these concessions go beyond mere greenwashing, they do not compromise and ultimately enhance the flex cane and palm complexes’ profitability and ability to stay in business and the racialized class hegemony of the elites. Violence, however, remains foundational to this political agenda, even if it is now cloaked in the rule of law. Thus, the concept of authoritarian corporate populism showcases a form of politics in which big business, intimately linked to the state and elites, plays a major role in mainstream sustainability transitions.
This essay, inspired by the huge outpouring of research generated in and around the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative, reflects on the challenges of analysing authoritarian populism and particularly its rural expressions. The paper first examines key features of authoritarian populism and early populist movements in the Americas and Russia. Then it turns to ‘illiberal’ neoliberalism and the origins of neoliberalism under brutal dictatorial regimes in Indonesia and Chile. The paper scrutinizes the scepticism about populism in the work of prominent liberal and neoliberal media pundits and scholars. The affinities and tensions between different authoritarian populist rulers, the worrisome transnational linkages of their support bases and the massive flows of right-wing donor money between white supremacist and nationalist movements in different countries suggest the emergence of a fractious axis, not as consolidated as the fascist axis of the 1930s and 1940s, but a rising threat to democracy nonetheless. The paper considers the degeneration of progressive populisms, such as Venezuelan chavismo, and the problem of resorting to ‘automatic’ or ‘unconditional’ solidarities as a factor in the delegitimizing of left alternative voices. The last sections discuss emancipatory politics, the recent phenomenon of pandemic authoritarianism and the rising protest movements that constitute a possible opportunity for progressive forces.
This review examines three recent books that address the relationship between neoliberalism and agribusiness, on the one hand, and the demise of smallholder farming, traditional diets and the rise of diet‐related chronic illness, on the other. The first, by Timothy Wise, adopts what may be characterized as an ‘agrarian populist’ stance, constructing a universal binary between trans‐nationalizing agribusiness and a unified family farm sector. Protagonists from the latter are seen to embody the future, using agroecology to feed the world sustainably in a time of climate crisis. This is not a consistently propeasant stance, however; Wise seems rather to advocate a ‘farmer road’ to national capitalist development. The other two books, by Alyshia Galvez and Gerardo Otero, cover quite similar ground to one another, looking explicitly at the rise of neoliberalism, the decline of traditional farming and diets and the rise of processed food‐related diseases. Unlike ‘agrarian populists’, both authors privilege the state and ‘class struggle’ (sensu lato) in analysing the dynamics of neoliberalism, free trade agreements and food policies. Normatively, both see the state as pivotal in generating policies centred around smaller scale farming and the production of nutritious food for all. For Otero, like Wise, these policies seem to be tied to a form of national developmentalism as an escape route from neoliberalism. For Galvez, the future is less clear‐cut—although by inclination ‘propeasant’, she does not exclude elements of national developmentalism in envisioning a postneoliberal world.
Brazil has recently shifted from economic growth to recession, from left-wing to far-right politics and from neo-developmentalist to ultra-liberal economic policies. This regressive change in Brazil (and elsewhere) has prompted the need for empirical investigation and emancipatory movement-building, as urged by the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI). This article responds to the ERPI call by reflecting on the politics of the past. It argues that the road to regression was paved during the tenure of the Workers' Party, when Lula's leadership emerged as representative of interests ‘from below' while advancing a political project that protected and nurtured interests ‘from above’ - a populist ambiguity. By offering an understanding from a class political economy perspective, this article concludes that reinforcing left-wing populism in the face of authoritarianism is unlikely to create a path to emancipation.
This paper explores how varying degrees of authoritarianism and populism, although not always coinciding, have been intrinsic to the imposition of agrarian policies in Mozambique. Taking the case of ProSAVANA, a highly controversial agrarian development program, we look at how its undemocratic imposition by the state has given rise to a vigorous resistance movement. By tracing a decade of electoral results in selected districts where ProSAVANA is intended to be implemented, we argue that due to its agrarian authoritarian policies which have had negative implications on rural livelihoods, the ruling party, FRELIMO, has recently been losing popularity to the strongest opposition party RENAMO.
The paper deals with the relationship of different types of populism with authoritarianism and constitutionalism. In the first part, I try to define various approaches—Left and Right-Wing, “good” or “bad”—to populism, especially from the point of view of whether they aim at changing the liberal democratic constitutional system to an authoritarian one. The following part discusses the rhetoric of authoritarian populists, which makes this type of populism distinct from non-populist authoritarians. The paper also explores the question of whom to blame for the success of authoritarian populisms, and the final part investigates, whether the use of legal tools by an authoritarian populist to dismantle liberal constitutional democracies means that we can speak about a special populist constitutionalism. While the paper tries to find out the joint characteristics of authoritarian populism, it heavily relies on the Hungarian experiences as a kind of model approach in East-Central Europe and maybe even beyond.
The focus of the study is to explore implications of the latest land and agricultural policy pronouncements, discourse and narratives by the new administration on smallholder farmers' access and security on agricultural land. To gather the perspectives, learn and share experiences of farmers, particularly women, relating to tenure security and access to land, the Sam Moyo African Institute for Agrarian Studies (SMAIAS) together with the Zimbabwe Land and Agrarian Network (ZILAN) conducted policy dialogues across the country on land tenure issues in the "new dispensation". There is a shift from the previous administration's standpoint in terms of land administration and agricultural growth strategy. Under the "new dispensation" the state is pushing for massive investments in all sectors of the economy. However, prioritisation of large scale farming will likely lead to land concentration by capital and land alienation of smallholder farmers, particularly women who do not take part in decision making. Furthermore, the renewed drive for industrial capital to take part in mineral exploitation will, without doubt, have devastating effects on the livelihoods of peasants, particularly those that depend on the land. This is worsened by the fact that according to Zimbabwean law, miners are given first preference when it comes to land use. The new administration is eager to raise capital via rents and in the process boost agricultural productivity. This has propelled the new administration to push for smallholder farmers to embark on joint ventures with foreign capital and, on the same note, there is a renewed narrative that land should be given to those who are financially and materially resourced and can fully utilise it. Interestingly, underpinning this productivist stance is the need for a land audit. There is no doubt, that smallholders are fully behind a land audit for it will free more land for the land-short and the landless and, more importantly, it will address multiple farm ownership. However, there are fears that the land audit maybe captured by the elites and lead to further peasant land alienation. Outstanding issues such as women unequal access to land control and ownership and bottle necks in joint registration of farm ownership still persist. The new administration is also confronted with a rejuvenated demand for compensation of former white farmers as the western powers covertly set this as part of the requirement for Zimbabwe's readmission into the international community. The "new dispensation" has witnessed the signing of the Land Commission Bill into the Land Commission Act and the subsequent decentralisation of the Zimbabwe Land Commission to all the country's provinces.
A new political moment is underway. Although there are significant differences in how this is constituted in different places, one manifestation of the new moment is the rise of distinct forms of authoritarian populism. In this opening paper of the JPS Forum series on ‘Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World’, we explore the relationship between these new forms of politics and rural areas around the world. We ask how rural transformations have contributed to deepening regressive national politics, and how rural areas shape and are shaped by these politics. We propose a global agenda for research, debate and action, which we call the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI, www.iss.nl/erpi). This centres on understanding the contemporary conjuncture, working to confront authoritarian populism through the analysis of and support for alternatives.
For 40 years, Chile has been implementing a series of free-market reforms that can best be described as a neoliberal revolution. This article discusses neoliberalism in Chile as it relates to secondary and higher education. Based on documentary sources and selected interviews with student leaders and others involved, it examines the arguments and actions of the Chilean students within the conceptual framework of social movements, looking into such issues as repertoires of contention, networks and alliances. It traces the evolution of student mobilisation from the initial 'Penguin Revolt' in 2006 to the nationwide disruptions of 2012. The article pays particular attention to the evidence and arguments presented by students in their opposition to the neoliberal policies and examine the response of the Chilean state, noting counterarguments as well as points of compromise and rejection. The student movement is found to be extremely creative in the ways it presents opposition to the government; moreover, it has learned to persist in its transformative demands, even though success has so far been modest. Since Chile continues to endorse a neoliberal model, the article ends with a balance of education policy accomplishments and failures, highlighting which social groups have benefited and which have not.
The Mozambican economy has been growing at an annual average of 7.5% for the best part of two decades, and has become one of the three most attractive economies for foreign direct investment (FDI) in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, it has been ineffective and inefficient at reducing poverty and providing a broader social and economic basis for development. It is argued here that the dominant political economy of Mozambique is focused on three fundamental and interlinked processes, namely the maximisation of inflows of foreign capital - FDI or commercial loans - without political conditionality; the development of linkages between these capital inflows and the domestic process of accumulation and the formation of national capitalist classes; and the reproduction of a labour system in which the workforce is remunerated at below its social cost of subsistence and families have to bear the responsibility for maintaining (especially feeding) the wage-earning workers by complementing their wages or trying to maintain the availability of the enormous idle reserve of labour. This article focuses on economic porosity, which, arguably, is a dominant factor in promoting the linkages between domestic and foreign capital, nurtured, supported and mediated by the state.
After nearly 15 years of political transition, it becomes legitimate to question the effectiveness and sustainability of land reform in South Africa. Based on empirical findings regarding the redistributive land reform projects (restitution and redistribution) of the Mole-mole municipality in the Limpopo Province (South Africa), the objective of this paper is to evaluate the contribution of these projects to development and to analyze the extent to which they have improved people's lives in rural South Africa. The paper not only details the limited impact of the land reform projects on the socio-economic aspects of the majority of the beneficiaries' livelihoods, its assessment of the effective implementation of these land reform projects – from the initial application phase via the settlement to the final configuration of the project – allowed the identification of deficiencies and threats affecting the projects. Analysis of the failure to link land reform to development has led to recommendations, and also to a reflection on the viability and legitimacy of the existing land policies.
This article examines the expansion of agribusiness and the evolution of land grabbing in Brazil and Mozambique. The modernization of Brazil’s agricultural sector, which began in the 1960s, successfully expanded into the cerrado region in the 1980s under the state-led PRODECER project. Modernization and state-led programmes such as PRODECER gave new rise to different forms and practices of land grabbing, creating spaces for investment by foreigners. Over the last three decades the production of soybeans in the cerrado has come under substantial foreign control and in recent years, sugarcane production and foreign investment in the ethanol industry has grown markedly in the region; the social and environmental effects of this have been devastating. In this article we will also examine the recent interest of Brazilian agribusinesses in investing in Mozambican land and in particular, the ProSAVANA programme modelled on PRODECER. We argue that while Brazil is subject to land grabbing by foreign capital, it has also become a promoter of land grabbing in Mozambique.
Market-led agrarian reform (mlar) has gained prominence worldwide since the early 1990s as an alternative to the state-led approaches widely implemented over the course of the 20th century. This neoliberal policy framework advocates voluntary transactions between ‘willing sellers’ and ‘willing buyers’ and the removal of various ‘distortions’ from land and agricultural markets. Related policies aim to secure and formalise private property rights. Emerging evidence from across the developing world suggests that such policies are incapable of challenging the political and economic power of large landowners and are unlikely to meet the land needs of the rural poor and landless. In key areas such as land transfer, farmer development and programme financing, mlar is shown to be falling far short of its objectives. Meanwhile, it is being actively challenged by national and international peasant movements that are calling for more direct intervention by the state in order to restructure patterns of landholding and provide the necessary support for small-scale farmers, many of whom produce primarily for their own consumption. The future of agrarian reform, it is argued, lies not in a return to the top-down, statist models of the past but in new forms of partnerships between progressive political forces and peasant movements that go beyond the confines of the market to redistribute land and create sustainable livelihood opportunities for the rural poor and landless.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is part of a worldwide wave of strong ‘populist’ leaders who have emerged in the context of the crisis of neoliberalism, and among whose appeal is their claims to put their economies back on a growth trajectory by the authoritarian implementation of core neoliberal reforms. Noting its relative lack in relevant literatures, I build an account of ‘strong leadership’, based on Modi’s record in government, as it mediates between ‘authoritarian populism’ and ‘neoliberal restoration’. Such leadership, I show, is based on a serial creation of a ‘people/enemy’ divide in society, mobilising this division to win large electoral mandates, and using and using such mandates in turn to support authoritarian projects of majoritarianism and of neoliberal economic reforms. Modi has drawn on leadership practices contextual to postcolonial India, such as earlier iterations under Nehru and Indira Gandhi. However, his project has moved beyond these earlier iterations of ‘strong leader’ politics into an authoritarian and, in some crucial ways, fascist directions. Coming to power to solve the ‘crisis of neoliberalism’, it has made most advance in instituting a majoritarian Hindu nation, first constructing it as a pre-figurative community, and now giving it shape as constitutional fact. These new modes of ‘embodying the nation’ and exercising spatial control have been made possible through the domination of media and social media that create serial ‘radical exclusions’ of nominated ‘enemies of the people’. However, his project of joining an authoritarian restoration of some key neoliberal policy themes with the pursuit of a Hindu nation is limited by how much contention can be contained within the 'people-enemy' frame, and by changes in other enabling conditions of international support and social media domination.
In the larger public debate, it is often suggested that neoliberalism has been swept aside by an upsurge of what are commonly referred to as right-wing populist movements, parties, and figures but are, in fact, authoritarian ones. It is the more or less explicit assumption of this narrative—namely, that there is a conflictual and dichotomous relationship between neoliberalism and authoritarianism—which is the focal point of the critical inquiry contained in this paper, thus building on recent scholarly accounts, which also challenge this assumption. The argument proceeds in two broad steps, prefaced by a theoretical-historical conceptualization of neoliberalism. First, an admittedly cursory survey of authoritarian parties and movements is conducted to show that there is ample reference to typical neoliberal ideas and arguments in their party platforms or concrete reform proposals. Secondly, the issue is approached from the converse perspective in order to ascertain the extent to which there are authoritarian potentialities in neoliberal thought. Here, calls for a strong state by some neoliberal thinkers are discussed as well as the link between some of them and the military dictatorship in Chile. Finally, the paper argues that the neoliberal view of politics is—possibly inadvertently but still systematically—drawn toward authoritarian politics and the respective actors because neoliberal thinkers largely lack any alternative option to account for the possibility of neoliberal reform. Neoliberalism and authoritarianism are not intrinsically tied to each other, but even less are they inherently opposed to one another; an amalgam of “authoritarian neoliberalism” thus seems far from impossible and may very well become the dominant shape of neoliberalism to come.
In recent years the creeping deterioration of democratic rule worldwide has become a major preoccupation across a wide range of research fields and disciplines—especially public law and political science—as scholars struggle to understand the nature of evolving threats to a broad range of democratic systems. Many terms are now used to refer to the incremental degradation of democratic rule worldwide, or ‘democratic decay’. Abusive constitutionalism. Autocratic legalism. Populist constitutionalism. Bad faith constitutionalism. De-constitutionalism. Constitutional retrogression. Constitutional capture. Constitutional rot. Constitutional decay. Democratic deconsolidation. Democratic backsliding. Authoritarianisation. Authoritarian backsliding. Rule of law backsliding. Democratic erosion. Democratic recession. The list goes on. This article argues that conceiving of this scattered cross-disciplinary literature as a research field and providing an account of recent conceptual development can help to map a rapidly developing landscape, maximise the analytical utility of key concepts, identify resonances and duplication among concepts and across discrete literatures, and can help to ensure that this emerging quasi-field develops in a more coherent and rigorous manner.
Anti-colonial movements secured political power as governments in countries of Southern Africa. Populist discourses, which reinforce the patriotic history and heroic narratives of a ‘big men’ syndrome, are part of their political culture retaining continued legitimacy, not least in South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe, where national sovereignty was the result of a negotiated transfer of political power. This briefing presents a critical assessment of such populism as an integral part of the repertoire of former liberation movements as governments.
This article argues that the growth of authoritarian forms of politics in India should be seen in the context of a long-term crisis of the state as successive governments have been unable to establish legitimacy for the policies of neoliberalisation that have been pursued since the 1990s. These policies contributed to the fracturing of dominant modes of political incorporation. The previous Congress Party-led government’s mode of crisis management – which it dubbed, inclusive growth – failed to create new forms of political incorporation by addressing long-term structural problems in India’s political economy, such as jobless growth, and gave rise to new problems, such as large-scale corruption scandals. Subsequently, it increasingly developed what Nicos Poulantzas called, “authoritarian statist” tendencies to marginalise dissent within a framework of constitutional democracy. The current Bharatiya Janata Party-led government’s mode of crisis management builds on these authoritarian statist tendencies but has sought to build legitimacy for these tendencies and neoliberalisation through an appeal to authoritarian populism. This seeks to harness popular discontent against elite corruption with majoritarianism to create an antagonism between the “Hindu people” and a “corrupt elite” that panders to minorities.
In recent years, an upturn in international commodity markets and the poor development performance of mineral rich African countries have catalysed the resurgence of debate and policy initiatives focused on extractivist models of growth in southern Africa. Beginning with debates on the ‘resource curse’, the East Asian developmental state and ‘developmental patrimonialism’, we extend the discussion to consider key unique challenges in contemporary African states: questions of finance and debt leverage, foreign capital domination and the problematic legacy of neoliberal structural adjustment. We consider the cases of Zambia and Zimbabwe, two countries heavily reliant on mining, in which current policy interventions have sought to anchor developmental state ambitions in the restructuring of the minerals sector. These cases illuminate the significance of current developmentalist politics in southern Africa, and underscore their specificity and constraints. Developmentalist projects are unlikely to succeed in the short term, but retain importance as emerging points of critique of neoliberal states in transition.
This contribution focuses on five societies that experienced successful counterrevolutions. It looks at how the dialectic of revolution and counterrevolution operated in Italy, Indonesia, Chile, Thailand and the Philippines. It seeks to understand the motion of different classes in periods of great political fluidity. It explores the dynamic relationship between conflict in the countryside and the overarching conflict of classes and their political representatives at the national level. Finally, it probes the relationship between domestic counterrevolution and global geopolitics.
This commentary aims to take stock of the 2016 presidential elections in the Philippines that led to the landslide victory of the controversial Rodrigo Duterte. It argues that part of Duterte’s electoral success is hinged on his effective deployment of the populist style. Although populism is not new to the Philippines, Duterte exhibits features of contemporary populism that are befitting of an age of communicative abundance. This commentary contrasts Duterte’s political style with other presidential contenders, characterises his relationship with the electorate and concludes by mapping populism’s democratic and anti-democratic tendencies, which may define the quality of democratic practice in the Philippines in the next six years.
The concept of neoliberalism has been influential in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, but it has little foothold in legal scholarship, and its very coherence has been controversial, as it is often a polemical term. In this Introduction to a special issue of Law and Contemporary Problems, we argue for a meaning of neoliberalism that can help to organize the stakes of various areas of law while also showing the usefulness of the term more generally. We define neoliberalism as an overlapping set of arguments, value commitments, predispositions, and ways of framing problems that are unified by the context and purpose of their use: Neoliberal claims serve to protect and expand market imperatives in a persistent political conflict between those imperatives and countervailing democratic demands for values such as security, dignity, fairness, and solidarity. Our definition of neoliberalism helps to tie together various public and private-law areas by showing how market and democratic imperatives are in conflict there, and how law is mediating those conflicts. Legal scholarship, then, needs the concept of neoliberalism. But a useful theory of neoliberalism also needs law: as legal realism showed, and sophisticated economists agree, markets are not natural phenomena, but products of legal choices. Therefore, the contexts of conflict in which neoliberalism does its work are always specified in law.
The U.S. economy has undergone a profound restructuring during the past two decades. This process, known as neoliberal restructuring, has affected practically every dimension of social life, including the gap between rich and poor, the nature of work, the role of big money in politics, the quantity and quality of public services, and the character of family life. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.
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Popular resistance to globalization and neoliberalism in Latin America is extensive and has been increasing both in scale and intensity. The polyarchic neoliberal regimes in Latin America have responded to this increasing popular resistance by relying on two types of measures: (1) tactical measures aimed at suppressing eruptions of popular resistance; and (2) more strategic measures aimed at preventing or at least maintaining within manageable limits the growing resistance to their policies. The United States Government and the main international financial institutions operating in the region have played a major role in both developing the second type of measures and assisting most of the Latin American governments to implement these measures. This essay examines the increasing popular resistance to neoliberal policies and capitalist globalization in Latin America; the responses of the existing neoliberal regimes and their backers to this increasing resistance; and the alternatives to polyarchy, neoliberalism and capitalist globalization that are emerging in the region.
Cet article décrit les caractéristiques essentielles de l'agriculture paysanne dans le Mozambique sud et surtout montre comment les forces de production ont été disloquées et bloquées dans leur intéraction avec l'avènement de la production capitaliste en Afrique du Sud. Les systèmes de récolte et les methodes de culture ont changé à cause de l'émigration de la main-d'oeuvre en Afrique du Sud. Du fait de ces changements, l'agriculture paysanne a dû dépendre dela main-d'oeuvre migratoire pour le reproduire. Pour pouvoir continuer à faire produire leurs champs, les paysans ont été obligés de rechercher une main-d'oeuvre salariée. Un autre conséquence de la migration de la main-d'oeuvre a été en outre une circulation accrue de l'argent dans l'agriculture paysanne. Plus tard, quand a commencé la production du marché agricole, la circulation de l'argent a diminué à nouveau.
This article argues that if we look at rural differentiation not only as emerging class stratification but also as changing divisions of labour, expressed in the diversification of rural livelihoods, we can see that proletarianisation in Mozambique was a deeply rooted process at Independence. The Frelimo party 's vision of agrarian class structure was, however, based on a dualist model of a homogeneous subsistence-oriented peasantry opposed to an enterprise sector. Strategic options based on this vision proved to be economically unworkable and politically compromising. Subsequent years of war have neither levelled class stratification nor reduced rural livelihoods to homogeneous subsistence production. Hence the dualist premises underlying the smallholder model now projected by critics of Frelimo 's socialist options are similarly flawed.
The privatisation process currently taking place in Mozambique raises important questions about state/capital relations. While supporters of the process argue that the state will become more efficient and the economy more productive, critics claim that privatisation is tantamount to recolonisation. To explore the new relationship being forged between state and capital, this article looks at the different operations of two joint venture cotton companies in the northern districts of Nampula and Cabo Delgado. It assesses the impact of capital formation on the state's regulatory powers, policy‐making capacity, and legitimacy, and how local communities have reacted to the changes brought by private investment in cotton production. The article argues that privatisation constrains the government's capacity to shape the economy, but offers opportunities for it to seek legitimacy at the national and local level. Moreover, the diverse investment and production strategies pursued by the two private cotton companies suggest that capitalism will have a varied and uneven impact in the country, depending on the capabilities and objectives of national and foreign investors. Local responses by producers and traditional authorities coupled with the exercise of regulatory powers by the national government will also shape the future development of capitalism in Mozambique.
This book arose from our puzzlement at the paradoxical state of sociolegal knowledge on globalization. The beginning of the new millennium has witnessed a ground swell of proposals for the transformation or replacement of the national and international legal institutions underpinning hegemonic, neoliberal globalization. Put forth by variegated counter-hegemonic movements and organizations and articulated through transnational networks, these proposals challenge our sociological and legal imagination and belie the fatalistic ideology that "there is no alternative" to neoliberal institutions. The initiatives are as diverse as the organizations and networks advocating them, as the case studies in this book lay bare. Impoverished women in Tanzania as well as marginalized communities and progressive parties in Brazil mobilize to change and democratize the national and international regulatory frameworks that effectively exclude them from key political arenas such as the process of allocating public budgets (see Rusimbi and Mbilinyi's and Santos' chapters on participatory budgeting). NGOs, unions, consumers, workers and other actors in the global North and South organize to challenge the market-friendly regulation of labor conditions, corporate accountability, intellectual property rights and the environment which fuels the spread of sweatshops in the Americas, the African AIDS pandemic, and environmental degradation in Europe (see Rodríguez-Garavito's, Shamir's, Klug's, and Arriscado, Matias and Costa's chapters). Progressive activist-researchers, people of faith and members of marginalized communities in the U.S. --the "inner Third World" of laid-off industrial workers, migrants and informal laborers— come together to collectively conceive cosmopolitan identities and legal rules in opposition to the exclusionary ideologies and laws of
This essay sheds light on the neoliberal aspects of the Italian political-economic system exemplified in the relationship between capital, state and media. The main argument is that the specific marriage between neoliberalism and neocorporatism that characterizes Italy reveals a distinctive characteristic of neoliberalism: a class project relying heavily on the state. As Polanyi has suggested through the concept of ‘embeddedness’, capitalism has consistently developed through the double movement of preaching the independence of the free market from the state and requiring the state's protectionist interventions. After describing this state-centric framework to interpret neoliberalism, in the second part of the paper, I consider the political-economic history of Italy's recent decades, paying particular attention to the media system. I will examine the ‘communicative performance’ of neoliberalism in Berlusconi's discourses and concrete political decisions taken in the name of neoliberalism. The articulated relationship between media and politics reveals the continuous attempts by the advocates of neoliberalism to seize the state, not to reduce its intervention but in fact to manipulate the market.
Since its transition to democracy, South Africa has implemented a multifaceted programme of land reform to address problems of historical dispossession and rural poverty, relying heavily on the concept of 'willing buyer, willing seller'. This version of market-led agrarian reform has been influenced by the World Bank but enjoys support from landowners and elements within the ruling African National Congress committed to maintaining the structure of large-scale, capital-intensive farming. Central to the South African approach is the voluntary acquisition of land, but also important have been the methods of beneficiary selection, of farm planning and of post-settlement support, all of which have been influenced by the market-led approach and serve to discriminate against the very poor. The rate of land transfer remains far below official targets and the limited available evidence suggests that, where land has been transferred, it has made little positive impact on livelihoods or on the wider rural economy. Key to understanding the slow pace of reform is the lack of mobilisation and militancy among the rural poor and landless, who to date have had minimal influence over the design and implementation of the land reform programme.
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