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This paper contributes to International Relations studies on the (de)legitimation of global governance institutions by introducing a focus on substance-oriented (de)legitimation practices to complement existing legitimacy-oriented perspectives. Building on the distinction between performance and performativity, the paper clarifies the concepts of performing (de)legitimation as legitimacy-oriented and performative (de)legitimation as substance-oriented. It argues that while the former primarily aims to contest or establish legitimacy, the latter targets substantive outcomes but affects legitimacy as a by-product. The paper introduces three distinguishing criteria – orientation toward legitimacy or substance, focus on form or function, and justificatory or substantive manifestation – to differentiate between the two. Their empirical manifestation is illustrated through a case study of the United Nations' open-ended intergovernmental working group on business and human rights, which highlights the role of complexity and how it can serve both sets of (de)legitimation practices by contributing to legitimacy and substance, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the global wave of privatization of local public services, re-municipalization has emerged as a viable policy alternative, broadly understood as the return to public management. The paper examines its transformative potential by analysing what 'public' means in practice with a particular focus on governance and decision-making. To do so, the paper investigates the re-municipalization of urban water services in Naples (Italy) and Paris (France) by utilizing qualitative methods. Through a critical political economy approach, informed by social reproduction theory and political ecology, I argue that re-municipalization should be seen as a process that different social forces continuously try to shape. The findings not only contribute to the specific literature on water services, but also to that on re-municipalization, within the debate about public versus private provision. More broadly, the research enhances the understanding of water through the lenses of critical political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the recently rising number of academic papers that empirically examine local variances in China's Belt and Initiative (BRI) projects in various foreign lands, this paper points out the tension between attempts to theorize BRI projects. The Sino-localized approach and the assemblage theory were the two main attempts used by scholars from disparate academic disciplines to conceptualize local agency and to understand how local conditionalities, practices, and norms may affect the outcome of BRI projects. We need to examine their differences and similarities, and determine whether they are really irreconcilable. In addition, how their ontological differences lead to epistemological, methodological and analytical differences in studying BRI projects should be clarified as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we identify localization(s) as an expanding set of spatial processes by which key economic and social mobilities are shifting towards regional, municipal and neighbourhood scales in response to interconnected crises of globalization, ecology, economy, politics, and public health. Localizations are already underway, and are likely to proliferate as these various crises intensify. They are diverse in their politics and have implications for all scales of social organization. Localizations raise important questions around inequalities and injustices, new topologies of (dis)connected communities, ethical dilemmas of obdurate globalizations, contesting turns to nativism, and ensuring the just and democratic construction of open-locales. Observing this trend of localizations from within the UK lockdowns of the global coronavirus pandemic, we argue that more geographically embedded but socially and politically interconnected futures are both an implication of this paper and should constitute the format of an important emerging research agenda around localizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper represents narratives from black women who work at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Their stories unearth their impossible existence within the institution and deliberateness on their survival tactics through theorising Nguni concepts of Ukuzilanda, Ukufukuza, and Andizi. In a world that does not 'trust' black women to have a voice, have feelings, and have a story, the dialogue amongst these academics sheds light on how their everyday resistance is their survival. The paper takes a self-study approach to record the moment and define survival in anti-black, anti-women employment space. The paper also explores how the Covid-19 pandemic revealed distrust that the world usually shows towards black women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of labour arbitrage, Romania became home to an expanding nearshoring business service sector. Many graduates work in 'call centres': a generic term for various types of customer-oriented services associated with different employment regimes and company structures. This research examines the discursive construction of compliance to precarious work, largely centred on managerial perspectives. Based on in-depth interviews with managers, HR staff, call-centre operators and through the thematic analysis of managerial outlets and career events, the paper unpacks several mechanisms, metaphors, and symbols that maintain young people's adherence to the demands of work. It is argued that the repertoire of neo-liberal tropes (authenticity, personal development, growth) creates legitimacy for an (arguably) precarious sector in an emerging economy, and ultimately crafts individual-ized working narratives. The paper suggests that young employees appropriate the related structures and the master narratives, whilst lacking a solid repertoire to critically engage with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current triad competition between the US, the EU, and China, globalization-relevant infrastructures serve both as the means and ends of conflicts. This paper asks how this historical constellation of geoeconomic competition has changed the infrastructure policy of its centers. Its political-economic perspective discusses infrastructures not just in terms of their strategic instrumentalization, but also of their role in global production and geoeconomic competition. It underlines how infrastructures serve as fixes that counteract internal crisis dynamics and allow for an expansion of productive activity. The paper undertakes an empirical comparison of the triad centers' central infrastructural measures and flagship projects. The results highlight a shared reorientation towards infrastructure policy that is driven by internal crisis dynamics and external competition over contested markets. Yet, it also reveals the varieties of infrastructural approaches as regards political objectives, modes of policy-making, and the role of national businesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the entanglements of waste infrastructures and harm in the wider Athens region. It focuses on Fyli landfill, which is currently the only formal waste management facility to serve the entire region. Associated with pollution, privatization, and allegations of corruption, the landfill has been formative of differential modes of uncertainty, interruption, and (in)visibility. By paying attention to the infrastructural contestation surrounding Fyli landfill, we conceptualize waste infrastructures as techno-political devices that engender harm. Our paper, first, examines the ways in which the spatio-temporal modalities of harm play out within this context, and secondly, rethinks modes of contestation and (in)visibility in relation to urban infrastructures. It argues that thinking through harm further elaborates the complex enmeshment between spatio-temporal and moral dynamics of infrastructures and forms of disruption, accountability, and participation. Hence, while we rethink waste infrastructures through harm, we also attend to the infrastructural codifications of harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast to expectations that the greater visibility of aid increases the donor's prestige, this paper examines why certain donor countries may seek to render their aid programs invisible. As the case of Japan's early Triangular Development Cooperation (TDC) in Southeast Asia demonstrates, donors at times seek to conceal their presence to better secure their national interests. By approaching this (in-)visibility puzzle through the focus on its politics, this study highlights the complexity of donors' motivations in selectively activating (in-)visibility in TDC. Via a historicised account of Japan's post-war aid/economic cooperation relationship with Southeast Asia, the paper finds how the triangular mechanism allowed Japan and Thailand as an intermediary to selectively render their presence in-/visible to shun hostile sentiments against them in order to pursue their respective diplomatic goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the existing international political economy (IPE) literature, the demise of the Bretton Woods order is widely regarded as a key transformative moment in the development of the global political economy. Three successive waves of IPE literature have highlighted how the collapse of the monetary regime heralded the politics of exchange rates, the explosion of global financial markets, and new institutional configurations. Contrastingly, drawing on and developing heterodox theories of money, this paper postulates that the globalization of financial markets was rooted in the post-war processes of monetary transformation. More specifically, as the US dollar operated as 'money of account' and dynamically developed as social relation of credit and debt at the international level, the dual features of the US dollar secured the emergence of global financial markets in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, the end of the Bretton Woods order entrenched the transformative features of the US dollar on an international scale such that the US dollar was firmly established as institutionalized money, and US government debts became 'risk'-free assets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the deepening vulnerability of both domestic and international migrant workers to contemporary slave labour and the challenges for its eradication in the Brazilian Amazonian state of Mato Grosso. Drawing upon the experiences of 40 workers 'rescued' from contemporary slave labour, the paper shows that the repetitive experiences of contemporary slave labour by subjects and the authoritarian turn in Brazil evokes a conceptual reinterpretation of solidarity and its operationalization. It must move away from the distinct liberal approach in the state paradigm to focus on class and agrarian based solidarity and their understanding of liberation. The paper redefines solidarity as structural and relational notion that engages with the epistemic insight of unfree workers to define the terms of their own freedom, pointing towards humanizing, and self-emancipating alternatives that challenge roots of class oppression and slave labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The so-called 'sea of plastic' in Almería, Spain, is a 450km2 area devoted to intensive greenhouse farming managed by 10,000 small farmers who employ a labour force of 50,000 workers, mostly immigrants from Africa and eastern Europe. Romanian immigrants arrived at the beginning of 2000s and have occupied various positions within this agro-industrial district. Some started their own businesses in greenhouse reparation and construction employing fellow Romanians. They seized the market, providing more stable jobs through their transnational networks, and extending their businesses nationally and internationally. This paper analyses the global processes 'from below' that explain the occupation of specific economic spaces by transnational migrant entrepreneurs. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and social network analysis, the paper shows how the seasonal mobilization of a workforce through a transnational social field connecting Romania and Spain provided a competitive advantage to these entrepreneurs to start investing in their ventures and acquiring new markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though diasporas no longer reside in their homelands, the proliferation of globalization and movement, as well as the exponentially increasing reach of the Internet has meant that the link between authoritarian regimes and their corresponding diaspora groups is very much alive. This paper argues that, in the Kurdish case, this link also extends to second-generation Kurds (who may not have directly encountered these authoritarian regimes). Drawing on ethnographic and interview fieldwork conducted with Kurdish university students in London, the paper argues that second-generation Kurds maintain a nexus with the authoritarian regimes of their ‘homelands’ in two ways: through their own local mobilizations against these regimes, as well as through their exposure to cultures of surveillance and fear instated by these regimes through the Internet. In a climate of ever-changing methods of political participation and influence, the paper calls for greater recognition of the role of the cyberspace in extending the reach of authoritarian politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows the limits of the Global North activism related to environment and indigenous identity for the South to instead highlight the primacy of regional political processes. It studies the changing perceptions of the state and the consequent political strategies used by the marginalized Bhils. They faced submergence due to the Sardar Sarovar Dam on River Narmada in western India. The Bhils, categorized as ‘aboriginal tribe’ by the colonial regime, along with other groups, are popularly called Adivasi (original dwellers). The Narmada dam followed in the wake of their sociopolitical isolation due to state policies, loss of forest, and exploitation by dominant groups. The paper highlights the continuous attempts by the Bhils to adapt and constructively engage with the state as they first opposed the dam and later mobilized for their resettlement. They made transient alliances with various external activists rather than simply being helpless victims or heroic resistors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the politics of refugee arrival and integration at urban level in Germany following the migration influx in summer 2015. How have cities redefined themselves? How have newcomers and residents with different subjectivities constructed their identity, social belonging, and justified their rights-claiming? What kind of changes can be observed in city's social spaces? Supported by critical geography, securitization, ethnographic approaches, the paper aims to identify the grey areas of the urban social spaces and presents two accounts centred on: (1) city as sites of bureaucratic politics, austerity urbanism and surveillance; (2) city as sites of sanctuary/solidarity practices. It argues that the refugees' arrival offers the chance for German cities to envision a social project through engaging a politics of 'bounding' which involves the re-framing of refugee displacement in relation to urban development by covering both the lived (camp) experiences of those on the move and local population's needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars in the field of development have recently begun to highlight the demise of neoliberal hegemony. Still, testimonies of emerging economies that are struggling to move on from embedded neoliberal strategies and institutions have also surfaced across the globe. By analysing the recent conflict that the Mexican state experienced when trying to revert market-oriented reforms in its energy sector, this paper aims to contribute to the literature on neoliberal resilience and the literature on Polanyian dynamics beyond the Global North. Accordingly, through a Polanyian perspective, the paper highlights how a recent constitutional lock-in of competition policies have thus far stifled intended protective countermovements by the Mexican state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an introduction to the special issue: 'The Far-Right in World Politics'. In setting out the special issue, the paper does four things. First, we provide a definition of what we mean by the 'far-right' and identify its core characteristics over the longue durée and across different spatial locales. Secondly, we provide a brief discussion and critique of existing approaches to the study of the far-right and offer an alternative methodological framing centred on 'the international'. Thirdly, we discuss the ambivalent connections between the far-right and liberal international orders – both today and in the past. Finally, we provide brief summaries of each contribution to the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a critique of perspectives that see the recent global rise of right-wing populism as a direct reaction to the disastrous effects of neoliberalism. By turning attention to the uneven development of capitalism and international competition, in this paper, I present a distinction between 'offensive' and 'defensive' types of right-wing populism that take place in different zones of the world economy. Through a comparative analysis of India and Turkey, this paper discusses the particularities of the rise of 'offensive' populists in emerging powers of the Global South in a period of economic growth. The comparative-historical framework employed in the paper allows us to understand how the world-hegemonic crisis empowered populists by providing opportunities for upward mobility for emerging powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intermediaries are indispensable for processing the mobility of international migrants. In the absence of an official migration policy in Japan, this requirement of intermediaries is not an exception. This paper examines the different approaches of Japanese intermediaries towards Japanese client firms and Vietnamese early-career professionals employed in the information technology sector in the cross-border labour market between Japan and Vietnam. Two major results are derived based on data from semi-structured interviews. First, recruitment companies instruct labour users, and recruitment organizations seek to 'frame' a job post for migrant workers for a successful visa application. Second, temporary staffing firms 'package' multiple Vietnamese workers to provide the necessary labour to clients. This study argues that different types of intermediaries are present in the employment process of early-career foreign skilled labourers and that a temporary staffing firm intervenes the most actively in the employment process of skilled migrants among other intermediaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2004 the SF Movement has developed a global community of food producers and activists called Terra-Madre. Every two years representatives of the community meet in Turin for five days of workshops and conferences. Due to Covid-19 crisis SF has radically changed the nature of the meeting, presenting a six-month calendar of digital and physical events around the world. The paper examines the exchange occurring between communities as a form of translocal activism and considers to what extent SF can be defined as a movement for food sovereignty. It draws on digital data collection on the online activities and research with participants involving semi-structured interviews and observation notes. The paper reflects on the experience of digital fieldwork and how the new format of Terra-Madre provides insights into SF as a translocal movement characterized by conflicts, common perspectives and emergent capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I present my reading of two paths of existence in texts written by white Danes concerned with crisis. The first obeys the politics of purity and involves an existential commitment to status quo. I call this path whiteness collapsing into itself, inasmuch it remains locked in the confines of the politics of purity, makes impossible both delinking from modernity-coloniality, and relinking, as the process of delving and dwelling in the wider processes of becoming, which I have learnt to know as Mother Earth. The second text attests a decolonizing practice of collapsing whiteness that is creolizing and engages in relinking as healing. I conclude by addressing the importance of deciding to decide to relinking as a radical practice of cultivation of sociality and relationality rooted in specific places which, however, are interconnected precisely because social and relational. Therein, I argue, is the healing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the experiences, vulnerabilities and contributions of women health workers during Covid 19 pandemic in India. It elaborates upon their everyday struggles and issues including incidences of violence against them, poor wages, temporariness of their jobs and other labour rights. The paper further discusses the transitioning characteristics of women health workers in the context of corporate globalization in India. The paper offers a critical reading of health worker's rights from a feminist perspective and raises the challenges and opportunities the pandemic provides in rethinking the role of women health workers in India and women welfare workers in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The terms 'fake news' and 'alternative facts' have lost their shock value in today's public discourse and seem to have become part of our normal political vocabulary. Fake news, mis- and disinformation are not a problem of a particular country but are found in politics around the world. In this paper, I look at how disinformation appears as a problem for democracy. Empirically, this paper explores dominant patterns of argumentation with a focus on the US, Germany and Czechia. I discuss the themes of media literacy, hybrid warfare and the emergence of fringe media. This paper argues that more attention needs to be paid to the affectual dimension of why people share fake news. Even though there is no easy solution for dealing with fake news, a first step is to stop denouncing people for believing in fake news and putting all our hope in media literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses how outward-oriented industry policies are made or changed in Vietnam, an illiberal state facing a rapidly liberalizing global economy, using the case of Vietnam's automotive sector as a spearhead sector for industrialization. It provides a new perspective by highlighting collective concerns among state elites in Vietnam, a relevant but relatively overlooked factor in understanding key industrial policy reforms in Vietnam. Specifically, this study argues that the positional characters of Vietnam as an illiberal non-major state in the international asymmetrical liberal order help us see when policy reforms, particularly in outward-oriented industries, are likely to be initiated and in what forms or in what directions changes can be made. Drawing on conceptual discussions of conflicting concerns among the illiberal state elites governing developing countries in a liberalizing global economy, this paper discusses how closely major policy reforms in automotive sector are aligned with elites' interests in reducing these dual concerns in a balanced way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the roles of those who mediate citizenship by investment (CBI) in Türkiye. Within the scope of the study, those who mediate the sale of CBI to foreigners in 8 cities were interviewed. The study revealed that the investment industry in Türkiye has multiple actors, and these actors invest in institutional infrastructure to improve their organizational capacity, and they have institutional and political connections. With these connections, intermediaries affect both the shaping of investment programmes and the socio-spatial mobilization of migrants within intertwined relations with the housing market. Based on all this information, it can be clearly stated that the intermediaries have a crucial role in the development of the global citizenship market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Powered by global financial institutions, philanthrocapitalists and development agencies, agricultural commercialization is once again at the forefront of development discourse and policies, especially since the late 2000s. The cornerstone of this development approach is that by investing in raising agricultural productivity, supporting infrastructure, and introducing climate-smart agricultural systems, with private sector investments all along the food value chain, Africa will transform into a breadbasket for the world. In the last decade, Uganda and Tanzania have enthusiastically embraced agricultural modernization discourses, becoming test beds of new ‘frontier’ blueprints: ‘responsible’ agricultural commercialization projects, ‘inclusive’ business models and ‘sustainable’ contract farming schemes. This paper takes issue with the de-politicizing discourse of the value chain paradigm by exploring diachronically the genealogies of agricultural commercialization in Uganda and Tanzania from colonial times, across post-independence state-led modernizations, to the present neoliberal reforms. It argues that mainstream development narratives tagged to commercialization projects have worked as an ‘anti-politics machine’ making invisible to the public eye the widespread land dispossession, rural pauperization and social conflicts it entails. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is increasing concern regarding the influence corporations have over the global food system. The extent of this power is so great that it is described as a defining feature of the current global food regime. In this paper, I explore the case study of regenerative agriculture, a growing transnational sustainable agriculture movement which has received increasing interest from corporate actors. Existing literature has highlighted the risks of corporate co-optation in regenerative agriculture but has failed to explore these patterns in any great depth. To address this gap, I analyse 21 multi-national corporations with regenerative agriculture programs and policies. Combining food regime theory with a three faces of power framework, I document the nature of corporate involvement in regenerative agriculture and how it reflects a broader attempt by agri-food corporations to legitimize their power in the global food system via the corporate environmental food regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines South Korean conglomerates’ strategies used to convey their interests as the interests of all. Their hegemonic strategy was one factor in overcoming the authority crisis triggered by bribery scandals in 2016–2017. They adopted strategies such as social contribution activities and implemented hegemonic strategies, involving (1) social movements and non-governmental organizations, (2) the media and publishing sectors, and (3) academia and the educational community. They funded pro-chaebol social movements and controlled the media through advertising and journalists. Conglomerates also used publishing companies to spread their ideas and developed think tanks. They advocated for owner management rights, tax cuts, deregulation, labour flexibility, and managed academics. They engaged in educating teachers, creating economics textbooks, and building university student networks. Although the strategies have yielded results, the resistance has not vanished. Through this study we can consider the significance of the authority crisis, hegemonic strategies, and capital-civil society relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a rhizomic authoritarianism that generally operates through a complex network of connections. It provides a genealogical reading of the authoritarian rule in Cameroon, with a particular focus on the roles of France and China, using both primary and secondary sources. Specifically, it seeks to enlighten the complex processes through which a transnational authoritarianism has been established in Cameroon over the past six decades, as well as how the formation of strategic alliances between local political actors and international institutions has contributed to the normalization of authoritarian policies and practices that sometimes occur in transregional contexts. The paper's main argument is that the authoritarian system Cameroon has experienced since the late 1950s is rhizomatic in nature and is partially the result of the hegemonic interventions of international powers such as France and China in the country's politics and economy, as well as its development and modernization processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of the recent rise of authoritarianism and processes of 'democratic backsliding' in the Balkans (and other parts of CEE), the EU has projected an image of itself as a bastion of democracy and a counterweight to authoritarian tendencies and regimes. In contrast, this article points to the ways in which the EU – through its enlargement strategy – has legitimized authoritarian practices in candidate states. These practices have been inherently linked to the adoption of the EU acquis communautaire and deepening processes of neoliberal restructuring. In Serbia, the mandated transition to renewable energy, and the associated rise in small hydropower as a solution for meeting renewable energy targets, has led to an intensification of state-sponsored violence and coercion. By focusing on a small hydropower development in Rakita, Serbia, this paper highlights the inherently multiscalar nature of authoritarian state power and potential new avenues for contestation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses the question of what accounts for South Africa's current deep political and economic crisis. The paper argues that most theories of development do not take into account the important role of what Partha Chatterjee describes as political society. In polities such as South Africa, political society encompasses the vast majority of voters who are marginal to the capitalist economy yet central to democratic politics. Democratically elected leaders provide resources to the electorate on the basis of a 'politics of exception' which benefits groups rather than individuals and is distributed unevenly. As a result, many of the assumptions about political and economic development in the global economy are undermined by local political conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores three moral economies that regulate the production and circulation of things and economic transactions: kosher (a Hebrew term meaning 'fit' or 'proper'), halal (an Arabic word that literally means 'permissible' or 'lawful'), and Hindu vegetarianism. Over the last three decades, these moral economies have been shaped by new forms of globalized religious technoscience, and nowhere is this process more apparent than in biotechnological production. In this paper, technoscience denotes material technology and specialized social expertise that also contributes to knowledge production, globally, and a sense of what it means to be human, which includes the component of faith. Drawing largely on my ongoing fieldwork conducted, since 2005, at Novozymes in Denmark, which is the world's largest producer of enzymes and adheres to kosher, halal, and Hindu vegetarian standards, I explore how these moral economies are conditioned by a particular kind of globalized religious technoscience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the entanglement of mobility, immobility, labour control, and immigration control in Washington State in the US. I analyse two cases: first, one where aggressive immigration enforcement has destabilized a local labour regime, impacting workers' im/mobilities in ways that employers felt made their businesses vulnerable. In this case, employers responded with a politics of protection that involved cooperation with immigrant rights groups, but not in ways that challenge immigrant marginalization. Next, I analyse the H2A visa programme, a temporary foreign worker programme that concentrates power over labour's mobility with the employer in ways that have made workers vulnerable to unfree work conditions. Together, these cases demonstrate how state control of im/mobilities can do different kinds of work in the context of the struggle between employers and workers. I apply this lens to reimagining labour solidarity that centres the freedom to move rather than the protection of workers' marginality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper evaluates the effectiveness of citizen participation in environmental management, specifically, in relation to the process of evaluation of environmental impact assessment studies of large-scale mining projects in Peru. It is analysed if these mechanisms are equally inclusive of female and male voices; identifies the barriers that women face in these deliberative spaces and assess what the government is doing to reduce gender based exclusions. The paper argues that, although according to Peruvian environmental and mining law, participatory spaces are aimed to include citizens' voices; they end up reinforcing domination and control as they mainly operate to facilitate a rapid expedition of environmental licenses in mining projects rather than truly foster spaces of dialogue, consensus and political inclusion. For the most part, such mechanisms have also been blind to the gendered impacts of extractivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper analyses the Brazilian foreign policy towards the war in Ukraine, from the tensions preceding the invasion until the first half of the war's second year. Since the conflict began, Brazil was governed by two sharply contrasting administrations, neither of which clearly aligned with one side of the conflict. It is argued, however, that while Bolsonaro assumed an inert attitude, Lula undertook a proactive non-alignment. As proposed by this forum, this article presents three counterfactuals, exploring how the Brazilian position could have been different, and outlines future perspectives based on three uncertainties: (1) will Brazil be recognized as a viable mediator? (2) will Brazil explicitly choose a side in the conflict?; (3) will Brazil continue to be engaged with this agenda? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extent to which infrastructures being deployed for a postcarbon transition can be considered sustainable has been increasingly scrutinized within the critical turn in energy justice research. However, the focus therein tends to be on how new megaprojects still reveal Global North–Global South colonial relations and energy-related injustices. In this paper, we aim to contribute to widening critical energy justice research by illustrating how it needs to also consider the spatio-temporalities of renewable energy colonialism in the Global North. To that end, we undertake a psychosocial historiography of selected large-scale hydroelectric power plants in Portugal, from the twentieth century to the present day. This historiography is undertaken via archival data and interviews. Our analysis illustrates how hydrocolonialism has been enacted – discursively, infrastructurally, and psychosocially – in rural areas in Portugal, across different socio-political regimes; and also how it can be contested, by identifying some examples of resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how practices of (de)legitimation deal with regime overlaps by invoking the convergence or collision of norms, rules and procedures in regime complexes. It brings together two strands of International Relations literature – the concept of regime complexes and (de)legitimating practices in global governance institutions – to analyse the UN Treaty Process as a case study in the field of business and human rights. It makes three main arguments. The first is that regime complexes can be characterized by the concomitance of a collision and convergence of norms, rules and procedures. Second, regime overlaps and the collision of norms and rules may appear within a single international institution. Third, norm collision and convergence are inferred in (de)legitimation practices that characterize contestations in regime complexes. The UN Treaty Process demonstrates convergence and collision as (de)legitimation in light of the UN Guiding Principles (intra-organizational overlap) and the European Union (inter-organizational overlap). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the display of the power relations involved in the trajectory of China's land grabbing in Argentina. Through a study of the failed agri-food project of Beidahuang Group in Rio Negro, it shows the centrality of the dynamic configurations of material, discursive and institutional power surrounding Chinese investments to both facilitate land grabbing and condition its outcomes. Drawing on a neo-Gramscian approach, three configurations of power are identified in interaction with a logic of agricultural accumulation with hegemonic aspirations: the alignment of power relations; the challenges and the misalignment of these forces. Consequently, the project suspension results from a change in power relations caused by reactions from 'below' and 'above', although this does not affect the global primacy of agribusiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the economic growth imperative not only drives climate change and created the conditions for the development and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic but is also the context for climate change inaction and ineffective responses to the pandemic. Focusing on the United States, the paper identifies pretenses for collective inaction on COVID-19 that are similar in content to familiar justifications for delay in climate action: (1) denialism, (2) individualism, and (3) techno-optimism. These justifications must be identified as strategies to maintain the status-quo and benefit the wealthy few while allowing avoidable human suffering and loss. Adequately addressing climate change and future pandemics requires overcoming these false narratives and transitioning to social conditions that are resilient, healthy, and sustainable – specifically conditions where social and ecological well-being are prioritized over economic growth for the sake of profit maximization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global tourism competition has entered home and family space. Drawing upon ethnographic research in Guatemala, this paper investigates the postcolonial gendered politics that shape (and are shaped by) global tourism competition, homestays, and mothering labour. It shows how Guatemalan women turn to hosting as an economic strategy and, in doing so, become part of a complex power relationship between Spanish schools and their (primarily Western) language tourists (or ‘students’). Spanish schools only work with ‘host-mums’ deemed capable of meeting their students’ needs, desires, and expectations of homestays as affordable, enjoyable, pedagogical experiences of ‘real’ family. To achieve this, Guatemalan women become cosmopolitan, competitive subjects who devise and enact strategies to commodify, transform, and perform their mothering labour and homes/families in ways that appeal to their Western students. Far beyond creating desirable touristic experiences, the everyday competitive mothering of tourists is having widespread consequences at the personal, local, and global levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of pluriversal politics, which encompasses the vast array of alternatives to ecologically destructive and colonial capitalism, is crucial for envisioning emancipatory futures. However, the diversity of the initiatives composing the pluriverse poses obstacles to the unity necessary to dismantle interconnected systems of oppression, thus creating an intrinsic dilemma between diversity and unity. This paper explores the navigation of this challenge within emancipatory and pluriversal projects, drawing on material from ethnographic research on the Neapolitan Commons movement. The case study illuminates how social movement actors achieve simultaneous unity and diversity through the grassroots-developed concept of ‘hegemony of non-hegemony.’ In the Neapolitan context, this framework allows diversity to thrive while maintaining essential unity, crucial for confronting economic and political powers. The findings underscore how grassroots, autonomous, and pluriversal degrowth practices can challenge capitalist growth dynamics through unity in diversity, hence suggesting the unnecessary nature of state-led, top-down, or uniformizing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to advance our theoretical understanding of diversifying and homogenizing processes in human societies by exploring the sources of and threats to ethnolinguistic or cultural diversity. Invoking concepts such as ethnogenesis, schismogenesis, and structural transformations, it discusses the parallels as well as the divergences between biological and cultural theory. Models in historical linguistics risk importing unwarranted assumptions about diversification from biological models of speciation. A more pertinent theorization of ethnolinguistic diversity might build on anthropological perspectives such as those of Fredrik Barth, Gregory Bateson, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, all of whom recognized that such diversity reflects interaction rather than isolation. The empirical test of these considerations is the ethnography and history of language use among Indigenous peoples in Amazonia and the Andes. The conclusion is that premodern expansions of language families, in tolerating local cultural autonomy, multilingualism, and diglossia, did not threaten ethnolinguistic identities as has modern globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A hypermarket is a combined supermarket and department store that carries a large range of products. Since the opening of the first hypermarket in the US in the early 1930s, this concept has spread globally. Nowhere is this trend more visible than in India, now the world's most populous country with a middle class that will expectedly grow to 800 million in 2030. This paper coins the theory of hypermarketization to explain why and how the hypermarket as a globalized form signifies the full integration of liberalization, retail and middle-class consumer culture in emerging markets. The argument that hypermarketization marks the point when successful economies in the Global South mature and then qualify as emerging markets is based on empirical material from fieldwork on vegetarianism and meat in hypermarkets and among middle-class groups in South India, namely participant observation and interviewing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world of work is changing rapidly in myriad ways. The processes of digitization are enabling workers from different parts of the world to compete in a global market over the Internet without moving to different locations. Many employers are opting for hybrid working solutions in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, some commentators have suggested the end of globalization, while others are hoping that a fairer society will emerge. This paper departs from such rigid assessments of the future of work and instead attempts to understand the multi-dimensional transformations in the world of work through the lens of the global gig economy. It argues that the gig economy is the latest manifestation of capitalism's drive to accumulate which in turn produces uneven geographical developments. It concludes by outlining some strategies to build better work futures in a globalized world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on interviews and participant observation in a community of small scale oil palm farmers in West Sumatra, Indonesia, this paper investigates to what extent the interaction between transnational business governance (TBG) initiatives and the governments in the Global South have influenced local producing societies. Responding to the growing influence of TBG initiatives on the palm oil supply chain, the Indonesian government founded its own sustainable standard, and also developed the biofuel industry to increase domestic demand for the product. The TBG initiatives and the responding policies of the Indonesian government had limited influence on the international vegetable oil market. But its responding policies had strong, often adverse impacts on local society. Being involved in the oil palm plantations, the local populations were able to raise their incomes, but experienced great, often conflict-ridden changes in the customary leadership and landownership systems, and vulnerability to price fluctuations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of climate change, social theory has been subject to a surge of new materialist and posthuman approaches that reconfigure ontology and politics beyond the modern nature/culture binary which the Anthropocene has rendered untenable. But their (re-)turn to ontological speculation brackets the socio-epistemic situatedness and productivity of the way we think nature and its relationship to society. This paper reads Niklas Luhmann's systems theory as a posthuman perspective that can address the epistemological blind spot of materialist-ecological thought. Luhmann's ecology aligns with the former on the posthuman framing of shaping power, the productivity of an environmental outside that remains unknown, and the call for political modesty which follows. On the other hand, Luhmann's theory poses a critical challenge to materialist-ecological thought: the society/environment binary is here constitutively necessary, and its mapping onto a nature/culture binary functionally advantageous for subjects and social systems because it offers opportunities for complexity-reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the paths taken by Estonia and Latvia in their departure from the rouble zone are illustrative of authoritarian neoliberal governance. By challenging the widely assumed simultaneity of ‘democratic’ and ‘market’ revolutions, it critiques institutionalist literature on Baltic exchange-rate regimes and sheds light on the various methods employed to curtail democratic political discourse and participation. The paper delves into the origins of the Baltic neoliberal historical blocs and identifies the social forces that influenced the development of monetary reform initiatives. It then explores the construction of exchange-rate systems through the lens of power struggles within the state bureaucracy, as well as the restructuring of state apparatuses to limit public oversight of monetary policy formulation and implementation. Finally, the paper demonstrates how Baltic currency boards effectively facilitated the establishment of externally-oriented capital accumulation regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an interpretation of the ideology expressed by Jair Bolsonaro, current president of Brazil, as a Brazilian far-right neoliberal nationalism, which typically distinguishes between the members of the nation and its traitors and enemies, creating an authoritarian atmosphere of governance combined with the defense of neoliberal values. To establish the bases that sustain this ideology, we investigate four key arenas of his administration – family issues; the anti-left rhetoric; the call for a mixed-race identity; and Brazilian foreign policy. We sustain that Bolsonaro's discourse, instead of revealing a fragmented political project, actually articulates a powerful and authoritarian image of the Brazilian nation, while also reinforcing the idea of individual entrepreneurship and traditional morality. Although this project is deeply informed by past national ideological traditions, it is also aligned with the expansion of the far right internationally and sheds light to its dynamics in periphery countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonly assumed that far-right populist and nationalist movements and parties emerge within, and in reaction to, liberal international orders. This paper challenges that assumption. It shows that, while the rise of the far-right in interwar Europe and in recent decades in the Global North occurred during periods characterized by globalization, it was a globalization that was essentially anti-liberal in nature. During both periods, globalization was shaped, not by a liberal, competitive ethos, but by conservative and counter-revolutionary values and ideologies, and by policies which worked to 'dis-embed' local economies, promote concentration and monopoly, and widen inequality. Far-right politics emerged, therefore, in reaction, not to liberalism, but to established conservative parties which appeared either unable or unwilling to suppress pressures from 'below' and as, therefore, too weak or corrupt to ensure the continuation of conservative policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the emergence of neoliberalism, the power of multinational corporations has dramatically grown. Given the limits of 'self-regulation' (e.g. Corporate Social Responsibility), this paper examines the attempt to develop a regime of 'public governance' rooted in law-based regulation. The focus is on a referendum voted in 2020 that aimed at regulating Swiss-based multinational corporations. This case is interesting for two reasons. First, Switzerland hosts among the biggest multinational corporations in the world; changing regulations in Switzerland thus implies modifying the rules of globalization as a whole. Second, while corporations are often accused of directly influencing the political agenda through lobby or corruption, in this case citizens were endowed with the power to change the rules for these corporations. While the proposal was finally rejected, the referendum campaign allows reflection on the interplay between globalization and national democratic politics and on the possibilities and difficulties of developing alternative forms of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]