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Several recent episodes of massive student protests in countries in Europe, Latin America, and Africa, raise the question of whether we are witnessing to a new surge of student protests. This profile offers an interpretation of the socio-economic and political processes that have caused contentious reactions among students, paying special attention to changes in the major characteristics of the higher education sector. In last decades, governments of all colors have enacted laws promoting the outsourcing of personnel, the managerialization of governing bodies, and the introduction of tuition fees as well as cuts to public funding. These changes are inspired by a new paradigm, which promotes the ‘discipline of the market place, the power of the consumer and the engine of the competition.’ In this context, various forms of resistance and opposition can be observed. Here, we focus on three dimensions: (1) financing and autonomy of universities; (2) governance and managerialization; (3) precarization of labor conditions. The profile shows how recent protests in Chile and England are related to changes in the afore-mentioned dimensions. We conclude that the reappearance of students as political actors is related to the emergence of a range of distributional conflicts stemming from the implementation of the neoliberal agenda in the field of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the re-emergence of populism in Poland. With an all but absent left, the anti-neoliberal position in Poland emerged from the right. The article explores the processes associated with this and critically evaluates the populist turn asking if this is a rejection of neoliberalism or whether recombinant populism is increasingly compatible with contemporary neoliberalism. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with post-communist transition, first through Shock Therapy, second through Europeanization, and more recently through the so-called global financial crisis, former dissidents have been co-opted into the reproduction of neoliberalism. In the absence of a more forceful left response in Poland, the population has proclaimed its outrage with the hardships of post-communism by discovering a captivating message from the populists. The emergence of populist social forces has become one of the mechanisms for the disenfranchised to make sense of the pressures of neoliberalization. Populism, nationalism and neoliberalism can happily co-exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Indian economy suffered a balance of payment crisis in 1991, which provided the context for the rolling out of neoliberal policies, also referred to as the New Economic Policy in India. This paper examines the national and global causes and context of India's economic crisis and adoption of neoliberal policies. While grounding my analysis in historical-geographical materialism, I argue that India's economic crisis was a product of certain contingent conditions. I draw attention to India's pre-neoliberal economic regime and analyse how the earlier-established relationship between revenue generation and expenditure ran into trouble; what changes occurred in the organization and management of revenues and capital; nature of interventions of the state in the circulation of capital; changes in the physical aspects of circulation of commodities, together with foreign trade and the formation of the 'world market'; and the rise of the United States as the only global superpower. I conclude that India's economic crisis of 1990-91, and the neoliberal policies that followed, are products of contingent historical and geographical conditions. A teleological approach towards examining global capitalism and production of economic crisis often neglect such contingencies and provide a set of causalities that may, at best, be classified as incomplete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author offers a commentary on Marion Maddox’s and Nicolas de Bremond d’Ars’s articles in this journal. He suggests that taking into account macro-level changes in political economy is the key to understanding many current debates in the sociology of religion. He situates the Maddox and de Bremond d’Ars texts in the context of contemporary scholarship on religion and economy and discusses whether a new political economy of religions is emerging with reference to a growing economic reasoning among religions, new forms of religion and Church–State relations. The author raises many questions on the nature of contemporary religious change and the specific role of global capitalism and neoliberalism. He also suggests that religions will both adapt to and take advantage of the new state of affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]