The neoliberal free market has been 'constitutionalised' through law in Europe and elsewhere as a way to prevent challenges to financial and corporate power. The new technocracy put in place poses a serious danger to democracy and freedom.
Growing public awareness of corporate violations has led to various initiatives to improve corporate behaviour but these serve largely to beautify the beast. What options are on the table that could rein in corporate power and lay foundations for a new economy?
This essay presents a conceptual perspective on the dominant and novel logic informing today’s social movement-based counter-power. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s image of the rhizome, this essay examines the nature and workings as well as the challenges and shortcomings of contemporary movement-based counter-power.
With the postmodern rejection of the grand narratives, the academia has participated in fetishizing fragmented resistance. This paper critiques these fetishized forms of resistance and argues that the fragmented resistance recommends compromise with and adaptation to the manipulative system on the excuse of prioritizing survival.
Different mining company use influence strategies to gain community acceptance or a social license to operate from communities who are initially opposed to their projects. For instance they try to weaken and divide community movements opposed to their projects by making them more dependent on them.
Social movements in southern Asia have been shaped by the social relations dominated by the elites of the south Asian societies who share some common features in terms of culture and ideology. The movements have become contested power games around the issues of class, caste/ethnicity, gender, region and development.
This article delves into the underpinnings of society of a post-colonial nation, exploring the connections to those international actors that still influence its innermost levels. It looks at the operation of power in the international system, its impulse for endurance through innovations, and the spaces for resistance produced in consequence.
Banking profits after tax conditions created a mutually beneficial relationship between American banking and government, with the former earning higher profits and the latter higher tax revenues. This symbiosis influenced the impact and response to the global financial crisis.
We are blind to the transformations that protest effects, because we are wedded to theories of power that are ill-equipped to explain processes of social change. Conventional analyses of power present individuals as internalizing social structures in ways that govern their actions, and negate their agency and resistance. There needs to be a better explanation and thus enabling of social change.
While most debates attempt to explain why the adaptation of Western institutions and norms to other contexts is easier said than done, this paper takes issue on a more fundamental level. It scrutinises the peace that common-sense suggests we are living in. It argues that while war is the violent reordering of power relations, the current state of peace is the violent maintenance of power relations.
Only through understanding the functioning of power can we effectively resist the operations of capitalism bringing about global ecological catastrophe and begin to recompose our social and ecological relations. The further challenge explored by this paper becomes how to connect the multiplicity of resistances into a global rhizomatic network of experiments in practices of disobedience and of striving to realize new worlds.
The opportunity and power of the academic industrial complex to influence scholarship is great. This essay primarily uses the Johns Hopkins Industrial Complex in the U.S., a prestigious and world renown teaching, research, and health institution, as a case study to highlight the influence of public:private partnerships in growing power and corporatization of the academy with resulting corruption of scholarship and propagation of inequity.
Corporations donate to both sides of politics to ensure sympathetic policies to them. When both major parties share a policy stance it is effectively removed from democratic scrutiny.
Despite the pervasive strength of neoliberalism, activist practices including community organising, reciprocal working, commoning and conviviality are building spaces for relationships and learning and showing that resistance is not futile.
This essay considers the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the World Social Forum (WSF) as example enactments and representations of a global field of power.
In a world of globalised industry, where many States’ policy has increasingly been dictated by private sector interests and transnational corporations, it is worth examining how the Right to Food and the emergence of social movements that represent peoples’ local food systems and food sovereignty are swaying the balance in their favour.
Corruption and power are currently framed as individual acts without understanding the broader network of power and how it influences access and exclusion in Zimbabwe. Removing corrupt politicians is not sufficient to eradicate poverty but what is required is a fundamental change of the relations of power based on unequal structures.
