Today’s episode is the first part of a conversation with Nicolas Pons-Vignon who played an instrumental role in setting up Aporde, the African Programme on Rethinking Development Economics, a unique training programme teaching heterodox development economics in South Africa. In this episode, we explore Nicolas’ personal research background and his outlook on South Africa’s post-apartheid developmental trajectory. We talk about some of the root causes of South African deindustrialization, the reception of neoliberal ideas by policymakers, the policy impact of neoclassical orthodoxy in economics ..read more

In today’s episode, I’m talking with Ayşe Zarakol from Cambridge University about the crisis of the Liberal International Order (LIO). Ayşe's work explores the contradictions of the LIO as a hierarchical order premised on the notions of freedom, rationality and equal participation: she examines how anti-liberal discontents in the western Core blame it for undermining their status in the global World System, while conversely  critics on the Semi-Periphery  see it as reproducing power asymmetries  benefiting the Core. Ayşe  examines the surprising connections and hyridization ..read more

In this episode, I invited Jennifer Bair and  Benjamin Selwyn to share their insights on the World Bank’s 2020 World Development Report. The WDR is the World Bank’s flagship publication, which aims at defining a hegemonic framework for thinking about development. In 2020, the WDR was entitled “Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains”. Jennifer and Benjamin both recently published critical papers on the  WDR 2020: We talk about the methodological and theoretical contradictions of the WDR, what it says about the strange non-death of neoliberalism, but also how the Glo ..read more

In today’s episode, we examine the interdependence between urban displacements, surplus populations and surplus capital in Susanne Soederberg’s recent book “Urban Displacements. Governing Surplus and Survival in Global Capitalism” published in late 2020 with Routledge.  We explore the links between surplus money and surplus workers, social and rental housing, precarious work and urban poverty under capitalism, but also the political role of state actors in the  reproduction of surplus capital and surplus populations  producing cycles of urban displacements. Check out Susanne's ..read more

Today I am joined with Thomas Marois from the School of Oriental and African Studies to discuss the backdrop to his latest book  "Public Banks. Decarbonisation, Definancialisation and Democratisation" which is coming out with Cambridge University Press in May 2021. Critical social scientists have abundantly analyzed the ideas, institutions and power relations sustaining financialization - as well as the social and environmental dislocations it produces. Concrete, normative propositions about institutions that could offer alternatives are much rarer: Tom’s new book synthesizes his long emp ..read more

Pritish Behuria from the University of Manchester has a long expertise in studying industrial policy and comparative developmental trajectories in Sub-Saharan Africa. In today’s episode, we first talk about the broader context of a supposedly post-neoliberal developmental framework where industrial policy is again on the agenda - even though problems such as fiscal space, structural change, access to technology and dependency on foreign capital have changed little if at all. Pritish also shares his analysis of the Rwandan case - the apparent success story of a  "growth miracle", which som ..read more

Today I’m talking with Jathan Sadowski from Monash University about the economic and political dimensions of digital capitalism. An emerging consensus sees digital data, its extraction and the concentration of Big Tech as signalling a dramatic shift towards a new age of “digital feudalism”: The story goes that digital services with minimal marginal costs enabled unprecedented market concentration in the hands of giant corporations, which  thrive on capturing rents in the form of data they mine from end users. For many liberal scholars, this marks a dysfunctional phase of capitalism where ..read more

I am talking today with Zoltán Ginelli, a Hungarian critical geographer whose research repositions the semi-peripheral experience of Hungarian modernization in a global context, by studying the many points of connections linking peoples, ideas, expertise, institutions and political utopias in Hungary to other peripheries in the postcolonial Global South. Zoltán has co-curated a fantastic exhibition in Budapest entitled  Transperiphery Movement, where he examines these trans-peripheral connections in collaboration with a host of artists and scholars. We talk about Zoltán’s own research on ..read more

Today I am talking about China’s engagement in Central Asia with Niva Yau Tsz Yan from the OSCE Academy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. A region often overlooked by Western  media and academic research, Central Asia plays a central role in China's Belt and Road Initiative. Niva clarifies the relationship between China’s BRI projects in Central Asia and the militarisation of the South China Sea, and how Central Asia functions as a testing ground for initiatives that China seeks to export even further. She points out that the BRI is more than gigantic construction projects: digital soft infrastruct ..read more

State capitalism is today a label  often applied to China, Russia or the Arab Gulf as a model threatening to displace Western liberal conceptions of insulated markets driven by fair competition and minimal state interventions. In this episode, I'm asking  Ilias Alami from Maastricht University to unpack the concept: Rejecting a Western liberal Orientalizing discourse, which locates state capitalism beyond the West, Ilias argues on the contrary that the concept can be useful for understanding a restructuring of the State in both advanced and emerging market economies. Ilias points to ..read more