This book studies the experiences of Brazil and India, the major economic powerhouses of the 21st century, during the neoliberal era. Both the nations have become important players in global markets and their economic performance has captured the attention of policymakers and academicians across the world. The book explores the patterns of growth and the changing status of human development in the two regions, since the 1980s. In an attempt to better grasp the subtleties of their developmental experiences, it also highlights the political and institutional dynamics that have under girded the liberalization of the two countries.
Latin America has experienced a profound transformation in the first two decades of the 21st century: it has been fully incorporated into the global economy, while excluding regions and populations devalued by the logic of capitalism. Technological modernization has gone hand-in-hand with the reshaping of old identities and the emergence of new ones. The transformation of Latin America has been shaped by social movements and political conflicts. The neoliberal model that dominated the first stage of the transformation induced widespread inequality and poverty, and triggered social explosions that led to its own collapse. A new model, neo-developmentalism, emerged from these crises as national populist movements were elected to government in several countries. The more the state intervened in the economy, the more it became vulnerable to corruption, until the rampant criminal economy came to penetrate state institutions. Upper middle classes defending their privileges and citizens indignant because of corruption of the political elites revolted against the new regimes, undermining the model of neo-developmentalism. In the midst of political disaffection and public despair, new social movements, women, youth, indigenous people, workers, peasants, opened up avenues of hope against the background of darkness invading the continent. This book, written by two leading scholars of Latin America, provides a comprehensive and up-do-date account of the new Latin America that is in the process of taking shape today. It will be an indispensable text for students and scholars in Latin American Studies, sociology, politics and media and communication studies, and anyone interested in Latin America today.
Why do so few countries achieve development success? Achieving development requires many changes over a short period of time, generating instability and risk. It is a deep and integrated economy of change involving force, strategic thinking, and ideological conviction - it emerges when successful development is seen as necessary for the survival of a political order. Developmentalism engages with the moral issues that this raises. Developmentalism: The Normative and Transformative within Capitalism uses a historical comparative approach to understand development as a transformation which involves a deep and integrated political economy of change - a shift from a state of 'capital-ascendance' to 'capital dominance'. It is only through a transformation towards capital dominance that mass poverty reduction and the construction of a commonwealth are possible. However, capitalist development is extremely difficult and requires a highly exacting political endeavour. The politics of development is conceptualized as developmentalism: a strategy and ideology in which governments exercise heavy directive power, endure instability and crisis, and secure a rudimentary legitimacy for their efforts. This book argues that developmentalism requires a conflation of successful capitalist transformation with some form of existential insecurity of the state itself. It flourishes when capitalist transformation connects to profound questions of sovereignty, statehood, nation-building, and elite survival. Developmentalism shows deep contextualisation of capitalist transformation as well as the massive improvements in material life that it has generated.
Winner of the 2019 Global and Transnational Sociology Best Book Award, American Sociological Association Winner of the 2019 Political Economy of World System (PEWS) Distinguished Book Award, American Sociological Association Received Honorable Mention for the 2019 Asia/Transnational Book Award, American Sociological Association Since the mid-2000s, India has been beset by widespread farmer protests against land dispossession. Dispossession Without Development demonstrates that beneath these conflicts lay a profound shift in regimes of dispossession. While the postcolonial Indian state dispossessed land mostly for public-sector industry and infrastructure, since the 1990s state governments have become land brokers for private real estate capital. Using the case of a village in Rajasthan that was dispossessed for a private Special Economic Zone, the book ethnographically illustrates the exclusionary trajectory of capitalism driving dispossession in contemporary India. Taking us into the lives of diverse villagers in "Rajpura," the book meticulously documents the destruction of agricultural livelihoods, the marginalization of rural labor, the spatial uneveness of infrastructure provision, and the dramatic consequences of real estate speculation for social inequality and village politics. Illuminating the structural underpinnings of land struggles in contemporary India, this book will resonate in any place where "land grabs" have fueled conflict in recent years.
Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its “free market” strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country’s poor, including women’s groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women’s participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork and employing an approach combining political economy and cultural politics, Amy Lind charts the growth of several strands of women’s activism and identifies how they have helped redefine, often in contradictory ways, the real and imagined boundaries of neoliberal development discourse and practice. In her analysis of this ambivalent and “unfinished” cultural project of modernity in the Andes, she examines state policies and their effects on women of various social sectors; women’s community development initiatives and responses to the debt crisis; and the roles played by feminist “issue networks” in reshaping national and international policy agendas in Ecuador and in developing a transnationally influenced, locally based feminist movement.
Growth against Democracy: Savage Developmentalism in the Modern World, by H.L.T. Quan, is a radical critique of development as a modern project. Using three historical cases (Brazil-Japan, China-Africa, and US-Iraq), Quan probes the discursive practices of modern development, exploring the coercive and juridical dimensions of trade, diplomacy and war and their impact. This study builds on the critical works of neoliberalism, capitalist development, and empire to lay the groundwork for an honest assessment of neoliberal economics and foreign conducts and their impact on human life.
This book collects essays on the political economy of Brazil, focusing on the administrations led by the Workers’ Party, under Presidents Lula and Dilma Rousseff (2003-16). The essays examine the economic, political, and social aspects of these governments.
This book is among the first to take the poverty reduction paradigm as its central focus. Offering a comprehensive introduction, overview and critique, it traces the emergence of the framework and illustrates its consequences with global case studies.
