Archive
From Class to Citizenship. Global Inequality and Social Mobility in the Twentieth Century
Dongen, E.A.M. van
In this thesis migration flows are related to wage inequality for the period 1960-2010. Bilateral migration flows are considered both from the perspective of the sending country and from the perspective of the receiving country. Wages are differentiated by three skill levels and nationality, facilitating an evaluation of the relationship between migration and inequality between and within countries. Countries are clustered into world-regions based on income and migration flows. Global relationships between migration and inequality were ambiguous, but on the level of world-regions distinct and clear effects of migration on wage growth were found: while inequality increases by migration flows between countries in the western world, migration often has a beneficial effect in lower income countries. The purpose of this thesis was to develop a new methodology in global historical development studies which takes into account distinct regional features, using modern computational techniques.
The Rules of the Game: Allende’s Chile, the United States and Cuba, 1970-1973
Harmer, Tanya (2008)
This thesis is an international history of Chile and inter-American relations during the presidency of Salvador Allende. On the one hand, it investigates the impact external actors and international affairs had on Chilean politics up to and immediately following the brutal coup d’etat that overthrew Allende on 11 September 1973. On the other hand, it explores how the rise and fall of Allende’s peaceful democratic road to socialism affected the Cold War in Latin America and international affairs beyond. Based on multi-archival research, online resources and interviews conducted in Havana and Santiago, it places Chile – and the regional and international context in which Allende existed – at the heart of a story that has too often been told from Washington’s perspective and in isolation from the history of Latin American and Third World politics. It argues that the direct significance Allende’s Chile had for Latin America – and more specifically, the Southern Cone – between 1970 and 1973 was to reinvigorate a battle for control of the continent between those who sought socialist revolution and those who wanted to destroy it.
Read more
Chris Dietrich (2014) Allende, the Third World, and Neoliberal Imperialism
Dissent in Economics: Making Radical Political Economics and Post Keynesian Economics, 1960-1980
Jorge Fernandes Mata, Tiago (2006)
The history of dissent in economics has thus far been subject to scant interest. The existing scholarship, authored by dissenters probing their own past, has failed to address the crucial questions of how dissent emerged and rooted itself. This study is about two dissenting communities, Radical Political Economics and Post Keynesian Economics. I review the circumstances that led to their emergence in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I draw from the histories of religious and scientific dissent to explore the making of the dissenters’ challenge to the economics orthodoxy. Notably, I use the concept of boundary work to analyse the debates between dissenters and mainstream. The history of Radical Political Economics begins with the founding in 1968 of the Union for Radical Political Economics. Onto this Union converged a generation of young radicalised academics that sought to unite their political interests and their scholarly pursuits. After a period devoted to the design of a “paradigm of conflict,” radicals turned to outreach work with popular movements. The new commitment brought divisive political identities into their Union that barred any agreement on a programme to transform economics. Post Keynesian Economics emerged in the aftermath of debates on capital theory between Cambridge left Keynesians and neoclassical economists. With the conviction that the debates signalled the emergence of a new theory in economics, American dissenters decided to ally with the Cambridge critics. The content of the alliance was redefined many times in the 1970s by a succession of spokespersons for the group. Of this period resulted a weakly bound community joined by a sense of shared ancestry. The two case studies reveal the diverse resources and allies that dissenters mustered for their battle with the economics orthodoxy. They show how the dissenters’ challenge shaped the boundaries of their communities and the content of their identity.
Race, Capital, and the Politics of Solidarity: Radical Internationalism in the 21st Century
Danewid, Ida (2018)
This thesis interrogates the absence of questions of race, colonialism, and their contemporary legacies in the philosophical literature on global justice and cosmopolitan ethics. What are the ethical, political, and material consequences of these “unspeakable things unspoken”, and what would it mean for cosmopolitanism to take seriously the problem of the global colour line? The thesis provides a tentative answer to these questions through a close engagement with contemporary debates about the meaning and purpose of international solidarity. It demonstrates that critical and liberal approaches often help reproduce and legitimise, rather than challenge and transcend, the current unjust and unequal racialized global order. Drawing on Cedric Robinson and the literature on racial capitalism, it interrogates how solidarity can be decolonised and reconceived so as to better attend to the materiality of the global colour line. Through a close reading of the European migrant crisis, recent forms of Black-Palestinian solidarity, and the ongoing struggle for decolonisation in South Africa, it identifies an alternative internationalist imaginary that grows out of the solidarities forged in the struggle against imperialism, patriarchy, and racial capitalism. This is a radicalised and decolonised emancipatory project which retrieves the idea of universal history and total critique, but does so without invoking Eurocentric ideas of progress and teleology. In an era of Trump, Brexit, and global fascist resurgence—where the “white working class” frequently is juxtaposed with “immigrants”, and identity politics blamed for the demise of the organised Left—such an internationalist vision is urgently needed.
Conflict on High: the Bolivian Revolution and the United States, 1961-1964
Field, Thomas C., Jr (2010)
Despite receiving massive injections of US foreign aid in 1961-1964, Bolivia has so far escaped the attention of scholars of American foreign policy toward Latin America during early 1960s. Yet only a thorough analysis of the Alliance for Progress in Bolivia can properly account for the reasons why the highest per capita recipient of Alliance aid funds entered a long period of military rule on 4 November 1964. Most previous accounts have blamed the military coup on the CIA, or the Pentagon, thus acquitting Kennedy-era aid programs of any complicity. This thesis argues that, on the contrary, Alliance programs played the central role in building up the Bolivian armed forces, both through civic action programs in the countryside and harsh labor reforms that were implemented through military force. The narrative suggests that aggressive ideologies of Third World development can often fuel geostrategic foreign interventions that rely heavily on authoritarian regimes. Rather than being a work of US imperialism, the following narrative suggests that the 1964 coup d’etat was actually a reaction against the heavy-hand wielded by the politicized intervention represented by Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress.
The Origins of Economic Inequality between Nations: An Historical Synthesis of Western Theories on Development and Underdevelopment
Ramirez-Faria, C.B (1990)
This dissertation examines Western views on the relations between the West and the rest of the world in order to discover explanations for the origins of the economic inequalities between nations as manifested in the contemporary division between the developed and the underdeveloped countries. This research is focused on three distinct chronological and intellectual phases: 1) “perception of differences” (from classical Antiquity to the 18th century); 2) Eurocentrism and the anti-imperialist reaction (19th century and up to World War II); and 3) capitalist “developmentalism” and the Marxist general theory of economic imperialism (after WWII), The first two phases trace the sources and the evolution of the concepts underlying the theories analysed in the third part, which is the principal and most extensive of the three. The third phase also includes an investigation of the most recent reactions within the developmentalist and the Marxist camps against, respectively, the so-called orthodoxy of development economics and dependency theory. It synthesizes contemporary research on the development of West European capitalism insofar as it sheds light on long-term influences on the appearance of underdevelopment. Aside from the systematic discussion and criticism of the theories themselves, the research yields a “unified field” approach to the problems and issues of underdevelopment, and it further allows a summatory evaluation of the general question of the possibilities of over-all Third World economic development.
Download
J.A. Hobson’s Approach to International Relations: An Exposition and Critique
Long, David (1991)
This thesis argues that Hobson’s approach to international relations coheres around his use of the biological analogy of society to an organism. An aspect of this ‘organic analogy’ – the theory of surplus value – is central to Hobson’s modification of liberal thinking on international relations and his reformulated ‘new liberal internationalism’. The first part outlines a theoretical framework for Hobson’s discussion of international relations. His theory of surplus value posits cooperation as a factor in the production of value understood as human welfare. The organic analogy links this theory of surplus value to Hobson’s holistic ‘sociology’. Hobson’s new liberal internationalism is an extension of his organic theory of surplus value. This approach is contrasted to the domestic analogy and economism as bases of liberal internationalist thought. The second part examines Hobson’s ‘sociology’ of international relations. Hobson’s theory of imperialism is placed in the context of his theory of surplus value. Imperialism is sectionalism in the international system. For Hobson, internationalism advances from the isolation of the pre-industrial era, through the non interventionism of Cobden, to positive internationalism, including some international economic management. Hobson’s proposals for international government rely on the domestic analogy. A broader vision of world society, however, emerges from the extension of the organic analogy to international relations. The third part locates Hobson in international relations scholarship. Hobson’s work is not straightforwardly idealist. His new liberal internationalism modifies liberal thought towards institutional solutions to international problems. It is concluded that some aspects of his analysis remain of interest to the contemporary international relations theorist.
Read more
- Shachi Amdekar (2010) Hobson’s Choice: Revisiting The Economics of Imperialism
- Hauner, Thomas and Milanovic, Branko and Naidu, Suresh (2017) Inequality, Foreign Investment, and Imperialism.
A Critical Geopolitics of American “Imperialism” and Grand Strategy (Post-9/11): the Role of Language and Ideology
Koluksuz, Melissa (2015)
Koluksuz (2015) examines the methods through which the administration of George W. Bush utilized the events surrounding the attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11) to legitimize a type of imperial American foreign policy. The central argument of this research is that 9/11 was used by the Bush administration to present a perceived shift in the danger and threat that America faced, thus legitimating a more aggressive foreign policy, which this thesis categorizes as ‘informal imperialism’. It argues that an American grand strategy of global dominance is not new, but rather constitutes a continuation of policies whose ideological roots date back to the 1990s.
Koluksuz (2015) explores this argument through the lens of critical geopolitics (CGP), which provides a critical and interdisciplinary framework for unpacking geographical assumptions in geopolitics and questions how they function within ideology. CGP serves as a framework for understanding the use of language in constructing and normalizing imperial policies in the United States after 9/11. Methodologically, this thesis used critical discourse analysis (CDA), which provides tools for analyzing discourse, and examining how language is the key to understanding how power functions. He then deploys a critical analysis and definition of American imperialism and the contributions of CGP to the debate of a ‘post 9/11 world’. A CDA of the writings of key people in the Bush administration traces their foreign policy and its ideological roots. Further, a CDA of post 9/11 discourses focuses on the changing geography of danger, fear, threat and the act of Othering as it relates to a post 9/11 world. Finally, a CDA of the discourses surrounding the Global War on Terror is conducted, arguing that the frames set up in relation to a new and dangerous world paved the way for policies that justified a war with Iraq.
Imperialism’ and ‘Anti-Imperialism’ in Mao Zedong: Origins and Development of a Revolutionary Strategy
Deckers, Wolfgang (1997)
The central question which will be considered in this thesis is how Mao Zedong formulated a concept of imperialism and resistance to it, to enable and continue the socialist revolution in China. The specific focus in this thesis is an explanation of how Mao understood imperialism in order to use it and to turn it into anti-imperialism, the origins of his ideas, his theoretical development of it and his application of this idea in practice. At the same time, it will be examined how other aspects of Mao’s thinking were linked to this central, strategic concept. The thesis begins by examining Mao’s connection and indebtedness to Marx and Lenin: this has not yet been done with regard to his use of the concept of ‘imperialism’. This thesis, besides being a contribution to the history of Marxism therefore, aims to fill a gap in research on Mao. It will help to establish how Mao used the concepts of imperialism and anti-imperialism. In addition, my research is part of the discussion as to what degree Marxism has been revised in the process. The argument essentially will be that Mao, basing himself on Marx and Lenin, used their concepts to adapt Marxism-Leninism in a novel manner in Chinese circumstances, first to win the revolution, and then to construct what he regarded as socialism. Thus the thesis will do two things: a) it will clarify Mao’s relationship to Marx and Lenin: Why did Mao’s Marxism-Leninism take the form it did. Did Mao stand on Lenin’s shoulders.; and b) it will contribute to understanding why the Chinese Communist Party won the revolution.
A Critical Examination of the Concept of Imperialism in Marxist and Third World Approaches to International Law
Robert Knox (2014)
During the 2000s the terms ‘imperialism’ and ‘empire’ made a reappearance. This reappearance followed ‘unilateral’ military interventions by the United States and its allies. Because these military interventions were all justified using international legal argument that the international legal discipline also became increasingly concerned with these terms. Given this, it is unsurprising that there also arose two critical schools of thinking about international law, who foregrounded its relationship to imperialism. These were those working in the Marxist tradition and the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) movement. Both of these intellectual movements are contemporary examples of older traditions. Despite this popularity, there has been little sustained attention to the specific concepts of imperialism that underlie these debates. This thesis attempts to move beyond this, through mapping the way in which Marxist and TWAIL scholars have understood imperialism and its relationship to international law. The thesis begins by reconstructing the conceptual history of the terms ‘colonialism’, ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’, drawing out how they are enmeshed in broader theoretical and historical moments. In particular it pays close attention to the historical and political consequences of adopting particular understandings of these concepts. It then examines how these understandings have played out concretely. It reconstructs earlier Third Worldist thinking about imperialism and international law, before showing how contemporary TWAIL scholars have understood this relationship. It then looks at how the Marxist tradition has understood imperialism, before turning specifically to Marxist international legal theory. Finally, it turns to the interrelationship between Marxist and Third Worldist theory, arguing that each tradition can contribute to remedying the limitations in the other. In so doing it also attempts to flag up the complex historical inter-relation between these two traditions of thinking about imperialism and international law
Mr. Rows Namoura Coffee 