Handbook of Neoliberalism. Dr. Simon Springer, PHD - Book Proposal

Book Proposal Springer et al.
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I. Proposed Title & Editor Information

Handbook of Neoliberalism

Dr. Simon Springer, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Geography, University of Victoria
Victoria, BC, Canada
springer@uvic.ca

Dr. Kean Birch, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Social Science, York University
Toronto, ON, Canada
kean@yorku.ca

Dr. Julie MacLeavy, PhD
Senior Lecturer
School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol
Bristol, United Kingdom
julie.macleavy@bristol.ac.uk

II. Description & Rationale

The Routledge Handbook of Neoliberalism seeks to offer a comprehensive overview of the
phenomenon of neoliberalism by examining the range of ways that it has been theorized,
promoted, critiqued, and put into practice in a variety of geographical locations and
institutional frameworks. Neoliberalism is easily one of the most powerful discourses to
emerge within the social sciences in the last two decades, and the number of scholars who
write about this dynamic and unfolding process of socio-spatial transformation is
astonishing. Even more surprising though is that there has, until now, not been an attempt
to provide a wide-ranging volume that engages with the multiple registers in which
neoliberalism has evolved. The Handbook of Neoliberalism accordingly serves as an essential
guide to this vast intellectual landscape. With proposed contributions from over 50 leading
authors, the Handbook of Neoliberalism will offer a systematic overview of neoliberalisms
origins, political implications, social tensions, spaces, natures and environments, and
aftermaths in addressing ongoing and emerging debates. Numerous books have been
published on neoliberalism, including important edited volumes, but none of these
contributions have attempted to bring the diverse scope and wide-ranging coverage that we
plan to incorporate here. Most of the edited volumes and monographs on neoliberalism that
have been published to date have a very specific thematic focus, either on particular
empirical case studies, or alternatively attempt to wrestle with a specific theoretical concern.
In contrast, the Routledge Handbook of Neoliberalism aims to provide the first comprehensive
overview of the field.
With authors working at institutions around the world, the Handbook of Neoliberalism
will offer a thorough examination of how neoliberalism is understood by social scientists
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working from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. Our goal is to advance the established and
emergent debates in a field that has grown exponentially over the past two decades,
coinciding with the meteoric rise of neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology, state form,
policy and program, and governmentality. In short, the Handbook of Neoliberalism will
intervene by both outlining how theorizations of neoliberalism have evolved and by
exploring new research agendas that we hope will inform policy making and activism. The
Handbook of Neoliberalism will include a substantive introductory chapter and seven main
thematic sections. By presenting a comprehensive examination of the field, this edited
volume will serve as an invaluable resource for undergraduates, graduate students, and
professional scholars alike. We envision the book as both a teaching guide and a reference
for human geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, heterodox
economists, and others working on questions of neoliberalism and its multifarious effects.

III. Timeline for Delivery of Completed Manuscript

This is large-scale project that will take considerable time to pull together based on the
number of potential authors involved, securing commitments from them to write chapters,
and the typical delays that come with attempting to get very busy people to adhere to
deadlines. Contingent upon our efficiency in recruiting authors, we expect that December
2014 would be an approximate timeline of when we would expect chapters to be returned to
us for comments prior to external peer review. We anticipate that the final volume will be
submitted for review in the summer of 2015.

IV. Table of Contents

Introduction Simon Springer, Kean Birch, and Julie MacLeavy

ORIGINS

1. Historicising the Neoliberal Spirit of Capitalism Matthew Eagleton-Pierce (SOAS,
University of London) - me7@soas.ac.uk

Neoliberalism is often read as the latest revision or revival of the liberal tradition. Yet
plotting what is new within neoliberalism, however precisely defined, is riven with
conceptual and methodological problems. Inspired by Boltanski and Chiapello (2007), this
chapter offers a particular framing of neoliberalism as the latest ideological spirit in the
history of capitalism. This spirit encompasses relatively stable schemas of justification,
including patterns of thought that are grounded in lived experiences beyond the world of
technical experts. The chapter charts and clarifies this terrain in two ways. First, it discusses
how many rationalities associated with neoliberalism can be tied to three master themes in
the history of liberal thought: (1) individualism, whereby the individual is granted moral,
ontological priority over the collective; (2) universalism, such as seen in the expansionary
tendencies towards a world market; and (3) meliorism, whereby humans are claimed to have
the potential to improve and remake themselves. While acknowledging that these themes
have contemporary imprints on ideas and policies linked with neoliberalism, the second part
of the chapter urges caution with imputing that neoliberalism has some bounded, historical
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coherence. In doing so, the argument dissects how each of these themes can also feature
contradictions between theory and practice. It will also be suggested that such practical
tensions partly account for the regenerative capacity of contemporary neoliberalism to
legitimise itself and contain rival critiques that may aim to undermine processes of
accumulation.

2. The Ascendency of Chicago Neoliberalism Edward Nik-Khah (Roanoke College)
and Rob van Horn (University of Rhode Island) - nik@roanoke.edu, rvanhorn@mail.uri.edu

The Chicago School of Economics was one of the primary formations in the post-World
War II US economics profession, ascending in a little over three decades from a position of
relative weakness to become Americas most powerful economic program. During this time,
the formation of the Chicago School was conditioned by its status as the primary American
outpost of the Mont Pe!lerin Society. This chapter examines the relationship between these
two institutions. We emphasize in the rich interplay between the distinct intellectual and
institutional programs of the three most crucial figures at ChicagoMilton Friedman, Aaron
Director, and George Stiglerand their work locations, the Department of Economics, the
Law School, and the Graduate School of Business respectively. Our analysis devotes special
attention to their views about knowledge, democracy, and the appropriate role of the
economist. In particular, we examine Chicago scholars engagement in economics
imperialism, in redirecting state activities, and in reengineering science. We conclude with
some observations about the status of the Chicago School today.

3. Neoliberalism and the Transnational Capitalist Class William K. Carroll
(University of Victoria) - wcarroll@uvic.ca

Although a literature on the transnational capitalist class (TCC) began to form in the 1970s,
along with the first stirrings of neoliberal public policy, both of these intersecting
phenomena have deeper lineages in elite capitalist networks, transnationalizing investment,
and the interaction between the two. This chapter traces the development of capitalist
internationalism, initially within the International Chamber of Commerce (established in
1919), then within the Mont Pelerin Society (established in 1947) and later within such peak
elite organizations as the World Economic Forum. These think tanks and elite forums have
provided crucial sites for hammering out what became a neoliberal consensus in a
transnational process of policy-planning, linked informally to states and to
intergovernmental bodies. In the late 20
th
Century, as corporate capital became increasingly
transnational, an international elite network took shape, linking together leading corporate
capitalists and neoliberal policy groups and affording the TCC some capacity to act in the
global political field as a class-for-itself. However, the TCC is not an economically and
politically homogeneous entity, and neoliberalism itself is a variegated and evolving project.
The chapter takes up the relationship between class fractions of the TCC and variants of
neoliberal doctrine, as presented in research by Van der Pijl and Robinson and Harris, as
well as recent developments in neoliberalism and the TCC, particularly the emergence of
climate capitalism and the green economy.

4. Theorizing Neoliberalizations Kevin Ward (University of Manchester) and Kim
England (University of Washington) - kevin.ward@manchester.ac.uk, England@uw.edu
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This chapter takes stock of the various attempts across the social sciences over the last
fifteen years to theorize neo-liberalism. This period saw it face unprecedented analytical
scrutiny from a range of theoretical positions. A rather crude characterization is that in
exploring the process of neo-liberalization, political economists saw patterns, points of
connection and programmatic features. Alternatively, post-structuralists saw contingency,
difference and discreteness. The chapter reviews these caricatures, but also examines the
points of agreement and overlap amongst those who have sought to theorize neo-
liberalization head-on. In addition, the chapter considers the challenges that the post-2007
financial crisis has posed to earlier attempts to theorize neoliberalization. The chapter
includes a discussion of what sorts of explanations we are currently left with when much of
the industrialized Global North continues to suffer economically but the neo-liberal models
that created the pre-conditions for the crisis seem to remain largely unchallenged.

5. Hegemony Dieter Plehwe (WZB Berlin Social Science Center) - dieter.plehwe@wzb.eu

Neoliberalism emerged in the course of the 1930s in confrontations with economic planning
perspectives advanced by socialist and Keynesian as well as populist and fascist thinkers.
Neoliberals confronted at the time what they considered an anti-liberal, collectivist
hegemonic constellation. The post WW II configuration in turn consolidated welfare
economics, welfare state capitalism and state interventionism in the Western capitalist world
in addition to the fortification of planned economies under the guard of the Soviet Union.
Neoliberals advocating market economic principles, competition, individualism and limited
statehood thus continued to face a hostile environment in most Western countries with the
notable exception of the Federal Republic of Germany (Social Market Economy) and to a
lesser extent the United States during the McCarthy years. Philosophically and academically,
let alone politically, neoliberal intellectuals were on the defense. The founding of the Mont
Plerin Society by F.A. von Hayek, Wilhelm Rpke and Albert Hunold among others in
1947 can therefore be considered a counter-hegemonic effort, and clearly was so understood
by F.A. von Hayek in particular. His essay "Intellectuals and Socialism advocated a long
term hegemonic strategy based on considerable academic research and debate as well as non-
academic networking and dissemination efforts. Modelled after the Fabian Society, Hayek
and his disciples constructed what is best understood as an anti-passive revolution strategy in
critical distance to the realities of capitalist transformation in the age of Fordism (welfare
state capitalism). When the crisis of the 1970s (stagflation) unfolded, organized neoliberals
were well positioned and increasingly well-funded to expand their influence within and
beyond the academic sphere. The era of social liberal hegemony arguably came to an end
ushering in the era of neoliberal hegemonic constellations. While the collapse of the Soviet
Union and socialist planning in the second world and the so-called Washington Consensus
in development politics reinforced neoliberal hegemony, the various financial and economic
crisis of the 1990s and 2000s and the global financial and economic crisis since 2008
challenge the continuing viability of neoliberal approaches to economic and in the
meantime social, environmental etc. policy making. While a Gramscian understanding of
hegemony does not require a near complete consensus with regard to key policy issues as
sometimes suggested, neoliberal hegemonic constellations appear to be less able to secure
the stable functioning of institutions around the world, and to sufficiently integrate
marginalized and oppositional forces into the historical bloc. It is nevertheless too early to
speak of a post-neoliberal age considering the strength and force of neoliberal leadership in
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areas like the European Union (austerity), or the deepening of transatlantic integration
(TTIP) vis--vis Russia and China in particular. The present transformation of capitalism can
be considered oscillating between the poles of a post-neoliberal Green New Deal on the
one hand, and authoritarian versions of neoliberalism.

6. Governmentality at Work in Shaping a Critical Geographical Politics Nick Lewis
(University of Auckland) - n.lewis@auckland.ac.nz

Foucaults concept of governmentality has been widely deployed in geography to connect
the political and the cultural, the material and the discursive, the ideological and the
technological, and the politics of the subject and the politics of the state. Over a period of
thought dominated by critique of neoliberalism, the coupling neoliberal governmentalities
has become a prominent critical refrain, albeit often consolatory. How effective the coupling
has proven in connecting these different knowledge terrains to establish a space for
developing critical geographical insights is uncertain. In this paper, I trace the ways in which
governmentality has been deployed to shape a post-structuralist political economy (PSPE)
in economic geography, and how in doing so it has opened up less consolatory and more
generative critiques of neoliberalism. As a project of knowledge production PSPE has a
particular geography associated with a long-term critical engagement with the changing
nature, form and work of neoliberal governmentalities in the New Zealand context. It also
has an historicity that has given it a prominence in economic geographys attempts to
grapple with neoliberalism as multiple, grounded, and simultaneously an ideology, a political
programme, and a subjectifying governmental technology. The paper will examine a
genealogy of PSPE to explore possibilities for academic geographers to practice a critical
politics under neoliberalism.

7. Neoliberalism in Question Sally Weller (Monash University) and Phillip ONeil
(University of Western Sydney) - Sally.Weller@monash.edu, p.oneill@uws.edu.au

This chapter offers a critique of the construction of neoliberalism as a variegated, hybrid yet
hegemonic global imaginary, as an idea capable of enrolling all manner of political-economic
change into its purview. We draw on a range of authors to make three arguments. First, that
the necessary fluidity of the definitions of neoliberalism to enable them to incorporate a
range of policy actions and outcomes acts to dull academic argument. Second, that the lazy
use of neoliberalism as a descriptor of observed changes has too often replaced close study
of the relationships among state policies, economies, societies and developmental trajectories
at the national and regional scales. Third, that the political utility of the idea of neoliberalism
as a means of uniting progressive politics is highly questionable. Our title, which echoes the
title of Andrew Sayers 1989 critique of post-Fordism, draws attention the fact that the idea
of neoliberalism is both overly flexible and insufficiently specialised, and that it feeds the
tendency for dualistic thinking, with debates about neoliberalism versus post-neoliberalism
the latest example. Our argument is that as a direct consequence of the misuse of the notion
of neoliberalism, the important detail of political-economic change is too often overlooked.
We advocate more robust debate about the nature of contemporary socioeconomic change
and the perennial issues at stake in explaining continuity and change. We conclude that
removing the word neoliberalism from our analyses would force us all to produce more
careful explanations.

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8. Neoliberalism: From Cultural Phenomenon to Multi-sided Social Fact Stephanie
Mudge (University of California, Davis) - mudge@ucdavis.edu

Albeit contentious and politically loaded, neoliberalism is now a fairly well established term
in the human sciences. Neoliberalism refers to a utopian project of European and American
intellectuals from the late 1930s who considered themselves the bearers of liberal virtues,
and who eventually built a network of academic centers, research institutes, and educational
foundations centered in North America and the United Kingdom. Neoliberalism is, in this
sense, above all a cultural phenomenon: a set of truth claims and an institution-building
project driven by charismatic leaders and rooted in a particular concept of the market as an
organic, natural realm of individual freedom and in which, by contrast, politics,
bureaucracies, and states are threats to be contained. More than a cultural phenomenon,
however, from the late 1960s forward the neoliberal project developed variable linkages to
cross-national struggles over governments and policies, political representation and party
politics, class power, and economic profit. Neoliberalism thus acquired a multi-sided
character that went well beyond its origins. Understanding the specificities of neoliberalism
as a multi-sided social fact and yet avoiding conspiracy theory and eschewing simplistic
conflationsfor instance, treating neoliberalism as a proxy for neoclassical economics,
American hegemony, or political rightnessremains a main challenge for scholarship on
neoliberalism today.

POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS

9. Neoliberal Geopolitics Sue Roberts (University of Kentucky) - geg207@uky.edu

This chapter reviews the main ways geographers and others have considered the relations
between neoliberalism and geopolitics. The review is structured around the ideas of
neoliberalism, geo-economics, and geopolitics. Key works discussed include those by
Luttwak, Silen, Sparke, Coleman, Springer, Cowen and Smith. In addition to providing a
critical review of the relevant literature, the chapter considers the recent US-led wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq and on-going use of drone strikes by the US as examples of neoliberal
geopolitics. Broadly speaking, the emphasis is on the relations between the generalization of
the logics of the market (neoliberalism) and ways of viewing and engaging the world
premised on the use of force. As a rhetoric claiming the desirability of a flat world,
neoliberalism would seem to be a kind of anti-geopolitics; relegating considerations of inter-
state rivalry to the sidelines, while an unfettered capitalism takes center stage, integrating and
enriching all who participate. However, this chapter argues that neoliberalism and geopolitics
have proven quite compatible. Recalling Shakespeares phrase Why, then the worlds mine
oyster we might do well to consider Pistols subsequent line in the play. It is, Which I with
sword will open.

10. Neoliberal Transformations of State and Sovereignty: On the Dynamics of Revival
and Reconfiguration Brenda Chalfin (University of Florida) - bchalfin@anthro.ufl.edu

If the formal origins of neoliberalism can be traced to the convergent crises and solutions of
Reaganism and Thatcherism in the Global North, thirty-years hence neoliberalism as a
philosophy, policy agenda and catch-all explanation of the condition of the present has
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become a world-wide phenomenon. Among neoliberalisms twists, turns and unintended
consequences is the fate of the sovereign state. Originally slated for radical surgery, these
reforms including the abolition of social service provision, state-owned industries, and most
dramatically, the dismantling of the regulatory edifice that was the hallmark of liberal
democratic regimes of the twentieth century. Caught in neoliberalisms path of creative
destruction, state institutional forms across the globe have survived the neoliberal onslaught
to be configured anew. This essay addresses three aspects of this dynamic emerging during
the past decades of high neoliberalism: the rebuilding of state authority in alliance with
supra- and international organizations; the merging of state agendas with the imperatives of
finance capital ; and the refiguring of the nation-state imaginary in the neoliberal mold,
rendering sovereignty a marketable commodity. These processes are explored from the
perspective of polities of the Global North and South as well as the broad swath of
transitioning states in between. A central concern will be to capture diversity as well as
identify cross-cutting trends that mark late-modern statehood world-wide.

11. Neoliberalism and Relational Citizenship: Speed, Subjectivity, and Space
Kathryn Mitchell (University of Washington) - kmitch@u.washington.edu

Citizenship is a process that is formative and relational. The speed associated with fast and
mobile citizenship often entails the slow-down or stoppage of movement for others. The
formation of certain kinds of positive emotions and identities of belonging vis--vis urban,
national, or supranational citizenship frequently corresponds with feelings of exclusion for
the remaining population. Healthy bodies and well-educated minds for some citizens are
achieved through the ill health and ignorance of others. Space is formative in all of these
relational processesthrough enclaving, targeting, deterritorialization, and other
geographical forms of inclusion and separation. In this chapter I identify and discuss the
ways in which the spatial effects of neoliberalization impact citizenship formation and the
relations between individuals and populations around the globe.

12. Development and Neoliberalism David Craig (University of Otago) -
david.craig@otago.ac.nz

International development agencies have been core to global neoliberalisation processes
since the early 1980s, when Regan- appointed World Bank president Alden Clausen turned
the Bank from poverty alleviation towards policy based lending, better known as
Structural Adjustment. Drawing lessons from early reform in Chile, and working in concert
with a wider Washington consensus of Regan- Bush- Clinton administration agencies, the
Bretton Woods organisations continued to lead neoliberal development well into the early
21
st
century. Sidestepping democratic processes and imbuing a sense of crisis, early shock
therapy structural adjustment enacted a core stabilize, liberalize, privatize adjustment
mantra, mainly by reforms orchestrated from central agencies (Treasury, Finance ministries),
often supported by US trained economists (Chicago Boys) or technopoliticians.
Stabilisation meant austerity, and popular reaction to cuts and re-pricings of staple goods
were often violent. Politicians and subsequently Bretton Woods lenders acted to mitigate
deflationary effects through a range of measures: social funds, fast dispersing loans, engaging
NGOs as subcontractors. After a lost decade of negative growth in sub Saharan African
countries, the evident failures of Structural Adjustment led to a series of move to rehabilitate
its primary sponsors and policy settings. The role for the state and its institutions was
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revised, and reforms were re-branded around the more inclusive neoliberal Poverty
Reduction consensus. This, in concert with a revived development security nexus, set
Developments agenda through the 2000s. This chapter charts the rise and partial demise of
neoliberalism in international development, and offers an assessment of its legacy and
prospects.

13. Free Trade and the End of Democracy Jason Hickel (London School of
Economics) - j.e.hickel@lse.ac.uk

Free trade agreements have proliferated across the globe since the early 1990s. Despite their
name, most of these agreements have very little to do with meaningful human freedom, and
rather a lot to do with corporate freedom. In exchange for much-needed access to the
markets of rich countries, poor countries are compelled to accept damaging neoliberal
reforms related to labor standards, pollution laws, public services, and corporate taxes.
Ironically, in the rhetoric of "free trade" the very things that promote real human freedoms -
such as the right of workers to organise, equal access to decent public services, and
safeguards for a healthy environment are cast as somehow anti-democratic, or even
totalitarian. These freedoms are reframed as "red tape", or as "barriers to investment", even
when they have been won by popular grassroots movements exercising democratic
franchise. In this paradigm, democracy itself is cast as anti-democratic, inasmuch as it grants
voters control over the economic policies that affect their lives. We can see this happening
very clearly in two new free trade deals: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
(TTIP), which will govern trade between the US and the European Union, and the Trans-
Pacific Partnership (TPP), which will govern trade between the US and a number of Pacific
nations. These agreements include "investor-state dispute settlement" mechanisms that
grant corporations the power to sue sovereign nations for laws that reduce their profits. In
other words, corporations will be empowered to regulate democratic states, rather than the
other way around. These trade deals also pre-emptively prevent states from making certain
laws that regulate finance and fossil fuels, effectively stripping elected representatives of their
power to protect citizens from economic crisis and climate change. This is the most far-
reaching assault on the ideas of sovereignty and democracy that has ever been attempted in
history. And it is being conducted under the banner of "freedom".

14. The Violence of Neoliberalism Simon Springer (University of Victoria) -
simonspringer@gmail.com

As austerity measures intensity in the wake of the most recent global financial crisis, it is
becoming ever more clear that neoliberalization exhibits a distinct relational connection with
violence. This is not an admonishment of the protests that continue to swell, but rather a
recognition that these movements are in fact pushing back against the violent measures that
have frustrated and demoralized everyday existence under neoliberalism. There is now
considerable room for skepticism with regard to the rising tides lifts all boats discourse that
is perpetuated by proponents of neoliberal ideology, as the free market has categorically
failed at producing a harmonious global village. Promises of utopia are confronted with the
stark dystopian realities that exist in a growing number of countries where neoliberalization
has not resulted in greater peace and prosperity, but in a profound and unmistakable
encounter with violence. This chapter questions how and why neoliberalizing processes
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often result in conflict, arguing that neoliberalism itself might be productively understood as
a particular form of violence.
15. Neoliberalism and the Biopolitical Imagination Nicholas Kiersey (Ohio
University) - kiersey@ohio.edu

Understood perhaps most fundamentally as a critic of liberal government, Foucaults
thoughts on the place of economic thought in our lives are often overlooked. Nevertheless,
it is clear that he attached particular importance to the role of economic imagination in
shaping contemporary imperatives of rule, a process which he termed biopolitics. This
chapter starts with a survey of what is popularly understood by the term biopolitics, and the
various debates it has promoted. It notes the significant influence of the work of Giorgio
Agamben in these debates, especially in the context of the War on Terror. However, as I
suggest, those who follow Agamben appear to ignore key aspects of Foucaults arguments
about power, and the power of the state specifically, and the fact that he attributed a critical
role to modern economic discourse in catalyzing the liberal imagination. Crucially, a growing
number of works are now giving attention to this latter point, and exploring the various ways
in which biopolitics must itself be situated in ongoing processes of sociological
transformation. Some, for example, focus on the unevenness of global liberalism, and on this
basis cast doubt on notions of 'global governmentality.' Others focus on the crisis-ridden
terrain of existing western capitalism, drawing attention to the significance of biopolitical
imperatives for everyday life. To explore these issues, the chapter contends, we should bring
an innovative attitude to our reading of Foucaults few rudimentary remarks on neoliberal
capitalist subjectivity, integrating more fine-grained methods of postliberal economic
analysis from Autonomist Marxism, among other sources.

16. Neoliberalism and Media Convergence Julie Cupples (University of Edinburgh)
and Kevin Glynn (Massey University) - julie.cupples@ed.ac.uk, K.T.Glynn@massey.ac.nz

Neoliberalism (along with its multiple contestations) defines the current global conjuncture,
but so too does the emergence of a highly elaborated and complex convergent media
environment marked by rapid technological development, digitalization, miniaturization and
mobilization. This chapter will explore the clash between top-down and bottom-up forces
within this complex conjunctural moment. Citizens, activists and conventionally
marginalized populations are forging new modes of media consumption/production and
devising more democratic ways to communicate, express their views and challenge
hegemonic and neoliberal structures of power. For example, media prosumers use
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, Internet forums and crowd-sourced and volunteered
geographic information to respond to political events, government policies, for-profit
corporations and mainstream media texts. In many cases, government agencies,
corporations and mainstream media are forced to respond to this bottom-up media activity.
Within what Mark Andrejevic calls the digital enclosure, our participatory media activities
are however being appropriated by states and corporations in the form of big data that can
be harnessed toward the advancement of neoliberal agendas. While corporations strive to
ever more precisely chart consumer profiles and preferences by exhaustively mining social
media sites, the NSA and other agencies subject citizen activists to extensive surveillance and
criminalization. Thus, although the Internet empowers us with access to once unimaginable
volumes of information and forms of connectivity, it simultaneously renders us vulnerable to
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algorithmic control exerted by the forces of commodification and securitization.

SOCIAL TENSIONS

17. The Co-constitution of Race and Neoliberalism: More than Just a Racist
Eruption David Roberts (University of Toronto) - d.roberts@utoronto.ca

In 2010, Minelle Mahtani and I published an article challenging scholars of neoliberalism,
especially within geography, to approach the connection between race and neoliberalism in a
more sophisticated manner. The scholarship on race and neoliberalism, at the time, tended
to focus on racialized outcomes of neoliberal reforms the racist eruptions of
neoliberalization. We argued that it was problematic to understand and theorize these as two
separate social entities that sometimes intersect. Instead, we demanded an understanding of
race and neoliberalism as co-constitutive. Following Giroux (2005) we argued that while
neoliberalism is saturated with race, it also modifies that way that race and racism is
understood and experienced in contemporary society. Since publication, the article has had
significant influence on the theorization of race and neoliberalism garnering nearly fifty
citations. This chapter revisits the original argument and then proceeds to analyze how these
arguments have been taken up by other scholars through a literature review of articles and
book chapter that have cited the 2010 piece. Towards a conclusion, I work to plot a course
as to what I believe should be the future directions in which the scholarship theorizing race
and neoliberalism may want to go.

18. Young Women as Ideal Neoliberal Subjects: Better to be Sick than Angry
Christina Scharff (Kings College London) - christina.scharff@kcl.ac.uk

Gender intersects with neoliberalism in various ways. A discussion of these complex
entanglements would depend on our understanding of gender and neoliberalism, which
are concepts that have been defined and used differently, depending on disciplinary
orientation, political outlook, and spatial and temporal context, to name just a few. Instead
of attempting to provide an overview of the various ways in which gender and
neoliberalism have been analysed and theorised, this chapter will hone in on recent feminist
research on contemporary Western societies. This body of work has suggested that women,
and in particular young women, have been constructed as ideal neoliberal subjects. By
adopting a Foucauldian approach to neoliberalism, feminist research has shown that public,
media and policy discourses have positioned young women as subjects of capacity who can
lead responsibilised and self-managed lives through self-application and self-transformation.
Based on empirical research, I will explore these subjectivities. In particular, the chapter will
draw on over sixty in-depth interviews with young, female classical musicians who, due to
their positioning as both young women and cultural workers, may be neoliberal subjects par
excellence. By focusing on the ways in which the research participants negotiated playing-
related injuries, which were prevalent but often hidden, the chapter will shed light on some
of the contradictions, exclusions and politics of neoliberal, gendered subjectivity.

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19. Neoliberal Paradoxes of Sexuality Sea Ling Cheng (Chinese University of Hong
Kong) sealing@cuhk.edu.hk

What kind of sexuality does neoliberalism endorse, let be, or penalize? What kind of sexual
subjects are compatible with the free, self-sufficient, and self-advancing subjects of
neoliberalism? How is sexuality mobilized in neoliberal political, economic, social, and
cultural projects? What are the sexual limits of neoliberalism? Sexuality stands at the
intersection of the political, economic, and cultural reconfiguration of relationships between
the state and the individuals in neoliberal transformations. While scholars generally agree
that neoliberalism varies across locations, examining sexuality as a dense transfer point for
relations of power (Foucault 1978) illuminate the paradoxes and contradictions of
neoliberalism. Socially, the retreat of the state from the social sphere is accompanied by a
reification of the nuclear family and relational sexuality. This buttresses a class-based view of
sexuality as a means of individual identity and emotional expression, a private matter that
must be distinguished from the public and therefore commercial realm. Embedded as such
as part of a narrative about self, authenticity, and nationhood, sexuality has been further
deployed for the securitization of state and national borders. This entry discusses how
neoliberal governance and subject-making are contested in the realm of sexuality, providing
an overview of the culture wars and policy debates around sex, ranging from gay marriage to
sex trafficking to reproductive technology.

20. Health and Neoliberalism: Biopolitics, Biocapital and the New Washington
Consensus Matt Sparke (University of Washington) - sparke@uw.edu

This chapter surveys the way in which both macro forms of neoliberal governance and
micro practices of neoliberal governmentality come together in context-contingent ways to
shape health policies, health systems and embodied health outcomes. Changing forms of
biopolitics in the era of biotech molecularization are important considerations in this respect,
and a key argument of the chapter is that neoliberalization is leading to extremely unequal
but interconnected regimes of biopolitics and necropolitics globally. To understand the
connections, it is argued, we have to come to terms - inter alia - with how these divergent
biopolitical regimes are tied together by biocapital. Their starkly divergent consequences in
terms of risk management and precarity therefore need to be considered in relation to one
another, both on a global and local scale. This approach to neoliberalism therefore takes us
beyond static statistical accounts of how inequality maps on to ill-health in particular data-set
defined populations. Instead, it opens up the possibility of mapping geographies of global
structural violence. By doing so it also offer sobering lessons about the ways in which even
efforts to reduce the violence and repair the world remain structured by an emergent new
Washington Consensus on neoliberal market fostercare.

21. Welfare and Neoliberalism Julie MacLeavy (University of Bristol) -
Julie.Macleavy@bristol.ac.uk

This chapter examines the (often counter-productive) neoliberal impulses underlying the
restructuring of contemporary welfare states. Its particular focus is on how a neoliberalised
approach to the broader political economy has been translated in an age of austerity and
used to legitimate further cuts to central and local government budgets, welfare services and
benefits, and the privatisation of public resources resulting in job losses. Employing a critical
12
gender analysis of contemporary welfare policies in different national contexts, it will argue
that the discourse of austerity re-constructs and re-embeds negative attitudes towards
welfare, which have made possible a process of welfare reform, as attitudes have shifted
from a general consensus that welfare exists as a safety net for people with no or low
incomes, towards a more punitive policy approach which emphasises self-sufficiency and
individual requirements to work. In doing so, it will explore the consequences of welfare
restructuring for different social groups.

22. Labour and Neoliberalism Ben Jackson (University of Oxford) -
benjamin.jackson@univ.ox.ac.uk

Labour has been central to the concerns of neo-liberalism from its ideological inception to
the roll out of neo-liberal policies in government in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries. This chapter surveys how neo-liberals have analysed this concept, focusing in
particular on the way in which neo-liberal theory has sought to treat labour as a commodity
to be bought and sold like any other on the market. A distinctive feature of neo-liberal
thinking is the view that there is no such thing as market-based coercion in labour relations,
only coercive interventions into the market sponsored by the state and by powerful, state-
backed unions. This has led neo-liberals to adopt a sceptical pose towards labour market
regulation and collective bargaining. The chapter investigates the ideological foundations and
policy implications of this stance and discusses the key neo-liberal writings on labour by such
authors as W. H. Hutt, Henry Simons, F. A. Hayek and Gary Becker.

23. The Commons Against Neoliberalism, the Commons of Neoliberalism, the
Commons Beyond Neoliberalism Max Haiven (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design)
- mhaiven@nscad.ca

In this chapter I briefly explore the relationship of the commons to neoliberalism in three
registers. First, I offer a brief historical overview of the commons as both actuality and idea,
with a focus on the celebratory concept of the commons as it has risen to prominence
amidst the neoliberal period. I trace both neoliberalism and the idea of the commons as
stemming from the crisis of post-war Keynesianism. This section is organized around the
contrast between the neoliberal agenda of the North American Free Trade Agreement and
the common-ist agenda of the Zapatistas. The second section of this chapter examines the
ways in which, over the past twenty years, neoliberalism has come to adopt and co-opt
certain aspects of the reality and the idea of the commons. It begins by addressing the
curious success of Nobel (Memorial) Prize winner Elinor Ostrom and other mainstream
economists and concludes with a discussion of the rise, in the past few years, of the rhetoric
(and reality) of the "sharing economy." These, I suggest, are examples of how neoliberal
capitalism increasingly relies on the commons (in idea and in fact) to reproduce itself. In the
final section, I take up a new generation of radical theorizations (and practices) of the
commons that are less celebratory and utopian, notably Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's
concept of the "undercommons" and Silvia Federici's historically-informed
conceptualization of the commons as the fabric of a struggle over social reproduction. Here
I follow George Caffentzis in retaining the conceptual and actual power of the commons to
resist and confront neoliberalism, but in ways that attend to the potential for co-optation and
the need to retain a broader analysis of capitalism.

13
24. Neoliberalism and Social Economy Peter Graefe (McMaster University) -
graefep@mcmaster.ca

Early analyses of neoliberalism, adopting an alarmist tone, emphasized the retrenchment of
state social provision to make space for market regulation. With time, these added the
nuance that programmes were not just retrenched, but also redeployed. It was not just a
question of changing the balance of state and market, but of transforming the logics and re-
orienting the goals of state provision, and of attempting to transform the subjectivities and
identities of citizens. Analysis of the social economy and neoliberalism has followed a similar
arc. At first, the question was one of the social economy as a site for privatization and state
offloading. Then, as a site of institutional and policy experimentation, it has sustained the
interest of those analyzing neoliberalism more dynamically. For more Foucauldian analyses,
there is interest in the technologies that align non-state service providers with governmental
programmes, as well as the manner in which social economy organizations govern clients.
For analysts more versed in the tradition of the regulation school, the interest has been tied
more to how this innovation relates to the temporality of neoliberalism. Are we witnessing
the roll-out of new institutions and governmentalities so as to extend market metrics deeper
into social provisions, and indeed into organizations previously marked by non-market
cultures and rationalities, or is the attention to the social economy more akin to creating
flanking mechanisms to compensate for problems in social reproduction that might hobble
the neoliberal project. Both the Foucauldian and the regulationist accounts provide useful
critical entres to understanding the development of the social economy, but they share
similar structuralist shortcomings. In looking for how the social economy translates or
relates to a broader neoliberal project or programme, there is a tendency to overstate
processes that reproduce neoliberalism, and to ignores the potentials for the social economy
to serve as an element of a settlement that might break with neoliberalism. This is not so
much a strategy of introducing agency so as to then adopt an excessive voluntarism, as one
of keeping an analytical door open to possibilities of change.

KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTIONS

25. Education, Neoliberalism, Human Capital: Prudential Rationality and Homo
Economicus as Entrepreneur of Himself Michael Peters (University of Waikato) -
m.peters@waikato.ac.nz

Neoliberalism is a changing dynamic phenomenon crystalising as an idea and insipient
ideology in the prewar period, becoming internationalized and institutionalized as a credo for
the Mt Pelerin Society (was to be Acton-Tocqueville society) in 1947, and a set of policies in
the service of economic liberalism with the ascendancy to power of Margaret Thatcher and
Ronald Reagan in 1979-1980 (Peters, 2011). One of the main forms of economic liberalism
analyzed by Michel Foucault (2008) in his historical treatment of the birth of neoliberalism in
The Birth of Biopolitics was American neoliberalism represented especially by the late Gary
Becker (1962) who on the basis of Schultz work and others introduced the concept and
theory of human capital into political economy privileging education in his analysis. This
chapter traces the inception of human capital theory and analyses it in terms of Foucaults
analysis that Becker developed an approach that is not a conception of labour power so
much as a capital-ability that Foucault captures in the following comment: the
14
replacement every time of homo economicus as partner of exchange with a homo
economicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself
his own producer, being for himself the source of his earnings.

26. The Rise of Neoliberal Reasoning in Universities: Subjects, Objects and
Globalized Academic Knowledge Production. Lawrence Berg (University of British
Columbia, Okanagan) - Lawrence.Berg@ubc.ca

The chapter will examine the rise of neoliberal reasoning in universities, as a system of
ideologies and policies designed to govern academia, and as a form of governmentality that
produces neoliberalizing subjects in the academy. The chapter will then go on to examine
the implications that such neoliberal policies, ideologies and governmentalities have for the
production of both knowing subjects, and the knowledge that they produce.

27. The Pedagogy of Neoliberalism Sheila Macrine (University of Massachusetts,
Dartmouth) - smacrine@umassd.edu

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the Pedagogy of Neoliberalism. First, it
provides an analytical framework for understanding how the pedagogy of neoliberalism is a
pervasive educational tool mediating a construction of consent and coercion between centers
of power and the common citizen. Further the chapter takes up this notion of the pedagogy
of neoliberalism and allows us to step back from the onslaught of its predatory practices and
examine how the hegemony of neoliberalisms pedagogy teaches us to accept our
oppression. Giroux (2004, p. 106) succinctly declares neoliberalism as a culture of corporate
public pedagogy that cancels out or devalues gender, class-specific, and racial injustices of
the existing social order by absorbing the democratic impulses and practices of civil society
within narrow economic relations. This construction of consent legitimizes the
widespread dismantling of welfare state policies and validates the neoliberal rhetoric of
individual freedoms and personal responsibility through meritocracy. Understanding the
pedagogy of neoliberalism helps illuminate how neoliberal governments psychologically
police citizens to become enterprising-selves irrespective of class barriers (Rose, 1990).
Under the guise of the pedagogy of neoliberalism, individuals are told to either work harder
or suffer the consequences of failure with no one to blame but themselves. Here the
Pedagogy of Neoliberalism is seen as a hegemonic system that involves the uncritical
promotion of values of enterprise and entrepreneurship in developing the ideological
apparatus of neoliberalism across the world (McCafferty, 2010). To challenge this Pedagogy
of Neoliberalism, this chapter argues for the development of a critical counter-hegemonic
pedagogy in order to explore and create alternative pedagogical sites to supplant
neoliberalisms savage capitalism.

28. Neoliberalism, business schools and financial economics: Legitimating corporate
monopoly? Kean Birch (York University) kean@yorku.ca

Neoliberalism is seen as a market-centred order in which markets are characterized as the
key ordering mechanism for economy, society and polity. What this description belies,
however, is the rise and importance of corporate monopoly since the 1970s. This presents a
problem for how we understand neoliberalism since markets and monopoly sit uneasily
together; it might even suggest that neoliberalism is not a market-based order after all. With
15
this in mind, it is important to examine how business and corporate forms and governance
have evolved during the so-called neoliberal era. What this illustrates is the importance of
two things to the reproduction of neoliberal order: on the one hand, new business and
financial knowledges that legitimate the expansion of corporate monopoly through the
reworking of the firm as a nexus of contracts; and, on the other hand, business schools as
centres of the production of these new business and financial knowledges.

29. Neoliberalism Everywhere: Mobile Neoliberal Policy Russell Prince (Massey
University) - r.j.prince@massey.ac.nz

One of the remarkable features of neoliberalism is its ubiquity: it seems to be everywhere
(Peck and Tickell, 2002: 380). It manifests in policy at all levels, from the local to the
supranational, and across international space, from the richest global cities of Europe and
America to the poorest communities of the developing world. From a certain point of view,
this convergence means the neoliberalisation of our global economy and society. But when
we look closely, there is remarkable diversity across time and space between policy
programmes that are otherwise reasonably described as neoliberal. By tracing the
connections between geographically separate neoliberal policy programmes and focusing on
how they get transferred across space we can grasp how this variegated neoliberalisation
proceeds. These transfers can be effected in a variety of ways, from deliberate strategy on the
part of neoliberal policy actors who often harness the power of governmental institutions to
construct fast policy networks that sell neoliberal ideas of crisis and solution, to the softer
inculcation of policy-makers with neoliberal common sense through the circulation of
certain technocratic knowledges and experts. But the politics of these transfers means that
the policies mutate as they move and circulate in order to be made to fit different contexts
and conditions. The dynamic ability of neoliberalism to change and adapt can be observed in
these transfers, and this helps explain its ubiquity.

30. Science, Innovation and Neoliberalism David Tyfield (Lancaster University) -
d.tyfield@lancaster.ac.uk

Science and innovation (S&I) have been tasked with kick-starting the moribund global
economy, underpinning a new techno-economic paradigm, while also tackling multiple,
overlapping global challenges, such as climate change, food security or energy security. But
the cultural and political role of science and the political economy of its funding in the
form of its ongoing commercialization, and its disruption by fiscal crisis and austerity of
public support (at least in the global north), continuing globalisation and the emergence of
web 2.0-enabled open science are currently in a state of unprecedented upheaval. Both of
these phenomena the intensified and particularly challenging demands placed on S&I, and
its transforming political economy are intimately related to neoliberalism. Indeed,
conceiving of neoliberalism as a political project founded upon a fundamentalism of the
market as the optimal epistemic device, S&I and the transformation of their political
economy in recent decades provides a singular window into the trajectory of neoliberalism
both past and regarding the emerging present. In particular, on the one hand, by exploring
how a neoliberal-conditioned system of knowledge production generates intensifying crises
in this key aspect of contemporary political economy, crucial tensions and even limits to
neoliberalism that are currently being played out are illuminated. While, on the other, trends
in the further transformation of knowledge production, from contemporary efforts to
16
circumnavigate these problems, afford informed speculation regarding emerging political
economic models and projects that may be designated post-neoliberal.

31. Performing Neoliberalism: Practices, Power and Subject Formation Michael
Glass (University of Pittsburgh) - glass@pitt.edu

This chapter provides a critical perspective on neoliberalism rooted in theories of
performativitya term in contemporary social theory that argues the use of language is a
form of social action with material consequences. Neoliberalism is considered a defining
feature of late capitalist society, serving as a political-economic concept that explains effects
through policies and practices on specific scales from the individual body to the supra-
national. A performative perspective holds that as with any concept, neoliberalism was
neither discovered as a fully-formed subject for geographic analysis, nor can neoliberalism
do anything without actants. There are multiple actants at play here who produce and
perform neoliberalism, including those who define and carry out the political and economic
policies considered neoliberal, those recipients of policy who must determine how to
respond, and those who assess the influences of neoliberalism and make claims about its
value. These sets of actants are discussed with reference to three key issues used by
geographers in research on neoliberalism: practices, power, and subject formation. Through
this survey, I emphasize how the concept of neoliberalism is produced in scholarly and
policy discourse and is transferred and resisted in specific contexts. The conclusion argues
this production can never be completed, creating the space for resistance.

32. Neoliberalism as Austerity: The Theory, Practice, and Purpose of Fiscal Restraint
Since the 1970s Heather Whiteside (University of British Columbia) -
heather.whiteside@geog.ubc.ca

Austerity through fiscal restraint government debt reduction and deficit elimination is en
vogue once again. As of 2012, all but four members of the G-20 have declared this to be a
leading policy priority and one which is scheduled to take precedence well into the current
decade. Far from technocratic, the politics of austerity are entrenching, reasserting, and
unrolling processes of neoliberalization at global, national, and urban scales, much as they
did during earlier iterations of fiscal restraint beginning in the 1970s. In this sense, the
history and hegemony of neoliberalism is intrinsically intertwined with that of austerity, and
the recent return of fiscal consolidation is a contemporary manifestation of a longer
historical trend. Austerity is a signature of the neoliberal era much as neoliberalism can be
understood as austerity. This paper examines the connection between neoliberalism and
austerity since the late 1970s in terms of their discursive, institutional, and material attributes.
Attention will be paid to temporal dynamics (the appeal of and to austerity over time), spatial
effects (the scalar impact of austerity, particularly downloading onto municipal or local
authorities), and socio-institutional reforms (policies and programs). Neoliberal-era fiscal
restraint works in lockstep with other key aspects of the neoliberal political economy such as
financialization, privatization, and marketization, and these connections will also be
highlighted. As an overview analysis, the discussion aims for wide applicability although
examples will be drawn on from the global North and South where appropriate.

17
33. Think Tanks, Neoliberalism, and the Production of Ignorance Tom Slater
(University of Edinburgh) - tom.slater@ed.ac.uk

This chapter explores and analyses the role of right wing think tanks in processes of
neoliberalisation. Think tanks lie at the intersection of academic, journalistic, policy and
economic fields, and they play a substantial role in buttressing the crafting, mutation and
expansion of the neoliberal state. As non-state agencies, they purport to be 'independent',
but they rely on generous donations from corporations, institutions and individuals with
clear political agendas, resulting in profound state effects. Neoliberal politicians rarely
consult published academic research unless it supports the policies they want to pursue;
instead, they deploy neat sound bites, accessible catchphrases and statistical nuggets from
think tank surveys that measure nothing more than the worldview of the think tank that
commissions them. As an illustration of this practice, I explore the methods and influence
of two right-wing think tanks in the UK, Policy Exchange and the Centre for Social Justice,
which have been highly influential in housing and welfare policies respectively. Their glossy
and authoritative publications, their fast channels of access to authority and opinion-makers,
and their speechwriters and researchers have provided the 'evidence base' for the
mobilization of state power in the extension of conservative dogma; they actively produce
ignorance to appease their funders, shielding politicians and their audiences from viable
alternatives, and inoculating them against the critique of autonomous scholarship. I argue
that the dominance of neoliberalism can be explained partly by the right wing think tank
mastery of decision-based evidence making, which requires exposure and critical analysis.

SPACES

34. Urban Neoliberalism Roger Keil (York University) - rkeil@yorku.ca

This chapter will trace the histories of the intersection of urbanization and neoliberalization.
It will demonstrate that the current urban age often portrayed as an almost natural
demographic, morphological and economic force -- has in many ways been a product of, and
has been productive of neoliberalization. While urbanism and neoliberalism are mostly
open-ended ideological formations, urbanization and neoliberalization are material and
discursive processes that lead to real (and imagined) constellations through which modern
capitalist societies are being reproduced. I will look at roll-back-, roll-out-, and roll-with-it
neoliberalization through urbanization and will discuss the ways in which those have led to
what Brenner, Peck and Theodore, among others, have called variegated forms of
neoliberalization. For illustration, I will look specifically at the neoliberalization of urban
peripheries as the prime landscapes of neoliberal urbanism. I will also look at the pitfalls and
possibilities in post-neoliberal urbanization as I contemplate the political opportunities
springing from the horizontalization of the urban polity in the period of (post)neoliberalism.

35. Neoliberalism and Rural Change Cristobal Kay (SOAS, University of London) -
ck7@soas.ac.uk

This chapter analyses the key features of neoliberalism as related to the rural spaces. During
the 1970s the statist development paradigm followed by most developing countries became
increasingly under fire from neoliberal thinkers. The statist development strategy prioritized
18
industrialization based on import-substitution and the urban areas often neglecting the
development of agriculture and the rural areas. The debt crisis of the 1980s provided the
opportunity for multilateral institutions like the World Bank to push for the adoption of
structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) in developing countries as a condition for
receiving loans and development aid. The SAPs contained the key elements of the neoliberal
policy proposals aimed at reducing the role of the State in the economy and giving free reign
to market forces, especially by removing protectionist measures and opening the economy to
the competitive forces of the world market. Later during the 1990s the so-called
Washington Consensus emerged which further emphasized aspects of the neoliberal
paradigm. The liberalization policies profoundly restructured the rural spaces and the
agricultural sector as exports based on natural resources gained new prominence. The salient
features of the great transformation in the countryside are discussed such as (a) the shift
from traditional commodity exports to non-traditional agricultural exports; (b) the
concentration of natural resources, land and capital; (c) the dominance of agribusiness and
transnational enterprises; (d) the shift to temporary, casual and flexible working conditions
and the feminization of the workforce; (e) poverty and income inequality; (f) the increasing
rural-urban linkages and reconfiguration of rural spaces; and (g) the growing reach of the
global corporate food regime. Due to rising poverty and inequality the neoliberal paradigm
was contested by scholars, activists, NGOs, peasant organizations and landless rural workers.
Some key debates are discussed focusing on issues like land reform, food sovereignty,
agribusiness versus peasant farming, agroecology and land grabbing.

36. The Heartlands of Neoliberalism Bob Jessop (Lancaster University) -
b.jessop@lancaster.ac.uk

This chapter adopts a regulation- and state-theoretical variegated capitalism approach to the
genealogy and subsequent development of neoliberalism. It distinguishes four kinds of
neoliberal project: post-socialist system transformation, principled neoliberal regime shifts,
pragmatic neoliberal policy adjustment, and neoliberal structural adjustment regimes. The
heartlands of neoliberalism are characterized by principled neoliberal regime shifts, typified
by the USA and UK but with variations in Canada, Eire, Australia, New Zealand, and
Iceland. I consider the periodization of neoliberal regime shifts in the USA and UK and
comment on similarities and differences with other cases. I then consider the extent to
which pragmatic neoliberal policy adjustments can cumulate, over time, through ratchet-like
effects, to produce de facto rather than principled neoliberal regime shifts. Here I also
consider two cases the Federal Republic of Germany, in which neoliberal policy
adjustments serve a neo-mercantilist economic strategy but have consolidated into a more
neoliberal regime shift, and Sweden, where a glass half-full, glass half-empty ambivalence
exists as a result of the steady cumulation of neoliberal policy adjustments but much of the
Swedish social democratic model has been retained. Finally, I consider the implications of
neoliberal regime shifts in the heartlands in terms of (1) core-periphery relations within the
heartlands themselves, associated with intensified uneven development and (2) the
repercussions of neoliberal regime shifts in the heartlands for the overall dynamic of a world
market organized in the shadow of neoliberalism.

37. The Peripheries of Neoliberalism Warwick Murray and Jon Overton (Victoria
University of Wellington) - Warwick.Murray@vuw.ac.nz, john.overton@vuw.ac.nz

19
Peripheries of the global economy have been deeply engaged in, and affected by,
neoliberalism. Politically, neoliberal reforms were encouraged and often forced on countries
removed from the centres of global power. This occurred both in peripheral developing
economies, as in sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America through the mechanism of structural
adjustment programmes, and in more affluent New World economies, such as Australia and
New Zealand. The result was change that was usually more severe and deep-seated than
elsewhere. Such extremes of neoliberal policy continue to the present, as in the stringent
conditions forced upon latecomers to WTO accession. Political change has been followed by
economic perturbations through neoliberalism. Opened to the global economy, resource
peripheries have faced both enhanced opportunities for trade and growth, as during the
commodity boom of the early 2000s, and marked economic contraction when commodity
prices fell following the global financial crisis of 2007-08. Yet, although peripheries appear to
be mere appendages of the global economy and subject to neoliberal pressures beyond their
control, there are signs that forms of resistance to neoliberalism, or at least attempts to steer
and limit its effects, are evident and growing in peripheral regions.

38. Neoliberal Migrations Maureen Hickey (National University of Singapore) -
arimhh@nus.edu.sg

It is difficult to overstate the impact that neoliberalism has hand on human mobility over the
past half-century. During this period all forms of migration, but particularly labor migration,
have intensified and diversified worldwide; a phenomenon that cross-cuts geographic scales
and has led some scholars to declare that we are entering a new age of global migration.
This chapter provides a brief critical overview of the relationship between neoliberalism and
migration in three key areas. First, it examines the restructuring of global markets and the
emergence of the New International Division of Labor (NIDL). Transnational
Corporations (TNCs) were able to leverage spatial inequalities, particularly at the
international scale, in order to relocate production to take advantage of cheaper labor and
less stringent regulations in many countries in Less Developed countries (LDCs). This shift,
epitomized by new forms of spatial organization such as Export Process Zones (EPZs), has
led to the emergence of new migration trajectories both within and between countries.
Second, we explore how successive waves of global economic crises, together with the
neoliberal policy responses of international financial institutions and development agencies
which have consistently promoted restructuring packages based on fiscal austerity,
deregulation and trade liberalization have shaped current international migration streams,
most notably the increasing flows of less-skilled labor from the Global South to the Global
North. Finally, new forms of enclosure and dispossession under neoliberal regimes,
including privitisation, deregulation, intensive resource extraction and environmental
degradation (including climate change), have led to new and growing streams of involuntary
migration; a trend that is poised to grow in importance in the decades ahead.

39. Neoliberal Re-regulation: The Simultaneous Opening and Hardening of National
Territorial Boundaries Joseph Nevins (Vassar College) - jonevins@vassar.edu

As many analysts have noted, the age of globalization was supposed to be a time of
disappearing territorial boundaries, but, instead, they are proliferating. Indeed, territorial
boundary control regimes around the world have become considerably more formidable
over the last two decades. Since 1998, for example, boundary walls or fences have arisen in
20
almost thirty binational borderlands where they had not previously existed according to
geographer Reece Jones. If neoliberalism is, among other things, a regime characterized by
the liberalization and de-regulation of national economies and increasing flows of capital
and commodities between them, it is also marked by intensifying regulation of immigration
and boundary controls. This is particularly true in the borderlands that divide and bring
together the relatively rich and poor, privileged and disadvantaged, white and nonwhite.
Thus, while the neoliberal era has seen a marked increase in transboundary mobility by the
relatively affluent, it has also seen a simultaneous hardening of territorial boundaries for
those deemed less than desirable migrants by receiving countries. As geographer David
Delaney observes, territories both reflect and produce the social orders to which they are
tied. In this regard, the growing filter-like aspect of national territorial boundaries is
inextricably tied to the neoliberal era. This chapter explores these matters via a focus on the
boundary and immigration control regimes of the United States and the European Union.

40. Home: Object and Technology of Neoliberal Governmentalities Rae Dufty-Jones
(University of Western Sydney) - r.dufty-jones@uws.edu.au

For some time housing has been an object of government and governance. It is not
surprising therefore that housing is an important focus for analyses of neoliberalisation,
particularly the socio-spatial implications of neoliberal policies, programs and processes.
Indeed, neoliberalism has become a key explanatory tool when examining the changes to
how housing is produced and consumed and the policy settings guiding this economic
activity in the twenty-first century. From analyses of privatisation processes of social housing
to tracing the antecedents and fall-out of the Global Financial Crisis the connections
between neoliberalisation and housing are now well-established. This chapter examines the
myriad of links between neoliberalisation and housing. In particularly it seeks to show the
way in which housing is not only an object of neoliberal governance but is also an important
technology employed in the pursuit of various neoliberal governmentalities. The chapter
reviews the neoliberalisation of housing at a variety of scales from the neighbourhood (e.g.
master-planned estates, policies of social-mix) to the nation-state (e.g. processes of
domicide). The chapter concludes with a reflection on how housing is not just a static tool in
neoliberal governing strategies but also key to producing mobile behaviours.

41. Space, Place, and the Cultural Landscapes of Neoliberalism Reuben Rose-
Redwood (University of Victoria) and Maral Sotoudehnia (University of Victoria)-
redwood@uvic.ca, m.sotoudehnia@gmail.com

This chapter examines how neoliberal modes of governance are reshaping the spatial
imaginaries of place through the refashioning of cultural landscapes into branded and
commodified spaces. We begin by providing an overview of key debates associated with the
rise of place branding and the performative enactment of place-images as marketing devices
within the context of the shift towards entrepreneurial governance regimes. Next, we explore
the internal contradictions of neoliberal rationalities that underpin both the marketing of
place-images as distinct brands, on the one hand, and the commodification of place-
identities, on the other hand. These political-economic practices are often viewed
interchangeably yet they can also work at cross-purposes, particularly when the corporate
branding of place-identities detracts from efforts to produce a unique place-image or place-
brand. We therefore consider how the contradictory strategies of neoliberal place-making
21
have opened new terrains within which the value of space and place is contested. The
chapter then concludes by highlighting the limits of neoliberal spatial imaginaries as well as
the prospects for working towards a politics of place that revalorizes the cultural landscape
as a political arena of spatial justice.

NATURES AND ENVIRONMENTS

42. Neoliberal Environmental Governance in the Anthropocene Jessica Dempsey
(University of Victoria) and Rosemary-Claire Collard - jdempsey@uvic.ca,
rosemary.claire@gmail.com

The project of governing the environment is increasingly complex. How is rule achieved?
What actors, processes and dynamics must we account for to understand environmental
governance, today? Are the interventions into environments changing under neoliberalism?
How? This essay will focus on reviewing neoliberal environmental governance literature in
geography to understand the various approaches to the question of governing nature. We
pay particular attention to the stakes and effects of neoliberal environmental rule. How are
distinctively neoliberal political-economies remaking socioecologies? And what evidence do
we have for this? In this analysis, it is important to recall that neoliberal environments
diverge and also build from historical liberal, capitalist environments. Thus while there is value
to the terminology neoliberalism, our primary interest in this paper is to draw out
consistencies and divergences in the project of Western environmental governance and
environmentalism. We identify logics of calculation, domination, quantification and
accumulation that persist across liberal-neoliberal regimes, logics long involved in the
production of socioecologies. Finally, we will link the debates and tensions in the
environmental governance literature to discussions around the governing in the so-called
Anthropocene. Bold popular and academic claims of the age of humans and the
environment is what we make it are resonating in many ways with neoliberalisms
instrumentalist and entrepreneurial zeal, and also with the modus operandi of rational,
scientific management. Such intersections bear scrutiny by critics of neoliberal natures.

43. Neoliberalisms Climate Larry Lohmann (The Corner House) -
larrylohmann@gn.apc.org

Popular unrest over climate change is a threat to capital accumulation in that it implicitly
challenges the amplified labour exploitation and speedier circulation that became possible in
the 19th century through thermodynamic energy and fossil fuels. The cobbled-together
official responses to this challenge that have emerged in the past two decades pre-
eminently, national and international carbon markets partake of virtually all of the
characteristic elements of neoliberalism. They assume that tackling social issues is largely a
matter of discovering prices inhering in new commodities developed for the purpose (in
this case pollution allowances and offsets). The commodities themselves are treated, via a
typically neoliberal fetish, as if they created and produced themselves automatically (or as if
they were unproblematic translations of ecological or social goods into a quantifiable and
circulatable form), while at the same time the most strenuous and violent efforts are devoted
to constructing the institutions needed to define, maintain and defend them through
dispossession and exploitation. Given the role of the state in creating demand, guaranteeing
22
supply, and underwriting the profits of a galaxy of private-sector partners, contractors,
consultants and technocrats who carry out most of the work of producing, circulating,
standardizing and regulating the new commodities, conventional dualisms opposing state
and market have become of as little use in analyzing climate policy as they are in
understanding other areas of neoliberal policy. Not least, the new markets follow the general
thrust of neoliberalism in that they help both state and corporate actors evade much of the
burden of addressing the social problems that the markets are advertised as cheaply solving,
while simultaneously holding out the promise of expanding and deepening opportunities for
capital accumulation at a time of deep crisis and sclerosis.

44. Neoliberal Energies: Crisis, Governance, and Hegemony Matt Huber (Syracuse
University) - mthuber@maxwell.syr.edu

The shift to neoliberalism has also correlated with profound shifts in the political economy
of energy. This chapter is meant to provide an overview of the different ways to
conceptualize the relations between energy and neoliberalism. First, energy is central to the
historical emergence of neoliberal hegemony in the 1970s. The energy crisis did not only
overlap with wider ideological shifts toward neoliberalism; it reinforced such shifts and
provided empirical case studies for wider logics and arguments about the government
inefficiency and market distortions (e.g. price controls, OPEC, Big Oil). Second, neoliberal
policies were in large part implemented in the field of energy governance. After a wave of
resource nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, energy price collapse and neoliberal policy
forced many developing nations to implement policies meant to attract foreign energy capital
(low taxes/royalty rates, privatization of national oil companies, state security, and
accumulation by dispossession of local communities). Third, while neoliberalism is often
envisioned as applying to specific empirical slices of policy reality (e.g., environment,
housing, energy, or whatever), it is less common to theorize the social and ecological
relations of neoliberal hegemony itself. In this regard, everyday lived practices of energy
consumption - specifically in relation to the privatization of housing and automobility can
be seen as underpinning a variety of populist neoliberal logics (e.g., hostility to taxes). I argue
that the geography of life in (often suburban contexts) reinforced what Foucault isolated as the
core of the neoliberal project the enterprise form. Thus, we need not only think of the
neoliberalism of energy, but also how energy fuels neoliberalism.

45. Water and Neoliberalism Alex Loftus (Kings College) and Jessica Budds (University
of East Anglia) - alex.loftus@kcl.ac.uk, j.budds@uea.ac.uk

Water is both a lens through which we might gain a better understanding of the shifts in
state-society relations associated with neoliberalism and also an elemental material through
which those shifts have been made possible. This chapter will begin by tracing the
emergence of neoliberalism back to the Chicago Boys Chilean laboratory, before
demonstrating how the development of water markets in the Chilean context were crucial to
a range of neoliberal environmental strategies. The second part of the chapter will look in
more detail at the intimate relationships established between new forms of water
governance, domestic water technologies and shifting subjectivities, understood in relation
to water provision. We will argue that the shifting citizen-consumer nexus, so often
associated with neoliberal governance strategies, is most clearly exemplified in changing
relationships to water established through forms of compulsory metering, privatization and
23
financialisation. The household and the body have become central to both the production of
the neoliberal subject and the accumulation strategies that seek to displace our most recent
financial crisis. The journey embarked on in this chapter will trace the translation of
neoliberal water governance strategies from Chile to Europe and South Africa, enabling both
South-South and South-North comparative research.

46. The Neoliberalization of Agriculture: Regimes, Resistance, and Resilience
Jamey Essex (University of Windsor) - jessex@uwindsor.ca

Neoliberalism has profoundly altered agricultural practices and systems since the late 1970s.
From the production of food and fiber in innumerable diffuse sites around the world to the
highly uneven and unequal systems of trade, speculation, and consumption through which
the world's population feeds and clothes itself, agriculture has proven a vital but highly
contentious arena of neoliberalization. This chapter covers the neoliberalization of
agriculture with an emphasis on how neoliberalism has entered into the metabolic relations
and processes of agroecological production, and attempted to bend these to the needs of
speculative global capital. Of particular focus is the food regime approach to understanding
the neoliberalization of global agriculture, as well as the debate this approach has sparked in
critical assessments of neoliberalism. The food regime approach stems from regulation
theory, and concentrates on global systems and historic shifts in the regulation of capitalism.
In doing so, it provides powerful insight into the development of a corporate-dominated and
market-oriented neoliberal system of agricultural production, trade, and consumption. Critics
contend, however, that it also limits our ability to examine the variegated and often
haphazard nature of agroecological adaptation and crisis under neoliberalism, as well as the
diverse forms of compromise, resistance, and resilience that have developed among agrarian
movements and alternative forms of agriculture. This chapter this highlights this theoretical
and practical diversity and the limits of neoliberal agriculture.

47. Sustainability and Neoliberalism Byron Miller (University of Calgary) -
bavrmill@ucalgary.ca

While neoliberalism might be succinctly defined as market fundamentalism, sustainability
is a far more amorphous concept. Definitions of sustainability abound, but most commonly
address inter-generational equity, e.g., the Brundtland Reports definition, and a tri-partite
notion of what is to be sustained: the natural environment, economic growth, and social
equity. Produced in the wake of the economic, environmental, and social crises of late/post-
Fordist capitalism, discourses of sustainability have resonated broadly in virtually all sectors
of society, with critiques rarely found. While the problems sustainability references are
real, the concept provides virtually no road map of the processes and power relations that
produced them, perhaps explaining its appeal to widely divergent interest groups. Central to
the concept of sustainability is the notion of global biophysical limits that must be respected.
These limits, in turn, mean that there must be ways of rationing the consumption of
resources and controlling the production of waste. Lacking an analysis of the power
relations and dynamics of capitalism, sustainability policies and programs readily fall back
upon capitalist market mechanisms as their primary means of limiting consumption and
controlling environmental impacts. Markets, indeed, can be an effective means of
creating/regulating scarcity while providing new opportunities for capital accumulation.
While et. al. (2004) and Gibbs and Krueger (2007) have argued that sustainability fixes
24
have become a fundamental component of contemporary capital accumulation strategies.
But reliance on market mechanisms gives short shrift to the social dimension of
sustainability and fails to address the fundamental question of sustainability for whom?
Rising prices and scarcity disproportionately affect those with little purchasing power,
leaving the wealthy to continue unsustainable practices. An uncritical reliance on market
mechanisms, moreover, implies the rejection of democratic alternatives that would not
necessarily favour the most economically privileged. Neoliberal policies have had some
success moderating environmental externalities and furthering capital accumulation, while
leaving in place the core mechanisms that produce the problems of social, environmental,
and economic sustainability.

48. Property, Object and Labour: Commodification in the Bioeconomy Maria Fannin
(University of Bristol) - M.Fannin@bristol.ac.uk

This essay reviews scholarship on bodily commodification in light of new technologies in the
biosciences. Much of the work analysing late 20
th
century developments in the life sciences
and medicine highlight their increasingly marketised character: the blurring of boundaries
between publicly funded and for-profit research, the inducement to scientists to approach
their work as entrepreneurs and to patients to approach their healthcare as consumers. These
developments are underwritten by the conjunction of market-oriented political economic
structures with scientific epistemologies that emphasise the flexible, competitive, and
promissory nature of biological processes. This essay revisits theories of commodification in
light of these developments, highlighting how new technologies in the biosciences rework
notions of objectification, fetishism, and the making of living bodies and body parts into
property. It draws on three cases as illustration. The first examines the practices of
dispossession that underwrite regimes of intellectual property, most markedly in relation to
indigenous populations. The second explores the collection, use, storage and exchange of
bodily tissues for research and potential therapy and the increasing scale and scope of
biobanking as a key site for the making of new kinds of bodily commodities. Finally, the
essay considers recent feminist theorisations of the political economies of reproductive
technologies in which the social dynamics of technologically-mediated reproduction
complicate conventional critiques of commodification. This work also highlights how the
bodys biological processes are put to work in experimental settings, in which what is
commodified is access to the body and its 'living labour.'

49. The Global Division of Labour/Nature under Neoliberalism: Extractivism and
Productivism Sonja Killoran-McKibbin (York University) and Anna Zalik (York
University) and - sonjakm@yorku.ca, azalik@yorku.ca

The new millennium has seen an enormous growth in the global reach and intensity of
extractive activities. This growth has been associated with intensified geopolitical
maneuvering for mineral resource access since 9/11 and, following the 2008 financial crash,
a move into commodities over finance as an outlet for accumulated capital. The
extensification and intensification of extraction has provoked increasing localized conflicts at
sites of industrial activity. Concurrently the organization of extraction globally demonstrates
the persistence of divisions between Global North and South as well rapid shifts in the
extractive economy associated with both financialization and the rise of the BRICS. The
chapter explores two mutually constituted process which manifest how the global division of
25
nature is persistent in the organization of economies viewed as relatively productivist and
relatively extractivist: 1) the relationship between the organization of productive processes
(including labour/nature) in creating more or less amenable extractive environments via
more or less sovereigntist regulatory and fiscal structures; and conversely 2) the extent to
which typically productive enterprises ranging from agriculture to textiles take on an
extractive character under neoliberalism. We argue for greater attention to a specifically
extractive form of neoliberalism and for a broader understanding of extraction as it relates to
human labour and the environment as co-constituted categories. Indeed, the extractive
frontier in many ways embodies practices of neoliberalization as it is a powerful force of
commodification of the natural environment and in its enclosure of territory and
association with financialization, exemplifies characteristics of what some understand as
contemporary accumulation by dispossession.

AFTERMATHS

50. The Crisis of Neoliberalism Grard Dumnil (University of Paris West) and
Dominique Lvy (Paris School of Economics) - gerard.dumenil@u-paris10.fr,
domi.levy@free.fr

The new phase in which capitalism entered at the beginning of the 1980s has been the object
of various diverging interpretations. The emphasis was, notably, placed on the opposition
between governments and markets, or a specific model of accumulation where demand is
stimulated by the wealth of the richest fractions of the population. There is obviously a
neoliberal ideology and a role played by governments in its establishment, both matching the
features of the new social order. Neoliberalism is not, however, a mere ideology of free
markets or a new governmental rationality in the Foucaldian sense of the term. In the mid-
1990s we gave a class interpretation of neoliberalism as a social order, whose basic feature
is the restoration of the power and income of capitalist classes in alliance with the classes of
managers. Following the neoliberal (counter)revolution, sharp transformations in the
functioning of capitalism were observed, with the new discipline imposed on workers, the
new forms of management targeted to the maximizing of stock-market indices, the advance
of financial mechanisms (the power of financial institutions), free trade and the free
movements of capital (as in globalization), and the corresponding rise of the income and
wealth of upper classes. In the wake of the sequence of crises manifested in the
establishment of neoliberalism within countries of the periphery (South-East Asia, Latin
America), the contradictions of the neoliberal class endeavor led to the major crisis
culminating in 2008 in the old centers, namely the United States and Europe. Beginning the
investigation in the late 19
th
century, it appears that this crisis is not the first structural
crisis (to be distinguished from the recurrent recessions in the business cycle) but the
fourth, following the crisis of the 1890s, the Great depression, the crisis of the 1970s. These
crises were either profitability crises (the first and the third), that is crises linked to the
decline of the profit rate, or crises of financial hegemony in which capitalism explodes (the
second and fourth) as a result of daring innovation and cumulative disequilibria. Thus, two
categories of factors account for the crisis of neoliberalism. First, the process of
financiarization and globalization (their intersection as in financial globalization) led to the
construction of a fragile and unwieldy edifice. To this first factor, one must add the
disequilibria of the U.S. economy, namely the deficit of foreign trade and the growing debt
26
of households. The combination of these factors caused the crisis, which came from the
United States where they coexisted. (We will not enter here into the details of these
mechanisms, which will be at the center of our contribution to the handbook.) This
interpretation must be contrasted with others that erroneously prolong the interpretation of
the crisis of the 1970s as caused by the decline of the profit rate (a lack of profits), or
Marxian-Keynesian approaches emphasizing the deficient share of wages in total income
(excess of profits), as well as the framework of long-waves (overaccumulation and
financiarization). As it can be considered in 2014, the crisis still affects the economies of the
United States and Europe. The two regions of the world entered a phase of long stagnation,
with low investment rates on national territories (large direct investments abroad). The task
of maintaining the stability of the aggregate economy appears very difficult. Policies differ
fundamentally in the two regions: (1) strong stimulation (government deficits, active
monetary policy, industrial policy, hidden protectionism) in the United States; and (2)
deflationary policies (cutting government deficits) in Europe with the aim of tranquilizing
financial institutions concerning the capability of governments to pay back their debts.
Neoliberalism will not survive the crisis in its present configuration. Already the United
States manifests the features of a gradually less liberal neoliberalism, although the interest
of upper classes remains basically unscathed. The economy will benefit from the low costs
of production labor and cheaper energy (with shale gas), but more profound alterations will
be required with deeper transformations of management and policies whose main feature
will be the increased role of the classes of managers in the private sector and officials in
governments. Such alternative course of events can be conducted by social orders leaning to
the right or to the left, though no signs are presently observed concerning the second
option.

51. Finance and Regulation Manuel Aalbers (University of Leuven) -
Manuel.Aalbers@ees.kuleuven.be

There is a complex relation between financial regulation and neoliberalism. Commonly,
neoliberalism is associated with deregulation, but the label deregulation implies less
regulation and deregulation is commonly framed as something that frees up markets from
government intervention, suggestive of neoliberalization. Although the idea that markets
thrive in the absence of state control has been criticized for decades, we have not broken out
of the framing of deregulation as something that frees up markets from regulatory
constraints. That does not imply that all government intervention is there to push
marketization, but it does suggest, first, that state intervention is a necessary condition for
markets to thrive, and second, that states often regulate markets to facilitate financial and
other elites rather than to constrain them. Actually existing regulation and neoliberalism are
not so much market-oriented as they are devoted to the dominance of markets and public
life by financialized corporations.

52. Neoliberalism 3.0 Reijer Hendrikse (University of Amsterdam) and James Sidaway
(National University of Singapore) - R.P.Hendrikse@uva.nl, geojds@nus.edu.sg

Diagnoses of the end of neoliberalism (after the late 2000s financial crisis) were premature.
We chart the reformulation of neoliberalism since the crisis, positing 6 interrelated features
and representations: (i) a fiscal crisis of the state, (ii) marketization of remaining state/social
assets, (iii) modifications to rhetoric of accountability and audit established in rollout
27
neoliberalism, (iv) the pursuit of social affinities and alliances in pursuit of these strategies,
(v) the tightening nexus of security, geopolitics and neoliberalism and (vi) shifts of geo-
economic power South and East. The relationship of these to earlier phases of neoliberalism
demands careful scrutiny.

53. Postneoliberalism Ulrich Brand (University of Vienna) - ulrich.brand@univie.ac.at

The delegitimation of neoliberalism takes place not only via visible crises like the ecological
and the financial one or by means of the enormous social polarisation in many countries
but in addition through continuing conceptual and practical criticism passed by intellectuals,
scientists and critical media, social movements and NGOs. The concept of
postneoliberalism was introduced at the end of the 1990s by intellectuals close to the
presidential candidate Ignacio Lula das Silva in Brazil. In the mid of intense anti-neoliberal
struggles across Latin America the concept intended to indicate that a government of the
Workers Party (PT) would break with neoliberal policies, its political economy, related power
relations as well as with respective discourses and subjectivities. In contrast to this political-
strategic perspective, a rather analytical usage of the term did not focus on the question
whether a new, postneoliberal era in general has begun and what might be criteria speaking
against and/or for this assessment. Rather, it is proposed to consider postneoliberalism as a
perspective on social, political and/or economic transformations, on shifting terrains of
social struggles and compromises, taking place on different scales, in various contexts and by
different actors. All postneoliberal approaches have in common that they break with some
specific aspects of neoliberalism, covering in its alternative approaches different aspects of
a possible postneoliberalism, vary in depth, complexity, scope etc. and cover a wide range
between everyday practices and comprehensive concepts. The analytical foundations of such
a perspective are theories like Regulation theory of Neo-Gramscian Political Economy
which are able to think the historically and spatially uneven development of capitalism, i.e. its
continuities and ruptures. In my contribution I will present a brief overview of the
beginnings of the concept and then outline the core dimensions of the concept, its strengths
and weaknesses as well as some differences between different contributions.

54. Zombies Japhy Wilson (University of Manchester) - japhy.wilson@manchester.ac.uk

Ever since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, and the ensuing Great Recession, the
metaphor of the undead has taken on a peculiar appeal in both critical scholarship and
popular culture. This trend has been dominated by the zombie: the dead man walking, who
staggers blindly forward, and who feasts upon the brains of the living. In the same way,
neoliberalism has risen from the ruins of the global economic crisis, and moves inexorably
onwards, in blind disregard for the social and ecological constraints of its surrounding
lifeworld, and deprived of the ideological hegemony that once brought vigour to its deathly
flesh. This chapter seeks to make sense of this disturbing phenomenon. It begins by
summarising the literature on zombie neoliberalism. This leads into an exploration of the
relationship between capitalism and the undead, which has its roots in Gothic literature and
the industrial revolution. I then propose a psychoanalytic reading of this relationship in
general, and of zombie neoliberalism in particular. Marxs theory of capital as undead labour,
which comes to assert itself as an abstract form of domination over the living, is related to
the death drive in the work of Freud and Lacan a drive that insists beyond all limits,
including self-destruction. If neoliberalism is a social fantasy, structured against the Real of
28
Capital, then what happens when this fantasy breaks down? In the ideological vacuum of the
end of history, we are left with the abject figure of the zombie, whose mind is vacant, but
whose twitching limbs are animated by the death drive of global capital. This zombie
hungers for your brain.

55. Resilience - Vlad Mykhnenko (University of Birmingham) - v.mykhnenko@bham.ac.uk
It is often said that cities and regions, their populations, and their governance structures
increasingly have to respond to major challenges and a vast range of contemporary risks
resulting from environmental change, threats to national and international security, and an
array of issues associated with international migration and growing global economic
turbulence. In the short-term, at least in the Global North, local communities, cities, and
regions have to tackle and mitigate the impact of the global financial and economic crisis. In
the medium term, they ought to be equipped to manage the pressures of an ageing and
declining population. In the long run, the capacity and systemic capabilities of the critical
urban infrastructure in major population centres must be enhanced to cope with potentially
cataclysmic consequences of climate change. Resilience is a conceptual framework, which
purportedly offers its adherents a set of mechanisms to confront these monumental
challenges of the modern age. The emergence of resilience as a popular way of thinking
about society at large has been prompted by the terrorist attacks in the USA on 11
September 2001. Yet even prior to those events, it is fair to argue that the market forces
unleashed through the neo-liberal globalisation reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, combined
with the consequent shifts in the geopolitical balance of forces towards the largest emerging
market economies, have enhanced a sense of personal and collective insecurity, particularly
in the West. Consequently, there appears now increased emphasis on responding to such
major challenges with a long-term view, rethinking risk assessment and mitigation strategies,
giving increased focus to developing adaptive human behaviours, and facilitating individual
and institutional coping strategies as to enable the local populations to bounce-back from
adversity. Within this context, this chapter initially sets out differing definitions and
approaches to the study of resilience. These include a focus on various aspects of resilience,
including individual and community resilience, as well as economic resilience and issues of
adaptation and the mitigation of risk. In terms of the former, this chapter will interrogate the
effect of place-based (community) and person-based approaches (individual adaptability,
for example), whilst from a theoretical perspective a combination of state-centred (strategic-
relational), institutional (multi-level governance) and individual agency approaches are
elaborated in terms of their ability to understand the changing nature

56. Everyday Contestations to Neoliberalism: Valuing and Harnessing Alternative
Work Practices in a Neoliberal Society Richard J. White (Sheffield Hallam University)
and Colin. C Williams (University of Sheffield) - richard.white@shu.ac.uk,
C.C.Williams@shef.ac.uk

This chapter draws on empirical research to demonstrate the pervasive nature of alternative
(non-commodified) spaces of work and organisation within contemporary western society.
The findings, in highlighting the shallow purchase of capitalism in everyday coping strategies,
provoke urgent questions about what constitutes and represents "the economic", which the
chapter reflects on in detail. Moreover, the presence of diverse alternative economic
practices suggests radical exist points that can further uncouple economic development from
a "neoliberal" future. Indeed the fact that more work practices have been increasingly
29
informalised over time in the "advanced economies" serves to further expose the dominant
claims of neoliberalism-as-hegemonic-project. At a time of serious economic, ecological and
social crisis, the chapter demonstrates the feasibility of engaging with alternative non-
commodified spaces to create more empowering, inclusive and sustainable economic modes
of production, exchange and consumption. While taking care to problematize what is
actually meant by "the alternative" in a society which tells itself it is capitalist, the chapter
focuses on ways to harness an economic future consistent with enactable "post-neoliberal"
visions of work and organisation.

57. Our Own Power Instead Mark Purcell (University of Washington) -
mpurcell@uw.edu

Enough of neoliberalism. It's not what we want. We should be talking about what we do
want. Let's write instead a Handbook of Democracy, or a Handbook of the Common, or a
Handbook of Care. All around us are innumerable positive desires that are good for us, that
nourish us, that are the foundation for building better ways to live together in the world. To
be sure, those desires are often captured and corrupted by structures like capitalist social
relations and state sovereignty. But we must avoid the temptation to slide into ressentiment,
to become obsessed by the structures, and to be consumed by the outrage we feel because
they capture our desire. Ressentiment makes us forget that these structures are not original,
that they are not the source of power; we are. Our desire is what is productive. It is what
creates the world. Our outrage can only destroy. It is only good for a ground clearing. It is
not the basis for a better life. When we fixate on neoliberalism, on injustice, on inequality, on
exploitation, on enclosure, on we ignore justice, equality, free activity, and the common. We
ignore our own power, the power that originates in and is proper to us, the power that we
need to be keenly attentive to so that we can reclaim it, so that we can learn to use it again.
From spectacular popular uprisings to the countless free actions of everyday life, there is no
shortage of events to examine and learn from. Enough of neoliberalism. We've got better
things to do.

V. Details of the Books Structure

Introduction
This chapter introduces the books thematic coverage by outlining its substantive content,
recognizing that writing about neoliberalism has quickly become a vitally important
component of contemporary scholarly critique within the social sciences. We will introduce
the concept of neoliberalism and discuss the importance of its theorization and actual
practice in relation to contemporary processes both inside and outside of the academy. A
working definition of neoliberalism will also be offered, but we will attempt to instill readers
with an understanding of significant fluidity as debates on what neoliberalism actually is,
and even if it exists at all, continue to rage across the academy.

Origins
In this, the first of our major thematic sections, we hope to guide readers through a
discussion of how something called neoliberalism came to be, detailing its early beginnings
and eventual uptake across a diverse range of economic matrixes, social contexts, policy
environments, and institutional settings.
30

Political Implications
This thematic section seeks to focus readers attention on the variety of political implications
that come attendant to neoliberal reform. Shifting geopolitical realities, the sovereignty of
states and their (in)adherence to democratic process, divergent approaches to questions of
development and citizenship, biopolitical consequences, and encounters with violence are all
discussed as the major loci of neoliberal politics.

Social Tensions
Although cognizant of the false dichotomy that separating social from the political implies,
we nonetheless felt it was a useful organizing principle to try to tease out social tensions as
slightly distinct from political implications. Here we set out to cover major identity categories
such as race, gender, class and sexuality, while also focusing on neoliberal consequences for
health, welfare, and patterns of punitive reform.

Knowledge Productions
With this section our intention is to demonstrate how neoliberalism operates through varies
frames of knowledge to accumulate its power. Processes of education and the impact on the
university and pedagogy are perhaps the most obvious domains, but we also seek to explore
themes of innovation, policy transfers, and financial economics as processes where
neoliberal knowledge is produced. More embodied forms of knowledge are also given
coverage by thinking through performativity and ignorance in relation to patterns of
neoliberalization.

Spaces
Given that human geography has been one of the most important disciplinary players in the
articulation of critiques against neoliberalism, and owing to the fact that all of the editors are
human geographers, we wanted to devote specific attention to the spatial patterns of
neoliberalism as such a focus is critically important in understanding both its operation and
neoliberalisms ongoing power. We look to the urban and rural frames to tease out
similarities and discontinuities, while also considering the notion of heartlands and
peripheries at a more global scale. Space implies both borders and process, and we look to
migration as a particularly salient way in which the movements of neoliberalism can be
witnessed and even potentially subverted. We also focus in on the domesticating
implications of neoliberalism in terms of its penetration of the home.

Natures and Environments
The impacts of neoliberalism extend beyond the domains of politics, society, and one of the
key spaces of encounter is the environment. Much has been said in the literature about the
neoliberalization of nature, and we afford this development with the attention it deserves by
providing coverage of major environmental consequences such as climate change, energy
sourcing, and access to water. Nature is not a category that is devoid of the social, and in
recognizing this we also look to the commodification of bodies, agricultural practices, and
the enclosure of the commons as important implications on natures and environments as
well.

Aftermaths
The guiding idea for this section is that neoliberalism continues to have resonant effects in
31
the aftermath of a global financial crisis. This can be framed in a variety of ways, and our
intention is to draw out a diverse discussion of where neoliberalism is headed, how it has
changed, and what sorts of resistances have emerged. Various authors have started to discuss
ideas of postneoliberalism, while others speak of a zombification of neoliberalism, where it
is effectively dead as a viable political economic idea, and yet continues to stagger
unrelentingly forward by mutating into new forms.

VI. Description of the Books Target Market

The book is primarily aimed at the academic community, including other scholars and
students working and studying in the fields of global political economy, human geography,
international relations, anthropology, urban studies, geopolitics, critical theory, poststructural
and postcolonial studies, political science and development studies. While it is an academic
text, those with a more general interest in critical political economy and the linkages between
neoliberalism and power will find the book particularly useful, which beyond the academic
community includes both activists and those working within non-governmental
organizations. In terms of student readership, the book would be suitable for both
undergraduate and graduate students, where the book would be used as a resource for those
addressing contemporary global politics, economic geography, critical approaches to
capitalism, global political economies, and discourses of power. The book has international
appeal as the subject matter pertains to the global political economy. Accordingly, a
readership would be located in scholarly communities throughout the world, primarily in
places like North America, Australia/New Zealand, Europe, Singapore, Hong Kong, South
Africa, Nigeria, and India. The book will appeal to the growing number of scholars who
demonstrate concern for and recognition of how neoliberalism has transformed global
relations in terms of politics, social processes, environmental concerns, and knowledge
productions.

VII. Competing Books

In recent years there have been quite a number of texts that take neoliberalism as a central
focus, yet there has never been a comprehensive volume to serve as a reference for scholars
and students interested in the field. The books listed below therefore do not represent direct
competition with the Routledge Handbook of Neoliberalism and instead are meant to illustrate
some of the engagements that have been made with neoliberalism in the literature.

1. David Harvey. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.

A watershed text, Harveys book has been tremendously influential in the ongoing debates
that frame neoliberalism. Not without its critics, Harveys text remains crucially important to
how neoliberalism has been conceptualized. Easily one of the most important books in the
social sciences to come along in the last decade.

2. Jamie Peck. 2010. Constructions of Neoliberal Reason. Oxford University Press.

This is a fundamental text within neoliberal studies, written by one of the fields most
32
innovative and prolific scholars. The book is a highly detailed account of how neoliberalism
was constructed as an idea and the fundamental flaws that are built into its reasoning.
Arguing from a political economic perspective it provides both scope and depth to our
understandings of neoliberalism by unpacking the geographical implications of
neoliberalisms unfolding.

3. Kevin Ward and Kim England (eds.). 2007. Neoliberalization: States, Networks, Peoples. Wiley-
Blackwell

Neoliberalization features contributors from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds,
writing from different locations, using varying methodologies, and working on diverse issues,
which provides a more comprehensive reading of how neoliberalism/neoliberalization has
been applied and interpreted across the social sciences. Empirically, the book appropriately
moves away from the first generation centers of neoliberalism, focusing on peripheries
within the global north as well as second generation adopters of neoliberalism in the
global south and specifically how neoliberalism has been variously implemented as
contingent, mutable, and contextually specific neoliberalizations.

4. Noam Chomsky. (1999) Profit Over People: Neoliberalism & Global Order. Seven Stories Press.

A book that stands out as one of the most influential texts on neoliberalism, where Chomsky
was clearly well ahead of the pack in identifying and critiquing this particular iteration of
capitalism. The focus here is centered on the ways in which neoliberalism restricts the public
arena in favor of private power and how this negatively impacts all of our lives. It also offers
a powerful indictment of the practices and policies of the international financial institutions.

5. Alfredo Saad-Filho and Deborah Johnston (eds.) 2005. Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader.
Pluto Press.

A critical introduction to neoliberalism that explains the nature, history, strengths,
weaknesses and implications of neoliberalism from the point of view of radical political
economics. The book outlines the theory of neoliberalism, its implications on policy, and its
uptake in various empirical settings across the globe. What is missing from this collection is
the voice of geographers, and although this is a curious omission, this is still a tremendously
useful volume.

6. Philip Mirowski. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial
Meltdown. Verso.

This recent book offers a vigorous challenge to those who have suggested the era of
neoliberalism is over and provides a detailed analysis of why it continues to resonate in
contemporary affairs. Mirowski argues that neoliberalism has become a theory of
everything and is now so entirely pervasive that any indication of counter evidence is simply
conscripted into neoliberals regime of truth. This is a fascinating spin on thinking through
the ongoing importance of neoliberalism as a political economic idea.

33
7. Adrian Smith, Alison Stenning and Katie Willis (eds). 2008. Social Justice and Neoliberalism:
Global Perspectives. Zed Books.

An important intervention that considers how neoliberalism has been resisted, explores the
entanglements of neoliberalization with identity formation and subjectivation, outlines the
impacts neoliberal implementation has on opportunities for achieving social justice, and
investigates the alternative economic practices that arise from, or exist alongside
neoliberalization through the lens of the diverse economies literature and its critical
questioning of the economic as a coherent category.

8. Manfred B. Steger. 2010. Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

This is a timely and very welcome addition to the literature that offers a basic introduction to
neoliberalisms central tenants allowing unfamiliar readers to get up to speed on what this
economic idea is all about. The book covers some of the most pertinent debates surrounding
the conceptualization of neoliberalism so as to satisfy those who are just becoming
acquainted with the topic. Not a groundbreaking text by any means, but nonetheless a very a
worthwhile addition to the literature and an ideal starting point for the uninitiated.

9. Kean Birch and Vlad Mykhnenko. (eds) 2010. The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism: The Collapse
of an Economic Order? Zed Books.

A really useful edited volume that provides a very focused set of analyses on the cracks that
have been exposed in neoliberalisms armor to reveal a political economic order that is filled
with contradictions. The collected chapters explore the diverse responses that have been
made in both buttressing and tearing down neoliberal hegemony, offering considerable
insight into how neoliberalism was constructed and ultimately how it may be deconstructed.

Each of the aforementioned books do something very different than what we are proposing
here. The closest to a comprehensive overview that if offered is either David Harveys A
Brief History of Neoliberalism or Alfredo Saad-Filho and Deborah Johnstons Neoliberalism: A
Critical Reader, but both of these books have their limitations in terms of offering a thorough
survey of the field. Harveys text does not accomplish this as it is intended as a history, and
in many ways we can look to his book as a catalyst for future inquiry rather than a survey of
the field. Saad-Filho and Johnstons text comes closer, but by the time our proposed
handbook is published, their edited volume will be over a decade old. There have been
significant changes in the neoliberal landscape since this time, arguably the most important
of which was the financial crisis that began in 2008, several years after the Saad-Filho and
Johnstons collection was published. In short, we feel that there is a distinct need to take
stock of the current state of the field and provide a comprehensive, up to date, and wide-
ranging survey of how neoliberalism is being understood, implemented, and resisted in the
wake of a major economic crisis.

34
VIII. Editor Biographies

Simon Springer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at University of
Victoria, Canada. His research agenda explores the political, social, and geographical
exclusions that neoliberalization has engendered in post-transitional Cambodia, emphasizing
the spatialities of violence and power. He cultivates a cutting edge approach to human
geography through a theoretical edifice that foregrounds emerging thematic concerns within
the discipline by incorporating both poststructuralist critique and a radical revival of
anarchist philosophy in advancing a postanarchist positionality. Simon has published
extensively in a number of top-ranking human geography journals including Progress in
Human Geography, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Annals of the Association of
American Geographers, Political Geography, and Environment and Planning A. He is also the author
of Cambodia's Neoliberal Order: Violence, Authoritarianism, and the Contestation of Public Space,
published by Routledge, and the lead editor of a special issue of Antipode on anarchist
geographies.

Kean Birch is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Science at York University,
Toronto. He teaches in the Business and Society program. His current research agenda
focuses on the problematics of neoliberalism and thinking through how we might
reconceptualize neoliberal restructuring in light of the global financial crisis. He has
published in a variety of journals including Economic Geography, Environment and Planning A,
Journal of Economic Geography, Regional Studies and Science, Technology and Human Values. He is
also the co-editor of The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism published by Zed Books.

Julie MacLeavy is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Bristol, UK.
Her research develops a cultural political economy reading of state intervention and its
geographies. Utilising an original and innovative analytical framework that synthesizes the
strategic-relational approach, neo-Foucauldian concerns with governmentality and
geographical scale issues (especially local impact), Julies research makes a valuable
contribution to the study of neoliberalism as both real world phenomenon and as a
theoretical object by providing a rich, imaginative and empirically grounded study of labour
market regulation, welfare provision and urban renewal in the UK. Julies work has been
published in a number of high ranking scholarly journals including Environment and Planning
A, Geoforum, Urban Studies, Cambridge Review of Regions, Economy and Society and Gender, Place and
Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography. She is the lead editor of a special issue of Antipode on
new state spatialities and has recently co-edited a special issue of Social Politics on gendered
transformations of governance, economy and citizenship.

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