This essay argues that neoliberalism seeks to frame highly political and morally-charged operations within a bland discourse that insists on the neutrality of the market. Thus it is necessarily flawed in its contribution to the study of offshore, because it attempts to disguise the invariably political and pragmatic functions of offshore in the contemporary global political economy.
It is a trite but commonplace observation that we are witnessing a resurgence in religion and religious fundamentalism; that the secularist progression envisaged by linear models of social development has not come to fruition. This essay seeks both to contest the notion that secularisation can be seen as a universal or absolute process and, further, to problematise certain critical approaches which understand ‘religion’ as a site of autonomy and resistance against these totalising discourses.
This essay first considers the ideological and discursive background to China’s one-child policy, before employing the Foucauldian concepts of governmentality and biopower to outline how these techniques of control are effected – looking specifically at non-coercive examples, which tend to be overlooked in discussions and popular conceptions of the People’s Republic.
This essay first outlines the orthodox or neoclassical understanding of ‘cronyism’ and its pejorative connotations, before considering the ‘developmental state’ paradigm that emerged with East Asia’s ‘miracle’ growth. I then attempt to recast the concept of cronyism within its historical and cultural context, dispensing with neoclassical ideas of ‘correct’ economic practice and notions that crony capitalism itself represents either an explanation or a necessary outcome.
This essay argues that one central problem remains regarding this Marxist theorisation of the international: namely that the normative concern of historical materialism can engender hostility towards contemporary ‘postmodern’ themes, which may ultimately prove an intractable obstacle to further intellectual enquiry.
This essay first briefly explains the significance of ‘structural violence’ in Israeli society, before going on to critically examine dominant conceptions of ‘suffering’ in the Israeli context, arguing that the pragmatic and rationalist bias of this notion itself constitutes one major hindrance to ‘healing’. Finally, I consider the role of silence and memory in perpetuating suffering in Israel, looking specifically at the two imbricated elements of Holocaust memorialisation and the construction of the Other, arguing for a more processual rather than essentialist conception of suffering, community, healing and memory.
The anarchical Hobbesian ‘state of nature’ is a commonly used paradigm in IR theory, yet this essay argues that alternative understandings of Hobbes’ work call into question the degree to which he himself could be accurately described as ‘Hobbesian’.
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