From free oil to ‘freedom oil’: terrorism,war and US Geopolitics in the Persian Gulf

Oil has been a major driving force behind foreign interests, regional and domestic balance of power, and territorial conflicts in the Persian Gulf. As a result of the ‘9/11’ terrorist attacks debates on oil and the United States' security agenda have significantly shifted. If on one side, those opposing US military interventionism have argued that the ‘war on terror’ provided one more convenient cover for a renewed ‘imperialist oil grab’ in this region; on the other, links between oil and terrorism pointed at problems of governance in oil-producing countries. As the ‘war on terror’ became justified as a ‘war of liberation’ against oil-funded dictators, the US portrayed its foreign policy as shifting from ensuring free access to oil for the world market, to ensuring that oil is delivering ‘freedom’ to local populations. Although engaging the crucial issue of oil governance, there is yet little evidence given the number of war victims and potential vested interests that a US policy shift from ‘free oil’ to ‘freedom oil’ is genuine and viable.     

Securitising the Unconscious: The Bush Doctrine of Preemption and Minority Report

Using Minority Report as its interpretive guide, this essay considers how the securitisation of the unconscious is performed in primarily fiction (film) but also ‘fact’ (US foreign policy). The essay makes two general arguments. Implicitly, it argues that American moralities and what I call US moral grammars of war are not only formulated in traditional realms of politics but in geopolitical moral imaginaries in which US foreign policy intersects with popular (often filmic) imaginaries as well as with narratives about the family. Elaborating on this final point about the family, the essay explicitly argues that the feminine is the keystone of the US moral grammar of war in the war on terror because it is the foundational figure upon whom a specific articulation of a moral US ‘we’ is constructed. What this means is that as the US ‘we’ looks ahead to who a future moral American US ‘we’ might become (which is the theme of Minority Report and a theme in everyday post-11 September American life), it ought to begin by understanding how the feminine both secures and insecures the complex relationship between justice and security, particularly as it functions in relation to the present-day Bush administration’s policies of securitising the unconscious.     

American hegemony after 11 September: allies,rivals and contradictions

11 September heralded and provided a pretext for a more aggressive but increasingly contradictory American hegemony. Some of the consequences are contrary to the United States' own interests. Its new doctrine of ‘preemptive strike’ against other sovereign states encourages similarly belligerent behaviour by other governments, and yet more terrorism by nonstate actors, the very threats which were to be eradicated by a re-asserted US hegemony. This essay focuses on three partly overlapping themes: different strategies towards allies – multilateral and unilateral; different forms of power – civil and military; and different ideologies of globalisation – neoliberal and neo-conservative. It argues that while US policy may oscillate between such poles, it often combines the different elements. The overall strategy of the Bush administration is best characterised as unilateral multilateralism. The main issue for US hegemonists is the ways in which their hegemony might best be exercised, maintained and strengthened vis à vis allies and rivals. But for a safer, more democratic world, the choice does not lie between one faction of US hegemonists and another: we need other alternatives such as cosmopolitan democracy and a genuine internationalist movement which would give it some much-needed substance.     

International Donors,NGOs, and the Geopolitics of Youth Citizenship in Contemporary Lebanon

In the aftermath of 9/11, Western states have increasingly used the promotion of democracy and civil society as a means of effecting geopolitical aims in the Middle East. Democracy promotion has involved extensive financial support of local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who work to instill (neo)liberal-democratic values and norms among populations that are seen to be lacking in these. This article, in examining the production of citizenship as a geopolitical practice, brings critical-geography scholarship into conversation with the critical literature on Western-funded civil society in ‘transitional’ societies. We focus on the case of Lebanon, which has been targeted by Western donors due to its strategic importance in deepening regional geopolitical rivalries. We highlight the pervasiveness of Western democracy discourses in the work of local NGOs, and especially the tendency to view sectarian politics as a source of instability that must be sublimated by new forms of societal consensus. But our account also highlights the scepticism that NGO directors feel toward their own efficacy and toward the influence of Western donors in Lebanese society. Their critical assessments of Western-funded civil society call into question the extent to which democracy promotion can secure Western geopolitical interests, much less enforce Western political supremacy.     

Efficiency And Equity Aspects Of The

The joint impact of long term structural features, on the one hand, and of recent market-oriented reforms in the macroeconomic incentive regime, on the other, are inducing major changes in social and production organization throughout the Latin American region. The new economic model is quite different in structure and performance from the one Latin American countries exhibited during the Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) period. Non tradable activities such as telecommunications, energy or transport services, natural resource processing industries producing low value added industrial ‘commodities’ and assembly industries (‘maquiladoras’), producing computers, TV and Video sets and garments for the US market, together with the vehicle industry, which has managed to receive preferential treatment from the part of the various governments in the region, have performed much better than average, both in terms of labor productivity growth as well as in terms of ‘catching up’ with the international productivity frontier. Contrary to the above, unskilled labor, and engineering and knowledge intensive industries, have performed worse than average and are ‘falling behind’ international standards. Domestic subsidiaries of multinational corporations and large local conglomerates are gaining ground within GDP, while SMEs and public enterprises have been losing it. The paper examines some of the macro-to- micro relations underlying the above mentioned process of structural transformation and the interdependency between economic, technological and institutional forces inducing it. It argues that ‘main stream’ economics fails adequately to capture the role played by such interdependencies and offers a policy advice which can not deal with the new efficiency and equity problems resulting from recent structural changes.     

UNDERSTANDING THE INTERACTION BETWEEN INTERNATIONAL AND EURO AREA OUTPUT VOLATILITY

This paper addresses two main questions. First, it seeks to establish whether the stylized facts of the ‘great moderation’ that have been documented for the UK and US economies can be found for the Euro area. Second, it explores possible explanations for any changes that have occurred in the volatility of Euro area output fluctuations. In examining why business cycles have moderated, much of the existing literature has tended to concentrate on a few key factors. These include shifts in the structure of the economy, improved monetary policy and a ‘good luck’ factor. This paper, however, follows a relatively new branch of the great moderation literature by focusing on whether international business cycle linkages have changed in a way that may have perpetuated the dampening in Euro area output fluctuations. The results show Euro area output fluctuations to have significantly reduced in variability over the last quarter of a century. The results go on to highlight that, although Euro area cycles differ little from rest of the world cycles, the moderation in Euro area output fluctuations is only marginally due to changes in international business cycle linkages and smaller international and domestic shock variances.     

Beyond Homo economicus: evidence from experimental economics

Environmental policies are generally based on a model of the human actor taken from neoclassical economic theory. This paper reports on laboratory experiments suggesting weaknesses in this model and describes alternative models correcting these weaknesses. One finding is that economic actors tend to be hyperbolic as opposed to exponential discounters who discount the immediate future at a higher rate than the more distant future. Another finding is that economic actors are not self-regarding, but rather in many circumstances are strong reciprocators who come to strategic interactions with a propensity to cooperate, respond to cooperative behavior by maintaining or increasing cooperation, and respond to free-riders by retaliating against the ‘offenders’, even at a personal cost, and even when there is no reasonable expectation that future personal gains will flow from such retaliation. We discuss some implications for policy analysis.     

Leading from Behind – American Exceptionalism and President Obama’s Post-American Vision of Hegemony

This article explores the discursive performance and political significance of ‘American exceptionalism’ under President Obama. Moving beyond a critical examination of geopolitical identity, it investigates how representations of exceptionalism, understood as ideational construct of uniqueness and superiority, are linked to practices of US foreign and security policy that confirm, but also contest, established notions of American leadership in world politics. A particular focus lies on the 2012 presidential campaign, and how diverging ‘exceptionalist’ visions between Obama and Mitt Romney testified to competing ideas for American primacy and cooperative engagement. The article will further examine the cases of ‘leading from behind’ in Libya, American non-intervention against Assad in Syria, and US reactions to current crises concerning Ukraine and ISIS. The contextualisation of these episodes in contemporary, geopolitical discourse reveals how the practice of US foreign and security policy under Obama is shaped by a conflicted and paradoxical vision of post-American hegemony.     

‘Socialization of Investment’ and ‘Euthanasia of the Rentier’: the Relevance of Keynesian policy ideas for the contemporary US Economy

This paper builds from two explicit policy ideas that Keynes introduced in the General Theory, a ‘somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment’, and ‘the euthanasia of the rentier’. The paper argues that, to a significant degree, the stagnation of the contemporary US economy can be attributed to the nature of its capital-market based, or ‘exit led’ financial system, which promotes short-termism, speculation and financial fragility, as well as excessive political power for the rentier class. In combination, these factors also diminish governments' capacity to successfully implement policies that promote egalitarian growth and full employment. In making these points, I contrast the US financial system with the bank-based or ‘voice led’ systems, such as those in Japan, France or South Korea. The paper then sketches a series of policy proposals which would address these problems. These proposals include regulatory policies which would ‘level the playing field upward’ among all financial intermediaries, and credit allocation policies that give preference to projects with high social rates of return. The proposals also aim to substantially increase the degree of democratic accountability within the financial system.     

Structural Reform, Macro Policies and Income Distribution

Since the mid-1980s, Australia has been under considerable pressure to restructure its economy. This restructuring has been necessitated by the need to generate surpluses in its external trade account in order to meet the growing interest payments on its foreign debt. To facilitate this process of restructuring, the Commonwealth Government initially used two macro policies that have the desired structural effects: ‘wage moderation’ and ‘fiscal management’. In this paper, we examine the distributional effects of these policies. The analysis depends on simulations using an extended version of the ORANI model of the Australian economy, taken in conjunction with unit record data from an updated version of the 1981–82 Income and Housing Survey database.     

Participation and Development: Perspectives from the Comprehensive Development Paradigm

This paper investigates the relationship between economic and social development. Contrary to the view of those who believe in the existence of a tradeoff between democracy and growth, the paper contends that consensus-building, open dialog and the promotion of an active civil society are key ingredients to long-term sustainable development. Development is a participatory process. "Best practices" or reforms that are imposed on a country through conditionality may very well fail to produce lasting change. They will tend to undermine people's incentives to develop their own capacities and weaken their confidence in using their own intelligence. Success in a knowledge-based economy requires a highly-educated citizenry, involved in the process of shaping and adapting ideas and policies. Participation and democracy in turn call for greater transparency and accountability in both the corporate and government sectors.     

The ‘Greater Middle East’ as a ‘Modern’ Geopolitical Imagination in American Foreign Policy

This article aims at analysing how the September 11 terrorist attacks have caused the formation of a new geopolitical vision of an area called the ‘Greater Middle East’ and how this formation has led to changes in US foreign policy towards this region. To do that, the article first presents a theoretical background against which the modern geopolitical imagination of the USA is formulated. It considers the links between national traumas/myths, geopolitical codes and visions, and foreign policy actions. The article then applies this analysis to the case of the Greater Middle East with respect to how this imagined geography shapes the foreign and security policy of the USA. It concludes that even though this imagined region has been presented in texts as justifying US-led policies with liberal underpinnings, it has in reality laid the ground for and been used for justifying US extra-territorial intervention in the region.     

A History of Violence: Mearsheimer and Walt's Writings from ‘An Unnecessary War’ to the ‘Israel Lobby’ Controversy

Realist academics wrote some of the most lucid critiques of the geopolitics of anger initiated after 9/11 by the Bush administration: John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in particular, began to interrogate the War on Terror with lines of inquiry that lead back to the critiques of U.S. foreign policy—and the ‘fantasies’ and ‘self-deception’ of policy makers—developed in the 1960s by Hans Morgenthau and Hannah Arendt. But then Walt and Mearsheimer published controversial essays on ‘The Israel Lobby’ based on arguments developed in Walt's Taming American Power. What interests me in the paper is accounting for a curious move that occurs in the writings of Mearsheimer and Walt since 9/11. By the time that we arrive at Walt's Taming American Power and the essays on ‘The Israel Lobby’, critical commentary on the ‘self-deception’ of policy makers and the problems with neo-conservatism has largely disappeared, replaced with an anxiety over the Israel lobby that appears overstated. It is argued that the emphasis on foreign ‘penetration’ is a means of postponing a broader interrogation of the domestic, internal problems of democracy and war in the United States.     

An economic evaluation of market development programmes for US dairy products

‘This study measured the effectiveness of US dairy export promotion programmes on increasing foreign demand and enhancing producers’ revenues. An import demand equation based on panel data was used to test whether export promotion has a positive and significant impact on US dairy exports. The effects of various promotion scenarios on the dairy market were then simulated, and benefit–cost ratios (BCRs) for these programmes were estimated. There were three key findings. First, the combined effort of public and private dairy export promotion expenditures had a positive and statistically significant impact on demand for US dairy products in the world market. The findings indicated that export promotion stimulated total dairy exports by 4.14 billion pounds, on average, per year, which represented 55.8% of total exports. Second, US dairy export promotion has been highly profitable for the nation’s dairy farmers. The calculated BCRs, based on assumed elasticity of supply, ranged from a low of 8.54 for the most elastic assumption to a high of 30.12. Third, from an optimality standpoint, dairy farmers are underinvesting in export promotion. The marginal BCRs ranged from a low of 3.79 to a high of 15.22, which means that, at the margin, increasing export promotion expenditures would be profitable for dairy farmers.     

Globalisation and post‐socialist development: the Tatarstan variety of capitalism

Russia's regions are attempting to form meaningful democratic systems, free markets and profitable industrial firms. This article, based on qualitative interviewing with local and foreign economic actors in the Republic of Tatarstan in central Russia, argues that while there are strong desires for globalisation to happen, the goal of significant integration into the world market is far from being attained. In this difficult scenario the local state, far from being a ‘failed state’, instead takes on a central role in determining the present and future shape of this developing region. Implications for globalisation theory are considered in the conclusion.     

The co‐development of economies and institutions

In this study, we model the Schumpeterian growth theory in a simple discrete‐time framework in which both economies and institutions need to be developed. Individuals need to borrow from an imperfect financial market to develop an economy. A government can adopt two potential strategies for improving the borrowing capacity of individuals and, as a result, enhancing economic performance: ‘the rule of law’ and ‘industrial policies’. We interpret market‐oriented reform in transition economies as a shift from ‘industrial policies’, exemplified at the extreme by the traditional planned economy, to ‘the rule of law’. The presented model shows that both strategies could be the best choice at different stages of development.     

Micro-Geopolitics: Capitalising Security in Laos’s Golden Quadrangle

Enclosure, dispossession and displacement loom large in current debates about the recent boom in transnational farmland deals, and about Chinese agribusiness for export in particular. Often under-examined, however, are the ways that legacies of geopolitical conflict shape the inevitably uneven distribution of enclosure, dispossession and displacement. This paper constructs a case of these ‘micro-geopolitical’ legacies by examining a Chinese rubber planting ‘promotion’ project in northwestern Laos’s emerging ‘Golden Quadrangle’ development region. It argues that longstanding concerns about security inform the ways that local authorities deploy investment projects that are otherwise seen as examples of ‘foreign’ land grabbing. Further, it shows that while the geographical aims of foreign agribusiness mesh with state-mediated resettlement efforts (a darker spin on the narrative of ‘win-win’ cooperation), these activities often precede current land deals rather than result from them. Chinese agribusiness in Laos’s upland interior thus appears less as a driver of displacement than a means for attempting to secure in place a particular (if precarious) configuration of population and security.     

Unified economic ideas and their hybrid policies: the case of Swedish life science innovation work

Institutional theory describes organisations as being open to external influences, including policy-making. Policy-making is in turn based on normative ideas that inform how markets and economies unfold. Policies may include wide-ranging concerns and trade-offs (as in science and industry policy) or may be detailed and specific (as in the case of, e.g. procurement policies in the medical technologies sector), but they tend to play a role in shaping markets. A study of the Swedish life science innovation field suggests that the policy shift in life sciences governance to what Berman [2008. ‘Why Did Universities Start Patenting? Institution-building and the Road to the Bayh-Dole Act.’ Social Studies of Science 38: 835–871] names a market logic. In the present case, the market logic is not sufficiently supported by favourable market conditions, leading to a ‘hybrid logic’ enforcing an enterprising ethos but otherwise remains couched within a bureaucratic innovation system not providing critical resources conducive to life science innovation – venture capital funds and commercial human resources. The outcome is arguably case of ‘over-entrepreneurialisation’.     

Using demographic identification to estimate the effects of board size on corporate performance

Motivated by agency theory, we investigate the effect of board size on corporate outcomes. To address endogeneity, we exploit the variations in the director-age populations across the states in the US. We argue that firms with access to a larger pool of potential directors tend to have larger boards. Consistent with this notion, our empirical results show that firms located where the size of the director-age population is larger have significantly larger board size. Because the director-age population represents broad demographic trends outside of any firm’s control, it is unlikely related to firm outcomes or policies and should be exogenous. Using the director-age population as our instrument, we estimate the effects of board size on firm value and profitability. Our approach is less vulnerable to endogeneity and is more likely to show a causal effect.     

Evaluation and design of innovation policies in the agro-food sector: An application of multilevel self-regulating agents

The aim of this paper is to explore the possibilities offered by agent-base modelling techniques in evaluating the impact of alternative sets of innovation policies on the system where these are implemented and on its actors. The policies selected for this exercise are inspired by the Regional Government's policy document — the Programme for Rural Development (2007–2013) of the Puglia Region, Italy. These regard, inter alia, the promotion of organic agriculture and GMO-free cultivar, the introduction of a zero-food-miles strategy and new regulations and controls to prevent food adulterations. The paper presents and discusses the results of the simulations showing a trade-off between alternative growth paths and the overall structure of the sector. A “light-touch approach” affects positively smallholdings, associations of micro-small enterprises and the local retail sector by promoting shorter and more rewarding routes to markets for food products. Pursuing the policies more aggressively, will shift the focus of economic activities towards larger enterprises in the primary sector, manufacturing and business services and towards the large distribution for retail, while smallholdings and associations of micro-small enterprises will be increasingly marginalised.