When we discuss the climate crisis in economics, we are often confronted with a debate resting on technical solutions, emissions paths, and energy use: a certain amount of time to go from coal to turbines means a certain amount of carbon dioxide emitted, which means a certain likely degree of global temperature change. In environmental economics, climate change and its associated environmental problems are often framed as 鈥榚xternalities鈥; that is, unfortunate and unintended spillovers caused by market mechanisms. Often, social issues are taken into account within this narrative through sunny phrases like 鈥渟ustainable development鈥 or 鈥渏ust transition.鈥 The responsible parties are often individuals, states, or firms that are often thought to take action within the market. What does this debate look like if we take two different questions as starting points: not how to solve the climate crisis through market mechanisms and regulation, but how to solve the climate crisis while attending to the colonial legacy and exiting from contemporary neo-colonial accumulation patterns? Let us take a look.
In the latest issue of the London Review of Books under the title of 鈥淩ed Power: Indigenous Political Strategies,鈥 Thomas Meaney has written a review of three recent award-winning books by historians of Native North America: Pekka H盲m盲l盲inen鈥檚 Indigenous Continent; Ned Blackhawk鈥檚 The Rediscovery of America; and Nick Estes Our History is the Future. In some ways, the review is impressively learned. Meaney uses the occasion to canvass a generations-spanning array of scholarship on the history of Native North America and engages figures, events, and historiographic questions of which only a very small body of Native and non-native scholars on these topics are even aware.
Marks of erudition aside, Meaney is out to weave together a broader narrative that extends beyond the historical bona fides of these books. The key moment in setting up this narrative comes after Meaney has raised his readers鈥 hopes by opening with a quite historically literate summary of European settler expansionism and Indigenous peoples鈥 responses to it. In the paragraph that then really begins the substance of his review, Meaney pivots: 鈥渂ut recent roadmaps of the historiography either sidestep material questions or mistake a colonized mindset for progressivist one.鈥 This is where Meaney divides the three books under review into three categories of political and historical errors: H盲m盲l盲inen鈥檚 revisionist history overstretches the notion of 鈥渆mpire鈥 in his account of 鈥淚ndigenous power鈥 by labeling the Lakota (and in earlier work, the Comanche) as such. (I agree with this critique, so I leave it aside in this review). Blackhawk represents a trend of scholars of Native history and federal Indian law who 鈥渉ave so thoroughly internalized constitutional ideology that they seem not to notice how their cause has been instrumentalized by the most fanatically libertarian segment of American society.鈥 And finally, 鈥渁 nominally [!] left-wing Native scholarship鈥 that romanticizes Indigenous experiences, engaging in a politics of authenticity. The latter is how Meaney represents the work of Lakota scholar Nick Estes.
After establishing these categories, Meaney argues that these various limitations are 鈥渁ll the more regrettable because the 20th century offered examples of Indigenous co-operation with the left, cases contemporary political theorists have examined with more care than their historian peers.鈥 This is a strange thing to assert at the outset, given that there was no recognizable anticolonial 鈥渓eft鈥 in the US settler colony that Native nations could possibly have 鈥渃ooperated鈥 with in the 19th century. The consensus on the necessity and inevitability of land dispossession and structural predation cut across almost all categories of white society, including almost all of those on the far left of the political spectrum. Moreover, this included, as many others have noted, some key figures in the history of African-American political thought such as Douglas and Du Bois. What these historians鈥攑articularly Blackhawk and Estes鈥攁sk us to do is to suspend some assumptions about what constitutes the commitments of 鈥渢he left鈥 at all, given the deep investments of American republicanism and many later iterations of US leftism (let alone the liberalism of the Democratic Party) in colonial dispossession or just racialized indifference.
Calls for decolonizing disciplines, fields, even businesses have proliferated. The goals and meaning are not always clear, but any decolonizing process necessarily entails deconstructive and reconstructive tasks. In Economics, the first task must challenge dominant and domineering paradigms 鈥 orthodox and heterodox 鈥 and expose mechanisms of exclusion in the profession (Zein-Elabdin and Charusheela 2004). The constructive task, at least in part, consists of developing a theoretical vocabulary of economic meaning and well-being based on contemporary understandings of 鈥榲alue鈥 and its genetic relationship to questions of power and justice. Amartya Sen has aptly noted that 鈥渨hat moves us, reasonably enough, is not the realization that the world falls short of being completely just 鈥 which few of us expect 鈥 but that there are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate鈥 (2009). I would argue that historical injustices, such as those brought about by colonialism or other forms of lasting domination, cannot be remedied without reconstructing the meaning of economic value and valuation. Confronting value, power, and justice as a mutually constitutive problem is a necessary step for any project of 鈥榙ecolonizing鈥 Economics.
More than a century ago, Thorstein Veblen noted that 鈥渆conomics is helplessly behind the times鈥 (1898). His remark then was made in reference to the rise of Anthropology and new biological sciences. Today, this statement could well serve to depict the sluggishness of Economics to engage with postcolonial critique. Nowhere is this engagement more needed than in theories of value where a contemporary view is lacking. Value is a dauntingly complex concept; it is interpretive rather than discoverable. For the sake of this argument, I broadly frame it as a reference to what enables material sustenance and general well-being. Among other things, a new theoretical framework must seek to: a) revalue different types of work, especially those performed by women and ethnic and cultural subalterns; b) recalibrate 鈥榟umans鈥 relationship with the 鈥榥atural鈥 world; and c) redefine 鈥榩oor鈥 countries鈥 contribution to life in 鈥榬ich鈥 parts of the globe. So far, most economists have studied social disparities in income and wealth, ecological degradation, and global inequality as analytically separable problems without much attention to their common foundational reliance on major concepts of value inherited from industrial European modernity. In this brief commentary, I suggest that new, less 鈥渂ehind the times鈥 interpretations of value in Economics are long overdue.
Women have historically been excluded from formal land rights in the Indian subcontinent. For its rural population, land remains the most prevalent and significant asset, making bequests of land parcels the main channel through which women can acquire land (Gazdar, 2003; Nelson, 2011; Agarwal, 1994). Customary land rights prevented inheritance along gendered lines and in colonial times, these laws were codified to prevent the sale and purchase of land parcels (Nelson, 2011). To what extent and how have such gendered patterns of land ownership persisted in different areas of Punjab in Pakistan? To what extent is there path dependence in gendered land ownership? Those are the research questions I鈥檒l tackle in this blog post.
In 2015, the Government of Punjab introduced a series of reforms aimed at enforcing women鈥檚 existing legal land rights in the process of inheritance. One enforcement mechanism introduced was making it the responsibility of local revenue officials to ensure that after the death of a landed individual, each heir would be transferred their inherited share in the land parcel by revenue officials even if the family did not initiate an inheritance mutation process. In addition, paper-based land records originating from the era of British colonial rule were digitized and stored in a central database. The new system made it mandatory to conduct in-person biometric verification of all heirs (male and female) of the deceased for an inheritance mutation case to move forward with the official transfer of land parcels. The introduction of these enforcement mechanisms made an historically exclusive inheritance mutation process more inclusive towards women. But fieldwork suggests that previous patterns of land ownership continue to be repeated in Punjab putting women at a disadvantage. In this blog post I unpack some of these findings, which raise questions about land reform alone as the solution to gendered division of land ownership. Instead, I find that the manner in which old patronage structures interacted with the British colonial system has had lasting implications on the way in which land is distributed.
The Gender and Trade Coalition was initiated in 2018 by feminist and progressive activists to put forward feminist trade analysis and advocate for equitable trade policy.
This article is the second in a series of short, Q&A format 鈥榚xplainers鈥 unpacking key trade issues produced for the Gender and Trade Coalition by Regions Refocus. It was written by Senani Dehigolla (Regions Refocus), Erica Levenson (Regions Refocus), Anita Nayar (Regions Refocus), Nela Porobi膰 (WILPF), and Fatimah Kelleher (Nawi鈥揂frifem Macroeconomics Collective). Read the full article and catch up on past explainers .
Does Trade Enhance Post-Conflict Recovery?
Post-conflict contexts can refer to a spectrum of situations of violent political conflict (both inter-state and within states) which share similar considerations for reconstruction and development. Countries recovering from conflict wrestle with the challenges of sustaining peace while restoring their economies, rebuilding devastated social and physical infrastructure, and providing basic services to people whose lives have been upended by displacement and insurmountable loss (Cohn and Duncanson 2020; Mallett and Pain 2018). Many realities do not reflect the static term ‘post-conflict’, as conflicts can restart and end at different times in different parts of a country (Mallett and Pain 2018; Turner, Aginam and Popovski 2008). While trade may provide opportunities for exports and economic growth, unfettered trade liberalization can be counter-productive to domestic industries鈥 recovery and does not necessarily benefit affected populations or lead to lasting peace (Kurtenbach and Rettberg 2018; Langer and Brown 2016; Oxfam 2007).
According to the infamous McDonald’s theory of peace, no two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other; this is because they are assumed to engage in free trade with one another and, therefore, a war would threaten both of their economies (Friedman 2000). Adhering to this theory, the World Trade Organization (WTO) Trade for Peace Programme highlights the role of trade and economic integration in promoting peace and security. It presents post-conflict contexts as a new opportunity to generate profit for multinational corporations (MNCs) based on the argument that integration into the multilateral trading system leads to stability and economic well-being.
In reality, turning post-conflict recovery into a one-size-fits-all outcome can lead to violent and incomplete re-integration into the global economy (Kurtenbach and Rettberg 2018; Langer and Brown 2016; Mallett and Pain 2018). This directly affects disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs on the ground which are critical to rebuilding post-conflict societies (Woodward 2013). Conflict can be further fueled by economic activities, with MNCs at worst capitalizing on conflict and post-conflict contexts to increase land grabs and labor rights violations, and at best continuing with business as usual despite the conflict (see for example Abed and Kelleher 2022; Frynas and Wood 2001).
Opening recovering domestic industries to highly competitive global markets can lead to the elimination of local economic actors and the further weakening of domestic industries, which deepens inequalities within and between countries (Krpec and Hodulak 2019). Even while some post-conflict countries such as Sri Lanka and Uganda have benefited from trade liberalization according to macroeconomic indicators, their GDP growth has failed to produce jobs for domestic populations, thereby neglecting to heal post-conflict wounds (Mallett and Pain 2018, 265). While trade liberalization may facilitate reintegration into the economic system, the same cannot be said for trade liberalization鈥檚 ability to facilitate the recovery of 鈥渢he conditions of people鈥檚 lives nor a society鈥檚 recovery from war鈥 (Cohn and Duncanson 2020, 5).
The Gender and Trade Coalition was initiated in 2018 by feminist and progressive activists to put forward feminist trade analysis and advocate for equitable trade policy. This article is the first in a series of short, Q&A format 鈥榚xplainers鈥 unpacking key trade issues produced for the Gender and Trade Coalition by Regions Refocus. It was written by Erica Levenson (Regions Refocus) with inputs from Fatimah Kelleher (Nawi鈥揂frifem Macroeconomics Collective), Mariama Williams (ILE), Hien Nguyen Thi (APWLD), and Senani Dehigolla (Regions Refocus). Read the full article .
How Are Gender and Trade Connected?
At the core of the modern global economy is an array of trade and investment rules that have been designed by developed countries鈥 elites and corporations. These interlinked rules reinforce the others鈥 impacts on national economies, enabled by international finance and trade institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Trade Organization (WTO) as enforcement mechanisms. From worsening human rights violations to degradation of the environment, the effects of trade and investment regimes impact every aspect of women鈥檚 lives, exacerbating and creating inequalities based on hierarchies of class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
Behind the scenes of global economic policymaking spaces, corporations and the financial sector set the policy menu: liberalization, deregulation, and privatization. Through predatory loan conditionalities, trade agreements, and other practices, international finance and trade institutions have enforced these policies and created 鈥榚nabling environments鈥 for foreign investments. Trade tariffs have been lowered; investment possibilities and controls have been liberalized; and regulations on the financial sector, markets, and corporations have been dismantled while at the same time the rights of major corporations (especially intellectual property) have been increased (Aguirre, Eick, and Reese 2006; Hathaway 2020; Hursh and Henderson 2011). Cheap imports are dumped by transnational corporations and their subsidiaries, primary commodity export dependence is perpetuated, public goods and services are privatized, and social protections are cut, among other things (Hormeku-Ajei et al. 2022). These are the effects of 鈥榮uccessful鈥 neoliberal policies, and in particular trade liberalization.
The manifestations of deeply unequal trade and investment governance regimes can be seen in worsening poverty rates and gender inequality; widening gaps between the world鈥檚 richest and poorest countries, and the richest and poorest people; and adverse impacts on supposedly inalienable human rights, including access to education, secure housing, food security, and healthcare (Koechlin 2013; Navarro 2007; OHCHR 2015; Western et al. 2016). The severe impacts of trade and investment rules have been increasingly borne by people in developing countries, especially women (Grzanka, Mann, and Elliott 2016; Pearson 2019; UNCTAD 2014; UNCTAD and UN Women 2020).
Contemporary trade intensification, expansion, and privatization in the modern global economy relies on the systematic exploitation of women. Women form the backbone of the economy, in terms of both production and domestic labor: women are systematically underpaid, occupationally segregated, and marginalized, and their domestic labor is invisibilized and devalued. Gender inequality is not a question of happenstance but rather something that is necessary to the current function of the economy, in particular to trade. A critical analysis of trade from a feminist lens proves the urgency of recognizing the crucial role that gender inequality plays in sustaining global and national economies and illuminates key areas that serve as opportunities for policy interventions.
Imperialism is still a relevant concept today, woven much more tightly into the structures of countries and economies than ever. The outcome of those seeking to expand their ownership or influence has stayed just as colonial and imperialist as ever before, especially now with the massive amount of capital accumulated in developed countries and the influence these countries have over the rest of the world. In a paper by John Foster, he quotes Harry Magdoff when he said, 鈥淚mperialism is the way of life of capitalism,鈥 when asked if it was still necessary (Foster et al., 2019). To expand, capitalism needs a mode or justification or framework that it adopts and has a history of working so well with, and that is imperialism. Colonizing, occupying, and dominating are blatant ways that imperialism effectively occurs in history. It has not changed significantly except that the people furthering their 鈥渆xpansion鈥 are not outrightly removing, killing, or taking resources from people; they now sign policies, laws, or rules, and then people follow this or follow it by force. Historically, the effects of imperialism have remained. We see this in the Native Americans who are forced to live on reservations whose way of life and traditions are limited due to state and private ownership of surrounding land in the form of preservations, parks, or plants for resourcing.
Imperialism can manifest in various forms: military, economic, cultural, agricultural, technological, and political influence. The United States, for example, has the largest military in the world, spending billions of dollars on funding its military and weaponry and maintaining this presence in countries worldwide. It has military bases all over the U.S. but also in Japan, Germany, and South Korea, amongst the most significant bases, and then in at least 80 countries such as Turkey, Bahrain, Spain, Honduras, and Cuba (O’Dell, 2023). This form of maintaining an imperialist presence is, in many ways, a reminder of the global hegemon that is the U.S. militarily and economically. The 鈥渟ilent鈥 presence of the military that Prabhat Patnaik discusses in his paper 鈥淲hatever Happened to Imperialism鈥 symbolizes the coercion of power the U.S. has over the rest of the world. A reminder that the United States could quickly get involved in smaller countries’ affairs (Patnaik, 1990). It is an effective tactic since massive amounts of weaponry can easily overpower another country or group of people.
Even more significantly, imperialism has manifested in global food systems. During the rise of the United States into its power today, there are clear examples of state-sponsored policies that changed the diets and modes of producing food. This mode of controlling and forcing people to consume food of the dominant hegemonic power has been seen throughout history, especially with indigenous peoples’ communities. An example of this state influence over food in indigenous communities is in what is now known as California; during the 1850s, with the invasion of European Americans, the people that lived in the Klamath Mountains, the Karuk People, were severely affected by the racial formations and domination for land and resources that the state was forcing upon them. The Karuk people lived near the Klamath River, and fishing was a primary form of survival in 1970. Although they had legal rights to fish in their river, state officials often arrested them for fishing, destroying their way of life and traditions. In this example, we see the state forcing people to assimilate. Since many of the Karuk people were trying not to be arrested or even killed, many of them resorted to eating government food, which lacked nutrients and was also forcing the native people to consume and engage in practices that were 鈥淲hite鈥 behaviors via boarding schools and other consumption behaviors that were not a part of their culture (Norgaard, 2011). Also, arresting the indigenous people is trying to erase the existence of these people in the first place, which is genocide continuing. This example of the Karuk people demonstrates how taking over land, either physically or legally(coercively), is perhaps a dominant way to maintain and gain control of people. The ability to own land or own the means of how food is produced is vital in being able to live healthily and sustainably. Also, food in almost any culture has significant meaning and symbolizes traditions passed down. Removing traditional food and practices removes culture and identity. If imperialism is how a state or group of people exercises control to maintain power via economic and social relations, then the first and most dominant way is to remove the ability to access resources for food. This is followed by the stripping away of culture and traditions. This happened with the Native Americans and still occurs in the global south and north today, although how those limitations exist in each may vary.
The spread of corporate power and how quickly it has dominated food and other consumed agricultural resources is also relevant to how it impacts development. Using the United States as the example in this analysis, how it produces its food and is influenced by corporate power in agricultural industries affects other developing countries where many of the subsidized crops grown here are exported. Philip McMichael highlights the corporate food regime in their analysis of food regimes and their history in the Handbook of Critical Agrarian Studies by Akram-Lodhi. McMichael denotes that a corporate food regime has risen in this neoliberal era of corporate power. A food regime plagued with exporting grains and crops to developing countries while continuing its high grain growth here in the U.S. The Farm Bill heavily subsidizes corn, wheat, soy, and rice and directly fuels this. He writes
In the 1990s, trade agreements (notably the WTO and associated free trade agreements) instituted liberalization measures to universalize 鈥榤arket rule鈥 via neoliberal agricultural investment and trade freedoms for transnational agribusiness. US and European Union subsidies for agribusiness artificially cheapened foodstuffs for dumping in world markets at the expense of now unprotected Southern farmers’ (Lodhi et al., 2021).
This advanced the dominance of the United States imperial programming and subjugated developing countries into cycles of foreign debt and political unrest. Artificially deflating the price of crops, countries struggled to develop large agricultural industries and could not develop economically past the agricultural stage. The United States used this domination to convince developing countries that they could develop manufacturing and resource extraction-based industries by increasing their reliance on foreign aid and foreign investment. However, they were subordinated into global structures of domination and colonization that few countries have been able to escape. In this conceptualization of corporate food regimes, McMichael denotes how the corporate influence of power affects not only U.S. consumers but also the livelihoods of small agricultural producers, domestically and internationally. Having power over food and agriculture is a prevalent form of imperialism and capitalism, and this severely impacts the course of development. If the most basic form of sustainment is unavailable, then, from a nutrition standpoint, how can people function and live properly? Malnutrition from starvation or nutrient deficiencies severely impacts survival or health outcomes.
An example of food imperialism can be seen in Palestine, which, under its occupation, cannot control its access to land and water resources. This has led, over the decades, and more prominently now in the current crisis, to severe food insecurity and malnutrition. In the West Bank, 63% of the cultivable land is under Israeli government control, and they only have about 15% access to groundwater from the Western Aquifer Basin. In contrast, the Israeli government controls and uses the rest (~85%). Controlling land and limiting what food can be grown and imported have impacted the course of development for these people (Shaban, 2022). In the relevance and different forms that imperialism has, this is a current example of the historically brutal forms in which power is exercised over people through agriculture and food.
Seeing corporate power reflected here in the United States, we can turn to the poultry industry and labor practices that occur here in the efforts to produce massive quantities of meat and profit. In 2019, the U.S. poultry industry produced 42 billion pounds of chicken, more than any other country globally, enough to give every person on Earth about 5.32 pounds of chicken (Freshour et al. 2020). Most of the workers in the processing plants are Black, and many are ex-felons since this is one of the few industries that will hire them. Many workers are subjected to long hours of standing and monotonous work on a processing line that will often speed up, and workers must work faster to process the meat. Not only creating health issues such as arthritis but also the time taken away from these workers to rest.
Agriculture and food are areas of extreme relevance to the concept of imperialism. Manifesting through corporate power, the economic and social relations that spread hegemonic domination over agriculture and food is one of the fastest ways to extend a state鈥檚 or group’s influence over countries and people. What people need to survive more than anything is food and water. To have influence or control over how it is produced and distributed, as well as who produces and distributes it, is a clear demonstration of the relevance of the concept of imperialism. This is why steps taken to remove much of the corporate power held in the global agricultural industry are essential in creating a more just and sustainable future.
References
Akram-Lodhi, A. H., Dietz, Kristina, and Engels, Bettina, eds. 2021. Handbook of Critical Agrarian Studies. Chapter 25. Food Regimes Philip McMichael, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited. Accessed December 15, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Foster, John B., Utsa Patnaik, Prabhat Patnaik, Samir Amin, Intan Suwandi, Hannah Holleman, Brett Clark, Ricardo Antunes, Harry Magdoff, and Firoze Manji. 2019. 鈥.鈥 Monthly Review.
Freshour, Carrie, Nick Estes, Roxanne Dunbar, Charisse Burden, Bill Fletcher, Lilia D. Monz贸, Jesse Benjamin, et al. 2020. 鈥.鈥 Monthly Review.
Norgaard, K. M., Reed, R., & Van Horn, C. (2011). A continuing legacy: Institutional racism, Hunger and nutritional justice on the Klamath. in Alkon, A. H., & Agyeman, J. (Eds.). (2011). Cultivating Food Justice: Race: Class, and Sustainability. MIT Press.
O’Dell, Hope. 2023. 鈥溾 Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
Patnaik, Prabhat. 1990. 鈥溾 Monthly Review.
Shaban, Omar. 2022. 鈥.鈥 Arab Center Washington DC.
Mirette Nunez is a master’s student in Economics at The New School. Her research interests are in the effects of corporate power and capitalism聽on global food and agriculture systems.聽
What is a feminist methodology? Academicians and scholars of gender and feminist studies have focused on feminist research methodology since the introduction of gender studies as a course in universities.Feminist methodology has developed as a result of several objections towards traditional positivist research. Theory and methodology can be seen to be closely interrelated in a wherein a feminist methodology can validate feminist theory and indicate the need for modifications. Many of the social sciences have theories that speak about human beings. But theory is rooted in reinforcing of experiences, perceptions, and beliefs of men. Even if women are being studied, the perspective and mode of the study have . As a result, research outcomes often end up justifying the status quo and the existing power relationships and myths about oppressed and other vulnerable communities. For instance, has tended to reproduce gender stereotypes by portraying behavior in the marketplace (considered to be men鈥檚 domain) as guided by rational pursuit of self-interest, and behavior in the household (seen as women鈥檚 domain) to be governed by altruism.
Photo: Women in rural Assam weaving a mekhela chadar, which the women use for their own consumption but also try to sell whenever possible. There is a thin line of separation between work and leisure for most rural women.
Traditional science, moreover, maintains that the researcher and the researched are in different spaces. Positivist social science research requires the researcher to be value-free, neutral, and uninvolved, thus, maintaining a hierarchical and non-reciprocal relationship between the research subject and the research object. describes women researchers in such situations to be trapped in a 鈥渟chizophrenic situation鈥, one where the researcher has to constantly repress, negate, or ignore her own experience of sexist oppression and have to maintain a so-called rational standard of the male-dominated academic world. Such an approach further hinders exploring areas like women鈥檚 perception of their own work, which have remained 鈥渉idden鈥 due to andocentric biases. Mies鈥 historic work on details such 鈥渉idden women鈥 through the example of official Census data. While her estimate of women lace makers was about 100,000 in the area, these women were not recorded in the official Indian census statistics of 1971. The 1971 Census enumerated only 6449 persons as being engaged in household industry in Narsapur taluk, making the 100,000 women 鈥渋nvisible鈥 despite the Census definition of the household industry covering exactly the type of work that these women did! Women workers, thus, remain invisible by official statistics by not including them as workers, even with abundant empirical evidence of their productive work. It is important to mention here that to conduct 鈥渙bjective鈥 quantitative research, one does not have to be detached and unconcerned about the topic. Having a strong opinion on women鈥檚 work being hidden or invisible historically does not necessarily mean that research decisions will be any more biased thanif those opinions are not held.聽聽
51本色 