Categories
Critique of Mainstream Economics Decolonizing Economics Economics Nobel Imperialism Methodology

New commentary: The Nobel Fetish

In response to the announcement of the Economics Nobel being awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, I wrote a commentary for Economic and Political. Here is the commentary and you can download the PDF here.

Read a Norwegian version here.

Categories
Blog Critique of Mainstream Economics Imperialism

The Trouble with Nievas and Piketty’s Unequal Exchange (new blog post)

I wrote an essay for the INET blog on the problems with how colonialism & imperialism in understood in the Economics discipline (exemplified by Nievas and Piketty’s recent paper). Have a read and see what you think.

Categories
Africa Critique of Mainstream Economics Decolonizing Economics Economic Development Ghana Imperialism Mining

New article: The Eurocentrism of mining in development economics

This new article in World Development interrogates how Eurocentrism is reflected in the Economics discipline’s approach to mining as well as in global mining policy. It then puts forward an alternative, South-centered understanding of mining, which is explored through a historical view of the Obuasi mine, which has been mined by AngloGold Ashanti in Ghana since 1897. The article is part of a special issue I’m co-editing on Decolonising Economic Development with Surbhi Kesar.

Categories
Decolonizing Economics Dependency theory Imperialism Publications

Back to Dakar: Decolonizing international political economy through dependency theory (new article)

I published a new article in the Review of International Political Economy with my co-author Felipe Antunes de Oliveira. The abstract:

Whereas the field of International Political Economy (IPE) included a diversity of voices at its outset, histories of the field tend to marginalize certain contributions – particularly those from the Global South. The endeavor to decolonize IPE offers an opportunity to look back at IPE’s history, re-discover the marginalized voices, and imagine new possible futures. This article engages with contemporary calls to decolonize IPE and proposes an alternative route to do so by recovering dependency theory. We argue that dependency theory can be conceptualized as a peripheral IPE perspective that was committed to thinking from the Global South and to producing politically engaged scholarship just as the field was being formed. The article elaborates on the key tenets of dependency theory, contrasting it with mainstream IPE, and putting it in dialogue with decolonial approaches. To demonstrate the simultaneous non-Eurocentric, anti-colonial, and policy-oriented potential of dependency theory, we recover a foundational moment that disciplinary histories of IPE have forgotten: the 1972 Dakar conference, organized by Samir Amin, with the participation of leading Latin American and African dependency scholars.

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Imperialism Interviews

“The need to centre imperialism” (new interview)

In the need book Talking About Global Inequality: Personal Experiences and Historical Perspectives, Christian Olaf Christiansen, Mélanie Lindbjerg Machado-Guichon, Sofía Mercader, Oliver Bugge Hunt, and Priyanka Jha interview a series of scholars from History, Sociology, Economics, Anthropology and Postcolonial Studies about global inequality. Here is the interview they did with me: The Need to Centre Imperialism.

Categories
Africa Dependency theory Development Finance Imperialism Publications

Beyond financialisation: the longue durée of finance and production in the Global South (new article)

I’m very happy to finally have this open access article “Beyond financialisation: the longue durée of finance and production in the Global South” out in the Cambridge Journal of Economics (coauthored with Kai Koddebrock and Ndongo Samba Sylla). I summarize the article in this twitter thread.

Here is the article abstract:

One of the central premises of the literature on financialisation is that we have been living in a new era of capitalism, characterised by a historical shift in the finance-production nexus. Finance has expanded to a disproportionate economic size and, more importantly, has divorced from productive economic pursuits. In this paper, we explore these claims of ‘expansion’ and ‘divorce’ based on a longue durée analysis of the link between finance and production in Senegal and Ghana. As such, we de-centre the dominant approach to financialisation. Seen from the South, we argue that although there has been expansion of financial motives and practices the ‘divorce’ between the financial and the productive economy cannot be considered a new empirical phenomenon having occurred during the last decades and even less an epochal shift of the capitalist system. The tendency for finance to neglect the needs of the domestic productive sector has been the structural operation of finance in many parts of the Global South over the last 150 years. Therefore, one cannot put forward a theory of the evolution of finance under capitalism without taking these crucial historical insights into account.

The article is a part of a two-part Special Issue on ‘Financialisation in Developing and Emerging Economies: Manifestations, Drivers and Implications’ in CJE, edited by Carolina Alves, Bruno Bonizzi and Annina Kaltenbrunner. Read their introduction to the first part here.

Categories
Dependency theory Development Finance Economic Development Heterodox Economics Imperialism Publications

International financial subordination: a critical research agenda (new article)

I have a new article in the Review of International Political Economy with the fabulous co-author team of Ilias Alami, Carolina Alves, Bruno Bonizzi, Annina Kaltenbrunner, Kai Koddenbrock and Jeff Powell. The article (open access) outlines a research agenda for understanding international financial subordination by drawing on the heterodox traditions of dependency theory, Marxism, and Post-Keynesianism.

Categories
Blog Decolonizing Economics Dependency theory Economic Development Heterodox Economics Imperialism Marx

Beyond Eurocentrism (essay)

I recently wrote an essay about Samir Amin for the popular magainze, Aeon. In it, I go through what I think are major lessons from Samir Amin that can help us understand imperialism, Eurocentrism, uneven development, and ideology better. I contrast his structural and materialist analysis of capitalism and imperialism with the culturalist views of Edward Said, as Said has received much more attention in both academia and in the public sphere. Read the essay here.

Read a Spanish translation of the article here (Letras Libres) and a Persian translation here.

Categories
Africa Book review Decolonizing Economics Imperialism Marx Publications

Colonial legacies and racial hierarchies in the global economy (review essay)

I had the privelege of publishing a review essay of two books in the most recent issue of Race and Class (2022). I review the important contributions and radical potential of Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire (2019) and Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa (2020), and outline some ways in which their analyses and frameworks could be expanded along anti-colonial Marxist lines.

Read the full review here.

Categories
Dependency theory Imperialism In the media Podcasts

On the Work of Samir Amin (podcast)

I recently spoke to Lev Moscow on the A Correction podcast about the life and work of Samir Amin. Listen here.