Common Sense
Complexity
Neoliberalism as neocolonialism: A collection of multi-disciplinary and multi-sector resources from around the world.
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This collection of resources has been brought together under the theme of 'Neoliberalism as neocolonialism'. These resources represent just a fraction of the decades old, multi-disciplinary, and global discourse on this theme, spearheaded by leftist PoC & women from across the developing world. As the first resource in the list exemplifies, if you dispute the usefulness of the term"neoliberalism", or its embodiment of racist neocolonialism, you are not just disagreeing with "white, western Bernie-bro's", you are erasing millions of oppressed voices globally who, after decades of multi-disciplinary discourse, understand this concept to the point of it being in popular culture. It is not they who are all mistaken.
Click here for Part 2: Neoliberalism, climate change, and the 6th mass extinction
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Michael Angulo et al, The Lion and the Hunter (2017)
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"The capitalist motivations of 19th and 20th century colonialism have been the driving force behind a system of systematic, worldwide exploitation that has persisted through time. Colonialism, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism are all a product of the persisting need of capitalist world powers to control wealth, political ideology, and strategic geographical locations. Colonialism, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism are all different stages within the same historical trajectory of capitalistic exploitation. Although the methods of exploitation differ slightly in nature within this evolving structure of global capitalism, the similar motivations and the use of violence in order to gain economic advantage underpins all three."
The Criminal Injustice System: Beyond Platitudes and Bleeding Hearts
Kieran Kelly, (2017)
Not an academic text, but a well-sourced, in-depth and passionately argued account of the damage wrought to New Zealand by neoliberalism.
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"Aotearoa (New Zealand) has a lot of serious problems. Neoliberal reforms have been imposed against the will of the people here and it is only our pride and our racially informed sense of kinship with imperial power that keeps us from recognising that we are a neocolony – a privileged neocolony perhaps, but a neocolony nonetheless.
Recent decades have been an affront to our sovereignty and our progressive and socialist history. We were the first country with a 40 hour working week, the first to allow women to vote, the second to have a comprehensive public health system, and the first welfare state. It cuts against the grain, therefore, that in 30 years we have gone from a country with no poverty or unemployment and near the worst income inequality in the OECD (7th worst in 2014). With relatively low wages and one of the highest costs of living in the world, neoliberalism is ripping apart our social fabric. We have a housing crisis that is worse than those hitting the US, UK, Australia and Canada, but it is even more of a shock because 30 years ago the idea of homelessness and of people begging in the streets was simply alien to us.
Make no mistake, neoliberalism has fucked this country, and I do blame the US and the UK along with those traitor scum politicians who serve the empire and not their own people."
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Couscous, capitalism and neocolonialism in Tunisia
Belen Fernandez, Middle East Eye (2017)
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"One particularly animated character in the film - named, as irony would have it, Eisenhower - rails against “the West’s strategy” to dominate markets and keep Tunisia “ever under their heel”. Asserting that he has never used any of “the chemical products that we import [that] have killed the soil,” Eisenhower speculates that the West in fact “wants to kill our agriculture". Another interviewee casts Tunisian agricultural dependency as a sort of remote “colonisation” in which acting colonial agents - seed manufacturers and so forth - require no physical occupation of the country in order to extract profit.
Indeed, what is the basis of colonialism if not the destruction of indigenous tradition for the purpose of further enriching the rich? Fortunately for the neocolonialists, there are plenty of international entities eager to do their bidding - in Tunisia and beyond - in the interest of maintaining global power structures and hierarchies."
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Balkan Transnationalism at the Time of Neoliberal Catastrophe
Dušan I. Bjelić, International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (2018)
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"The collapse of Real Socialism ushered in the unification of two Europes. United Europe as a new political entity without a previous history which has formally denounced colonialism and anti-Semitism, it somehow deserves a clean slate and the right to shift ownership of its colonial histories to former colonial subjects and their national histories. On the one hand, East Europeans denounce any role in the Europe's colonial history, on the other hand, neoliberalism figures today as Europe's internal neocolonialism. In the case of the Balkans, the neoliberal normalization of the unruly Balkans failed both at the periphery and at the center. Today's economic nationalists are now euro-autocrats and the most vocal proponents of fiscal conservativism, austerity, the Protestant work-ethic and the ultimate “Europeanization.” This special issue of the neoliberal Balkans interrogates a neocolonial reconfiguration of the entire region as a massive social overhaul, which includes at once global integration and local social disintegration."
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Where to Now: Shifting Regional Dynamics and Cultural Production in North Africa and the Middle East
Anthony Downey, IBRAAZ (2017)
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"Whilst the critical energy that postcolonial theory ushered into academe and traditional institutional practices became increasingly intertwined with a process of decolonization, this process, in a post-revolutionary context, has seen many institutions and practices merely repackaged through the demands of a neoliberal, global cultural economy. For all the steps forward made by the postcolonial/decolonization narrative (the move from reactive to proactive forms of emancipatory politics), and the rhetoric of post-revolutionary politics, there have been many setbacks as the wholesale adoption of neoliberalism increasingly emerges as a means of containing any full move towards a radical cultural politics and alternative forms of institutional organization. As a political, cultural and economic force, neoliberalism is, in sum, being instantiated as a means of containment, control, exploitation and extraction – this has become nowhere more visible than in the politics of cultural production in the Middle East."
Oona St-Amant et al, Global Quarterly Nursing Research (2018)
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"As international volunteer health work increases globally, research pertaining to the social organizations that coordinate the volunteer experience in the Global South has severely lagged. The purpose of this ethnographic study was to critically examine the social organizations within Canadian NGOs in the provision of health work in Tanzania. Multiple, concurrent data collection methods, including text analysis, participant observation and in-depth interviews were utilized. Data collection occurred in Tanzania and Canada. Neoliberalism and neocolonialism were pervasive in international volunteer health work. In this study, the social relations—“volunteer as client,” “experience as commodity,” and “free market evaluation”—coordinated the volunteer experience, whereby the volunteers became “the client” over the local community and resulting in an asymmetrical relationship. These findings illuminate the need to generate additional awareness and response related to social inequities embedded in international volunteer health work."
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Johanna Bockman, Humanity Journal (2014)
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"The United States.. ignored the global economy that UNCTAD and others envisioned and reasserted Rostow’s vision of modernization as a linear path of isolated countries within a slowly evolving neocolonial system. In the place of the emergent global economy, ‘‘the global factory,’’ in which companies in the Second and Third Worlds are integrated into First World corporate networks of production, services, and finance, creates new forms of dependence. The south turned from multilateral global connections and from south-south collective self-reliance toward north-south bilateral agreements reminiscent of colonial bilateral relationships.76 In such ways, the long-lasting debt crisis resulted in deglobalization and the reassertion of the colonial economies in a new form. Still, the economic globalization created by the concerted action of the Second and Third Worlds remains in some form that provides a basis from which to protest neoliberalism, neocolonialism, and the global factory."
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Declaration of the Inaugural Global South Women's Forum on Sustainable Development
"We, the women from the Global South who participated in the inaugural Global South Women’s Forum on Sustainable Development in Phnom Penh, Cambodia" (2016)
Nb. The link may be down, and unfortunately I can find no other hosts of this declaration online. Fortunately, I at least have a screenshot of the preamble, which communicates the overall sentiment.
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Marissa Jackson, Berkeley Journal of African-American Law & Policy (2009)
"Today, formal American colonialism is a reality, as the United States still controls populated territories including Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico. The second model is that of neo-colonialism, the foreign economic exploitation or coercive political domination of states by other states or world powers. The United States, along with other Western nations, currently wields its superpower status through neo-colonial foreign political and economic policy- such as the promotion of free trade and the forcible exportation of democracy throughout the world."
Neoliberal Imperialism and Pan-African Resistance
Niels S. C. Hahn, Journal of World-Systems Research (2008)
"In this context, it is argued that neoliberalism cannot be analysed without also considering inherent links to imperialism and neo-colonialism, which is being resisted by pan-African movements"
Educational Neocolonialism and the World Bank: A Rancièrean Reading
Sardar M. Anwaruddin, Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies (2014)
"In the name of objectivity, the Bank promotes particular kinds of knowledge, which steer educational policies and reforms towards neoliberal capitalism"
Ksenija Švarc, Theory and Practice in English Studies (2013)
"Since the advent of neoliberal capitalism and the liberalization of the Indian market, various Indian-English authors have criticized these neo-colonial processes in their novels."
Larry Lohmann, The Corner House (2015)
"Just as what is regarded as labor, land, health and mobility have changed under neoliberalism, so too has what is regarded as climate. Under previous phases in capitalism, climate was construed as part of a nature external to, yet interfacing with, society – as a condition for accumulation; as a resource; as an object of conservation; as a computer-modellable system. The neoliberal state builds on these conceptions in reconstructing climate also as rentable and marketable units. A thorough grasp of the exploitative and neocolonialist politics that this innovation perpetuates and deepens requires dialogue with indigenous peoples, peasants, workers and their collective history."
Johanna Bockman, Humanity Journal (2014)
"The south turned from multilateral global connections and from south-south collective self-reliance toward north-south bilateral agreements reminiscent of colonial bilateral relationships.76 In such ways, the long-lasting debt crisis resulted in deglobalization and the reassertion of the colonial economies in a new form. Still, the economic globalization created by the concerted action of the Second and Third Worlds remains in some form that provides a basis from which to protest neoliberalism, neocolonialism, and the global factory".
Free Trade as Neocolonialism: CAFTA, the United States, and Guatemala
Margret Reuter, University of Dayton (2014)
"Through different apparatuses of neoliberalism, the wealthiest of both United States and Guatemalan society are able to externalize the costs of development onto the backs of those who remain without a voice. The United States began its intervention in Guatemala in 1954, and it hasn’t stopped. Because the United States is still able to infringe on Guatemala’s sovereignty—both economic and political—colonialism has ended in name only."
Masking the Systematic Violence Perpetuated By Liberalism Through the Concept of ‘Totalitarianism’
Ioana Cerasella Chis, POLITIKON: The IAPSS Journal of Political Science (2016)
"Starting from the European conquest in 1492 which established the beginning of colonialism, going through the establishment of liberalism’s racial (‘social’) contract, and coming to present times of neocolonialism and neoliberalism, this paper underscores the interdependence between colonialism and liberalism, and liberalism’s systematic violence of oppression, arguing that the term ‘totalitarianism’ is unable to shed light onto this violence."
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Slimy Subjects and Neoliberal Goods: Obama and the Children of Fanon
Daniel McNeil, Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies (2014)
"McNeil’s article reveals the discordant affinities between the politics and poetics of Frantz Fanon and anti-colonial intellectuals in the 1950s and 60s. It also calls attention to postcolonial theorists who emphasize Fanon’s continuing relevance in the fight against neocolonialism and neoliberalism in the twenty-first century."
Collins, C.S. & Rhoads, R.A, Higher Education (2010)
"The authors use case studies of the World Bank’s involvement in Thailand and Uganda to better understand the role it plays in producing and reproducing forms of global hegemony. The authors discuss hegemony in terms of neocolonialism and neoliberalism."
The Dynamics of Forced Neoliberalism in Nigeria Since the 1980s
Olumide Victor Ekanade, Journal of Retracing Africa (2014)
"Cumulatively, [the neoliberal agenda] has led to the peripheralization for the country’s intellectual community as an aspect of the general strategy of strengthening neocolonial imperialism in Nigeria"
New Zealand after neoliberalism: What remains?
Bruce Curtis, New Zealand Sociology, suppl. Special Issue: Progressive Alternatives (2015)
"This article argues that while neoliberalism has supposedly been about ‘more markets’ in practice it has fostered the monopolisation of former state-owned assets by transnational owners. Neoliberalism is then a herald for neocolonialism, in which forms of political autonomy are undermined by transnational ownership."
Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of imperialism
Kwame Nkrumah, Thomas Nelson & Sons, Ltd., London (1965)
"In place of colonialism as the main instrument of imperialism we have today neo-colonialism. The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside. The methods and form of this direction can take various shapes. For example, in an extreme case the troops of the imperial power may garrison the territory of the neo-colonial State and control the government of it. More often, however, neo-colonialist control is exercised through economic or monetary means. The neo-colonial State may be obliged to take the manufactured products of the imperialist power to the exclusion of competing products from elsewhere. Control over government policy in the neo-colonial State may be secured by payments towards the cost of running the State, by the provision of civil servants in positions where they can dictate policy, and by monetary control over foreign exchange through the imposition of a banking system controlled by the imperial power."
Toward a Cogent Analysis of Power: Transnational Rhetorical Studies
Rebecca Dingo, Rachel Riedner, & Jennifer Wingard, JAC Online Journal (2013)
"In this introduction, we also seek to refine and specify transnational studies’ theoretical and methodological aims by drawing attention to how transnational studies scholars engage concurrently with multiple scales as they consider how globalized power operates through a variety of linked scales—the economic, social, national, state, and political conditions of contemporary neoliberalism, neocolonialism and neo-imperialism."
Richard G. Jones & Bernadette Marie Calafell, Faculty Research and Creative Activity (2012)
"We see some of these contradictions play out in the following ways: neoliberalism’s collusion with late-capitalism creates an ostensible level playing field, but only for those with the monetary capital to enter the game; countries and people are brought closer through technology and trade, but the digital divide and neo-colonialism reinforce the longstanding hegemony of the West"
Tejwant K. Chana, Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences (2010)
"This article reports on some of the ways in which global education (utilizing Euro-American conceptions of global education as a point of departure) and more specifically, perspectives on globalization are being taken up (or not taken up) in schools in Delhi, India. Qualitative case study research (based on a preliminary/initial or early analysis of specific data sets across 4 school sites) suggests that despite decolonization in 1947, the neo/colonial project rooted in European capitalism (now in the guise of neoliberal globalization) is being reproduced in Indian schools in urban centers like Delhi."
Neoliberalism as Liberation: The Statehood Program and the Remaking of the Palestinian National Movement (Don't worry, it argues against it)
Raja Khalidi & Sobhi Samour, Journal of Palestine Studies (2011)
"The Palestinian national liberation movement at its inception was an integral part of a broader political project of the anticolonial struggle and the establishment of a just world order. Once in power, however, most of the movements associated with these struggles failed to deliver on their promises, instead allowing neocolonial relations of production and exchange to bolster their own power and secure privileges for the national bourgeoisie and the “international investor.” More recently, the dynamics of such relations have been complemented by the irresistible “logic” of neoliberalism and globalization—striking examples being the African National Congress’s embrace of neoliberalism and the neoliberal “shock therapy” and rise of an “oligarchy” in countries of the former Soviet Union and bloc.
Then as now, neocolonialism and neoliberalization followed formal independence, and it is on this basis that the Palestinian statehood program, Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State, represents an extraordinary case. Coming amidst a historic crisis of legitimacy of the Palestinian national movement in the wake of unprecedented internecine political divisions, the program represents a new, apparently “home-grown” strategy to achieve statehood through neoliberal institution building. Enjoying growing international endorsement, this national liberation through neoliberalism redefines the Palestinian liberation struggle as it has hitherto been known."
Dominant Scholarship: White Neocolonialism and Academic Integrity
Katelyn M. Sadler, The Vermont Connection (2011)
"Academic integrity policies at colleges and universities have faced massive evolution in recent years due to increasing conflict over how to define intellectual property in the digital age and over how best to assist students in learning. In forming academic integrity policies, colleges and universities model their policies on existing intellectual property laws and educational precedents. These very policies and precedents, as well as the universities themselves, are based on White European systems of property ownership and education and continue to be formulated in a way to further a corporate, neoliberal economic agenda worldwide."
The betrayals of neoliberalism in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy
Emily S. Davis, Textual Practice (2015)
"My provisional argument about the relationship between these two terms, to echo Nkrumah, is that neoliberalism is the latest, if not the last, stage of neocolonialism. The fact that wealthy current and former colonial powers dictate economic and social policy directly through aid and foreign investment or indirectly through organisations such as the IMF and World Bank is nothing new. Neoliberalism simply provides a useful marker of the particular ideologies of economic and social relations currently dominant within this neocolonial framework. My modest proposal is that approaching neoliberalism in this way not only works against a static formulation of the neocolonial as everything that came after colonialism, but also situates neoliberalism as a historical phenomenon that is articulated through specific neocolonial contexts rather than as an abstract universal."
Rethinking the Bottom of the Pyramid: A Critical Perspective from an Emerging Economy Alexandre de Almeida Faria & Marcus Wilcox Hemais, Encontro Da ANPAD (2014)
"Based on a decolonial perspective enunciated in an emerging economy, this article highlights the dark side of the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) approach, which has been overseen in mainstream Western management literature, especially in marketing. More than a marketoriented strategy, the BoP approach is discussed as a (geo)political design of Eurocentric modernity, reinforcing a neocolonial order, under the rhetoric of salvation. By reinforcing market-orientation logic as the way for the ‘poor others’ to develop, BoP fosters a US-led neoliberal order in non-Western countries, challenging the decolonial option for a world where many worlds and knowleges could coexist."
Neocolonialism and the Global Prison in National Geographic' s Locked Up Abroad
Casey R. Kelly, . Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication (2012)
"Globally, the U.S. prison industries have directly contributed to the expansion of incarceration in developing nations by offering modernized prisons as symbols of neoliberal development (Sudbury, 2005). Corrections Corporation of America and Wackenhunt Corrections are fervent in their criticism of the abuse in foreign prisons. Sudbury (2005) argues that these discourses create a welcoming environment for private prison corporations to ostensibly commandeer the penal policies of developing nations. The prison industry thrives by isolating the failures of state-run programs and offering for-profit alternatives, “a panacea that will solve the problems of overcrowding, corruption, and horrendous conditions in overstretched, underresourced penal systems” (Sudbury, 2004, p. 25). Private prisons, however, have exacerbated conditions, and claims of efficacy are indicted by documented cases of staff shortages, inadequate health care, rampant violence, and sexual abuse (Nathan, 2000). Nonetheless, privatized prisons are now under construction or being considered in Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Canada, Venezuela, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and the Netherlands Antilles. Additionally, U.S. efforts to modernize developing economies have emphasized law enforcement and mass incarceration at the expense of social services, education, transportation, and housing (Sudbury, 2004). As a result, developing nations have divested from social programs that might alleviate the need for more prisons. The omission of abuse in Western prisons and the role of Anglo-American corrections corporations in perpetuating mass incarceration place the blame on developing nations."
Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology
T. J. Demos, Sternberg Press (2016)
"Buen vivir politics both challenges the Washington-consensus doctrine of development that has ruled Latin America since the mid-twentieth century (comprised of corporate neoliberalism and anti-environmental neocolonialism enforced by authoritarian military governance) and provides a crucial bio-centric model of political economy based on environmental consonance and social equality"
Societal Protest in Post-Stablization Bolivia
Moisés Arce & Roberta Rice, Latin American Research Review (2009)
"As noted earlier, foreign ownership and control of natural resources has proven to be a highly contentious issue in Bolivia, one that has radicalized broad sectors of society. At the heart of the water and gas wars was a deep-seated rejection of neoliberalism as a form of neocolonialism and the special place that these resources hold in the history of Bolivia."
Indigenous Encounters with Neoliberalism: Place, Women, and the Environment in Canada and Mexico
Isabel Altamirano Jimenez, UBC Press (2013)
"A critical approach to neoliberalism starts by considering how its processes unfold in specific locations in which neocolonial power is exercised."
From Resistance to Acquiescence? Neoliberal Reform, Student Activism and Political Change in Ghana
Lord C. Mawuko-Yevugah, Postcolonial Text (2013)
"As this neoliberal agenda persists and becomes dominant across the world, there has been a growing discontent and opposition in the form of the rise of resistance movements and popular groups, both at the global and local levels. At the global level, the resistance to the neoliberal agenda culminated in the anti-globalization protests of 1999 during the spring meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, the United States. Other forms of resistance have also emerged, movements such as the World Social Forum for example, which not only aim to oppose and contest the neoliberal agenda but also offer alternative or competing approaches for social and economic change. But the challenge and opposition to the neoliberal agenda is not confined to the international or global level. As noted by Osei Kwadwo Prempeh, the vigorous implementation of the neoliberal agenda in Africa and other regions of the 2 Postcolonial Text Vol 8 No 3 & 4 (2013) global South is “provoking the emergence of new grassroots-based social movements, which are engaged in counter-hegemonic struggles that represent both a challenge and alternative to this new form of colonialism”"
A Postcolonial Critique of Responsibility to Protect in the Middle East
Mojtaba Mahdavi, Perceptions (2015)
"This article is a postcolonial critique of the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in the Middle East. It problematizes a selective, arbitrary and punitive implementation of international law in Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Libya and Syria. It proposes that the hegemonic neo-liberal discourse of Humanitarianism and a paternalistic legacy of Orientalism have reinforced policing language of human rights and widened the gap between the ethical norms and their practice in global politics. A postcolonial critique of R2P calls for decolonizing and emancipating global ethical norms from the hegemonic discourse of neo-liberal order; striving for a consistent, just, people-centered, and fair implementation of norms; pushing for radical reforms in the UN; empowering regional and subaltern organizations; mobilizing world public opinion; and democratizing the world order."
Ligaya Lindio-McGovern, Indiana University (2006)
"In the social construction of this colonial state, an elite class was created whose existence and maintenance were ensured by collaborating with the colonial power in establishing its rule. This colonial elite would persist in the neocolonial stage. The main features of neo-liberal globalization build on and entrench these neocolonial structures in the nation state. But there are also forces within the nation state, as in the Philippine case, that challenge this neocolonial state, attempting to transform it, or even dismantle it and radically replace it with a revolutionary state that can complete the process of national liberation."
Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction
David Harvey, American Academy of Political and Social Science (2012)
"If the main effect of neoliberalism has been redistributive rather than generative, then ways had to be found to transfer assets and channel wealth and income either from the mass of the population toward the upper classes or from vulnerable to richer countries. I have elsewhere provided an account of these processes under the rubric oi accumulation by dispossession.15 By this, I mean the continuation and proliferation of accretion practices that Marx had designated as "primitive" or "original" during the rise of capitalism. These include (1) the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations (as in Mexico and India in recent times); (2) conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusively private property rights; (3) suppression of rights to the commons; (4) commodification of labor power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; (5) colonial, neocolonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); (6) monetization of exchange and taxation, particularly of land; (7) the slave trade (which continues, particularly in the sex industry); and (8) usury, the national debt, and, most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as radical means of primitive accumulation."
Neocolonialism, Liberation Theology and the Nicaraguan Revolution
John Hindley, . Phillips Memorial Library Undergraduate Craft of Research Prize (2015)
"Specifically, the paper will focus on how Liberation Theology addresses the problem of neocolonialism in the developing world. Neocolonialism is the process by which Western governments, institutions and multinational corporations use their economic and political power to continue the exploitation of non- European populations in developing countries."