Browsing by Subject "Neoliberalism"

The thesis analyzes how the EU regulates freedom of expression on social media and how the regulation transfers power. It interrogates EU’s positive fundamental right obligation to put in place a legislative and administrative framework to prevent and redress different online harms. By taking up a critical method that analyzes the contradiction between efficiency and democracy, the thesis focuses on the changes that are happening to positive obligations as part of the fundamental rights structure. The thesis links the structural changes to the advancement of neoliberal governmentality that favors managerial techniques such as cost-benefit analysis and privatization in government. After laying out the foundations, the thesis is divided into two parts. The first part departs from the observation that the EU has pressure to shift positive obligations regarding the protection of people’s freedom of expression and related rights to social media companies. It develops the general analytical framework of cooperation and contest which is informed by power struggles. In cooperation, the interests of the EU and the companies in rights protection are considered aligned. In contest, the focus is on situations where the interests diverge and where the EU and the companies deploy their respective strategies to assert their power unilaterally. The second part contextualizes the framework of cooperation and contest in three case studies. The case studies analyze three different initiatives to regulate social media introduced by the EU between 2016 and 2019. The initiatives are EU Code of conduct on hate speech, the revised Directive on audiovisual media services, and the Regulation on preventing the dissemination of terrorist content online. The case studies locate cooperation and contest in regulation through the analysis of relevant policy documents and other preparatory materials of the legislative processes. The thesis concludes that the emerging regulatory framework for rights protection exhibits hybridity that results from the interconnectedness of public and private power. While the framework can provide more effectiveness for the EU in protecting rights and public interest on social media, by deploying managerial techniques it also tends to sideline the considerations for people’s democratic self-determination, and reinforce the power of the executive and large social media companies. It is argued that new ways to enhance the horizontality of rights are needed for people to assert their rights against emerging hybrid power.

In recent years, a resurgent leftist faction has arisen in the Democratic Party of the United States, emerging first in Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign to become the party’s nominee in the 2016 presidential election. Sanders’ campaign declared a ‘political revolution’, a left-wing project advocating socioeconomic and political transformation and problematizing inequality in American society. The primary election process drew deep factional lines in the party between Sanders’ and Hillary Clinton’s supporters, and ultimately resulted in Clinton’s candidacy and defeat in the general election. In the wake of Sanders’ campaign, multiple left-wing organisations emerged both within the Democratic Party and beyond it, adopting his policy goals and campaigning style. Among these was Justice Democrats, a factionally-oriented organization challenging Democratic incumbents and endeavouring to enact a political realignment towards the left on the intra-party level. The ongoing factional struggle is seen against the backdrop of a broader hegemonic crisis. The leftist faction of the party has produced a new populist discourse building a counter-hegemonic left-wing social imaginary. This thesis examines the discourse of the political revolution, and the discursive devices constituting its articulation of key dichotomies. The thesis applies a theoretical framework of Giovanni Sartori’s factionalism, Margaret Canovan’s populism, and Gramscian hegemony to conduct a discourse analysis of the resurgent leftist discourse on the meso and macro levels. This thesis asks: how does the discourse of the political revolution construct an adversarial dichotomy of an in-group and an out-group as part of its populist counter-hegemonic project? To answer its research question, the thesis develops its methodological approach by combining critical discourse analysis (CDA), discourse theory, and aspects of the complementary method of discourse tracing. This framework views discourses and social reality as mutually constitutive. The value of such analysis lies in practicing reflexivity and considering what kind of social reality the discourse strives to generate, reproducing and disrupting dominant ideas and structures. Examining a discourse yields insight into the possible real-world consequences of the adoption of the worldview it constitutes, and facilitates the tracing of shifts in political culture. The thesis finds that, on the meso level, the discourse constructs a logic of difference to dismantle the conception of the Democratic Party as monolithic, producing an ideologically-based factional challenge through the dichotomisation of two factional groups. The discourse articulates an ideologically committed left-wing factional in-group, and a clientelist party establishment out-group corrupted by established campaign finance practices. The adversarial in-group and out-group constitute factions of principle and interest (as per Sartori), drawing from the redemptive and pragmatic faces of democracy, respectively. On the macro level, the discourse constructs a logic of equivalence through articulating a populist people-elite binary. ‘The people’ are conceived of as a broad, diverse collective connected by class-based grievances and interests, sovereign but unrepresented. This is juxtaposed with the articulation of an out-of-touch, oligarchic elite configuration consisting of dominant economic forces, a political elite, and a discursive elite. The elite are likewise connected by class interests, exercising undue influence over the political system and reproducing a hegemony facilitating economic inequality. The elite is articulated as the common Other for ‘the people’ as the groups’ class interests conflict and systemic structures privilege the elite at the expense of the needs of the people. This people-vs-elite dichotomisation produces the articulation of ‘the people’ as a historical bloc, a class alliance with transformative capacity, whose political action is seen as necessary to usher in a democratic renewal at both the meso and macro levels. The discourse scandalizes the existing level of inequalities in American society and articulates campaign finance practices yielding wealthy elites influence over the political process as impermissible. These scandalisations challenge existing social structures and dominant ideas. The discourse seeks to thereby shift these ideas and practices beyond the hegemonic limits of intelligibility through the production of a left-wing social imaginary. Understanding the effects of discourses and discursive shifts on social reality, and vice versa, is useful for academics examining social reproduction and transformation. A discursive shift the like of which the political revolution seeks to achieve holds practical policy implications and has potentially wide-reaching consequences on U.S. political culture and social practices. Ramifications may be felt beyond borders in the political discourses of other nations due to the prominent position the U.S. holds in the international community. Should this counter-hegemonic discourse become more broadly adopted within the Democratic Party and beyond, it may provide a blueprint for similar movements in comparable contexts.

This study analyzes the experiences of poverty and work among Roma in the context of post-socialist Romania through the lens of Merton´s modes of adaptation to anomie and Bourdieu´s concepts of field, habitus, and capital. The purpose is to investigate Roma remembrance of work in the former communist regime and explore how they navigate socially within the framework of current anomic Romania. The method of qualitative interviews is used in this study. Six semi-structured interviews included one with three participants and ten short interviews were conducted between February 2020 and November 2021. The interviewees were selected based on the criterion of remembering life during socialist Romania. The results suggest former regime nostalgia with the experience of life for Roma as “better then” due to provision of work and housing. In contrast, experience of a current inept government unable to provide work for the poor was prevalent. The analysis shows how Roma´s racialized habitus and low levels of cultural capital i.e., education, collides with structural ethnic racism, preventing employment within anomic Romanian work fields, with the result of Roma travelling and working abroad. This study suggests experiences of poverty coping strategies in the forms of “innovative” and “ritualistic” Mertonian modes of adaptation to the macro anomic context. The former through begging in order to survive and the latter on projecting the social dynamic of the former socialist regime's provision of work for the poor onto the local NGO. Thus, relying on the same social dynamic by “ritual.” Contrary to racist discourses on Roma as “being lazy” and “not wanting to work” this study shows unanimous positive work values among Roma. It brings the thesis to the conclusion that willingness to work exists but a clash of preferred governance of Roma and the requirement of cultural capital and neoliberalist entrepreneurship, aggravated by the anomic state of Romania, prevents Roma from labor market integration and thus escaping poverty.

Following the development of effective vaccines against COVID-19, a global access gap has emerged, with wealthier countries receiving the vast majority of vaccines and therapeutics. The governments of several lower-income countries have since identified a major cause of this gap to be intellectual property arrangements governing the development of pharmaceutical products. In response, these countries submitted a proposal within the World Trade Organization’s TRIPS Council to waive specific elements of the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights in relation to COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics. Since then, a small number of wealthy countries where most major vaccine producers are located have resisted calls to pass the Waiver, thus maintaining intellectual property restrictions and limiting access to vaccines. This thesis explores the discursive nature of the arguments put forward against the Waiver within the institutional context of the WTO TRIPS Council from October 2020 to December 2021. It applies the Critical Discourse Analysis approach to identify several discourses that characterise the nature of opposition to the TRIPS Waiver, to explain how these shape political outcomes and delimit courses of effective action and resistance. These discourses are interpreted through the theoretical lens of Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, which posits that sovereign power is increasingly based on the ability to decide who is worthy of life and who can be subjected to death, with racism and neoliberal market logics being the twin technologies of necropolitical violence. The thesis relies on primary material sourced from hundreds of pages of meeting minutes from the TRIPS Council, where opponents to the Waiver lay out their arguments and discursively construct their opposition in ways that are consistent with the necropolitical reading of global politics and structural violence. This thesis analyses this primary material in conjunction with secondary material from the pharmaceutical industry, uncovering discursive parallels that unveil the neoliberal logics that fuel opposition to the TRIPS Waiver. This thesis concludes that opposition to the TRIPS Waiver is both a driver and a symptom of a planetary renewal of colonial relations, in which neoliberal discourses around health have served to keep lifesaving treatments out of reach to those who cannot afford them during a deadly pandemic. The implications of necropolitical discourses around healthcare access for both democracy and for the future of the pandemic are fatal.

In 1993, the kidnapped, tortured, humiliated, mutilated and raped bodies of women started appearing in the streets, desert and open spaces of Ciudad Juárez. This marked the beginning of a feminicidal outbreak in Ciudad Juárez which has yet to cede. The outbreak of the feminicide epidemic of Ciudad Juárez coincided with the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Mexico, the United States and Canada. I have approached the subject by bringing together contemporary feminist, economic, judicial and political theory. By examining how transnational, national and local processes have interacted, and as a result shaped, and re-shaped traditional gender roles in Mexico, we are able to understand how global processes that involve rapid neoliberal transformations in patriarchal societies create conditions of vulnerability and dispossession – and ultimately, a landscape that fosters gender-based violence, and feminicide, affecting not only women, but entire communities. I find that the causes of the feminicidal outbreak in Ciudad Juárez is inseparable from various forms of systemic abuse that women have been subjected to by transnational corporations operating in Ciudad Juárez. In addition, I find that the feminicides of Ciudad Juárez are a direct result of the investor privileges that have been guaranteed under the NAFTA that virtually immunize the transnational investor from accountability to harm to the employee, anticipated or not, when conducting business in Mexico.