Poliko David Karas

Today’s episode is the first part of a conversation with Nicolas Pons-Vignon who played an instrumental role in setting up Aporde, the African Programme on Rethinking Development Economics, a unique training programme teaching heterodox development economics in South Africa. In this episode, we explore Nicolas’ personal research background and his outlook on South Africa’s post-apartheid developmental trajectory. We talk about some of the root causes of South African deindustrialization, the ...

In today’s episode, I’m talking with Ayşe Zarakol from Cambridge University about the crisis of the Liberal International Order (LIO). Ayşe's work explores the contradictions of the LIO as a hierarchical order premised on the notions of freedom, rationality and equal participation: she examines how anti-liberal discontents in the western Core blame it for undermining their status in the global World System, while conversely critics on the Semi-Periphery see it as reproducing power...

In this episode, I invited Jennifer Bair and Benjamin Selwyn to share their insights on the World Bank’s 2020 World Development Report. The WDR is the World Bank’s flagship publication, which aims at defining a hegemonic framework for thinking about development. In 2020, the WDR was entitled “Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains”. Jennifer and Benjamin both recently published critical papers on the WDR 2020: We talk about the methodological and theoretical con...

In today’s episode, we examine the interdependence between urban displacements, surplus populations and surplus capital in Susanne Soederberg’s recent book “Urban Displacements. Governing Surplus and Survival in Global Capitalism” published in late 2020 with Routledge. We explore the links between surplus money and surplus workers, social and rental housing, precarious work and urban poverty under capitalism, but also the political role of state actors in the reproduction of surpl...

Today I am joined with Thomas Marois from the School of Oriental and African Studies to discuss the backdrop to his latest book "Public Banks. Decarbonisation, Definancialisation and Democratisation" which is coming out with Cambridge University Press in May 2021. Critical social scientists have abundantly analyzed the ideas, institutions and power relations sustaining financialization - as well as the social and environmental dislocations it produces. Concrete, normative propositions a...

Pritish Behuria from the University of Manchester has a long expertise in studying industrial policy and comparative developmental trajectories in Sub-Saharan Africa. In today’s episode, we first talk about the broader context of a supposedly post-neoliberal developmental framework where industrial policy is again on the agenda - even though problems such as fiscal space, structural change, access to technology and dependency on foreign capital have changed little if at all. Pritish also shar...