Suchergebnisse

In the context of the euro crisis, several member states of the Eurozone were forced to implement so-called Economic Adjustment Programmes. The implementation of these programmes was supervised by a troika consisting of the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Fiscal adjustment was one cornerstone of the adjustment programmes. The objective of the programmes was to reduce previously soaring public deficits and to stabilise and reduce public debt in the long term. All programmes primarily aimed at cutting government spending. Increasing government revenues was to play only a secondary role. However, a look at the adjustment programmes for Ireland and Portugal shows a striking difference in the fiscal adjustment strategies. Different Irish governments pursued an adjustment strategy with a strong focus on expenditure cuts. By contrast, Portugal's adjustment strategy changed over the course of the programme and was increasingly driven by increases in revenues. How can we explain these differences? To answer this question, my dissertation provides two in-depth case studies of the adjustment programmes for Ireland and Portugal. I argue that fiscal adjustment strategies are determined by the activity of coalitions of different economic actor groups at the domestic level. These actor groups have different fiscal policy preferences. On the one hand, they differ in terms of their preferred level of redistribution and the economic risks to which they are exposed. On the other hand, sectoral actor groups have different preferences based on their prioritisation of international competitiveness and domestic demand. Actor groups with similar preferences form coalitions to influence the government's policy-choice. Two logics determine which coalitions ultimately prevail. On the one hand, some coalitions are involved in policy-making through social pacts and other institutional arrangements. On the other hand, sectoral coalitions are influential due to their importance for economic ...

How was France consolidated as an imperial state, and how was its imperial form challenged from the colonies? This is the question I address in this dissertation by turning to the works of Frantz Fanon. I argue that Fanon's first published work Black Skin, White Masks offers a critique and diagnosis of how the French imperial state was consolidated through racialized relations of social solidarity. In this work, Fanon shows that race mediated how social solidarity was articulated and practiced such that colonial subject-citizens were simultaneously included into and excluded from republican citizenship. Caught in the double bind of inclusion and exclusion, the possibility of forging any substantial sense of social solidarity between black and white citizens in France and its colonies was forgone. In Fanon's subsequent writings - A Dying Colonialism, Towards the African Revolution and The Wretched of the Earth – he demonstrates that the racialized social solidarity of imperial France and the international political community more broadly, were challenged by practices of regional political solidarity between the Third World masses in the post-war era. Specifically, I argue that his writings articulate two sets of political practices that the masses of the Third World engage in to transform the imperialist structure of France and international state system 1) the practice of vigilance in response to being vulnerable to undemocratic rule internally and being subject to imperial domination externally and 2) the practice of sacrifice as a way to share and distribute the burdens of waging armed resistance against powerful imperial states. These practices form the basis of Fanon's distinctive account of Third World political solidarity as a form of intercontinental populism between formerly colonized nations that could obliterate the bonds of racialized fraternity that defined colonial relations, and continued to define core and periphery relations in the postcolonial era.

Hunger for energy meets energy shortage: While demands for oil grow, the supply diminishes, making threats of blocked deliveries, escalating prices, and inflation more and more real. Discussing the topic with Astrid Schneider, Fatih Bodal, the chief economist of the IEA (International Energy Agency, founded in 1973 as a reaction on the oil crisis, to establish itself as an institution within the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development context), requests a change in politics among OECD member states. His slogan: We should leave oil, before oil leaves us. Tables, Figures, Photo. O. van Zijl

International audience ; This paper studies the diverse actions, interventions and strategies initiated to address rising energy vulnerability among low-income households in the Barcelona region over the last decade. Drawing upon recent conceptual work around the politics of energy and in-depth fieldwork conducted over more than two years, we trace the different processes and sites through which the basic socio-material conditions of domestic access to energy have become politicised. We show how this involves a two-stage movement of deconfinement and reconfinement. In a context marked by austerity, an energy inefficient urban fabric and a centralised and oligopolistic energy system, energy vulnerability emerged from the domestic and private sphere to become framed as a public problem through parliamentary debate, social protest and local authority initiatives. Yet, energy access and vulnerability have also to some extent been recontained in the space of the household through the focus of recent local policy intervention on 'low cost' measurement, audit and equipment of domestic energy use. We argue that in reprivatizing what had become a public issue and thus redistributing responsibility for change to the household level, authorities and practitioners continue to ignore the systemic factors behind energy vulnerability situations and reproduce a status quo that benefits only energy utilities. The contribution of the paper is thus to show a politics of energy access that is increasingly constituted through entangled, fluid, blurred forms of relations between domestic and collective issues. This politics allows, for example, the need for systemic change to be framed as ostensibly a concern of households and to be met through fragmented, low-cost, metrological measures at that level.

International audience ; This paper studies the diverse actions, interventions and strategies initiated to address rising energy vulnerability among low-income households in the Barcelona region over the last decade. Drawing upon recent conceptual work around the politics of energy and in-depth fieldwork conducted over more than two years, we trace the different processes and sites through which the basic socio-material conditions of domestic access to energy have become politicised. We show how this involves a two-stage movement of deconfinement and reconfinement. In a context marked by austerity, an energy inefficient urban fabric and a centralised and oligopolistic energy system, energy vulnerability emerged from the domestic and private sphere to become framed as a public problem through parliamentary debate, social protest and local authority initiatives. Yet, energy access and vulnerability have also to some extent been recontained in the space of the household through the focus of recent local policy intervention on 'low cost' measurement, audit and equipment of domestic energy use. We argue that in reprivatizing what had become a public issue and thus redistributing responsibility for change to the household level, authorities and practitioners continue to ignore the systemic factors behind energy vulnerability situations and reproduce a status quo that benefits only energy utilities. The contribution of the paper is thus to show a politics of energy access that is increasingly constituted through entangled, fluid, blurred forms of relations between domestic and collective issues. This politics allows, for example, the need for systemic change to be framed as ostensibly a concern of households and to be met through fragmented, low-cost, metrological measures at that level.

International audience ; This paper studies the diverse actions, interventions and strategies initiated to address rising energy vulnerability among low-income households in the Barcelona region over the last decade. Drawing upon recent conceptual work around the politics of energy and in-depth fieldwork conducted over more than two years, we trace the different processes and sites through which the basic socio-material conditions of domestic access to energy have become politicised. We show how this involves a two-stage movement of deconfinement and reconfinement. In a context marked by austerity, an energy inefficient urban fabric and a centralised and oligopolistic energy system, energy vulnerability emerged from the domestic and private sphere to become framed as a public problem through parliamentary debate, social protest and local authority initiatives. Yet, energy access and vulnerability have also to some extent been recontained in the space of the household through the focus of recent local policy intervention on 'low cost' measurement, audit and equipment of domestic energy use. We argue that in reprivatizing what had become a public issue and thus redistributing responsibility for change to the household level, authorities and practitioners continue to ignore the systemic factors behind energy vulnerability situations and reproduce a status quo that benefits only energy utilities. The contribution of the paper is thus to show a politics of energy access that is increasingly constituted through entangled, fluid, blurred forms of relations between domestic and collective issues. This politics allows, for example, the need for systemic change to be framed as ostensibly a concern of households and to be met through fragmented, low-cost, metrological measures at that level.

International audience ; This paper studies the diverse actions, interventions and strategies initiated to address rising energy vulnerability among low-income households in the Barcelona region over the last decade. Drawing upon recent conceptual work around the politics of energy and in-depth fieldwork conducted over more than two years, we trace the different processes and sites through which the basic socio-material conditions of domestic access to energy have become politicised. We show how this involves a two-stage movement of deconfinement and reconfinement. In a context marked by austerity, an energy inefficient urban fabric and a centralised and oligopolistic energy system, energy vulnerability emerged from the domestic and private sphere to become framed as a public problem through parliamentary debate, social protest and local authority initiatives. Yet, energy access and vulnerability have also to some extent been recontained in the space of the household through the focus of recent local policy intervention on 'low cost' measurement, audit and equipment of domestic energy use. We argue that in reprivatizing what had become a public issue and thus redistributing responsibility for change to the household level, authorities and practitioners continue to ignore the systemic factors behind energy vulnerability situations and reproduce a status quo that benefits only energy utilities. The contribution of the paper is thus to show a politics of energy access that is increasingly constituted through entangled, fluid, blurred forms of relations between domestic and collective issues. This politics allows, for example, the need for systemic change to be framed as ostensibly a concern of households and to be met through fragmented, low-cost, metrological measures at that level.

International audience ; This paper studies the diverse actions, interventions and strategies initiated to address rising energy vulnerability among low-income households in the Barcelona region over the last decade. Drawing upon recent conceptual work around the politics of energy and in-depth fieldwork conducted over more than two years, we trace the different processes and sites through which the basic socio-material conditions of domestic access to energy have become politicised. We show how this involves a two-stage movement of deconfinement and reconfinement. In a context marked by austerity, an energy inefficient urban fabric and a centralised and oligopolistic energy system, energy vulnerability emerged from the domestic and private sphere to become framed as a public problem through parliamentary debate, social protest and local authority initiatives. Yet, energy access and vulnerability have also to some extent been recontained in the space of the household through the focus of recent local policy intervention on 'low cost' measurement, audit and equipment of domestic energy use. We argue that in reprivatizing what had become a public issue and thus redistributing responsibility for change to the household level, authorities and practitioners continue to ignore the systemic factors behind energy vulnerability situations and reproduce a status quo that benefits only energy utilities. The contribution of the paper is thus to show a politics of energy access that is increasingly constituted through entangled, fluid, blurred forms of relations between domestic and collective issues. This politics allows, for example, the need for systemic change to be framed as ostensibly a concern of households and to be met through fragmented, low-cost, metrological measures at that level.

Anxieties about the effects of international property investment in world cities like London have mainly focused on super-rich investors and corporate vehicles that have generated price inflation of assets and accelerated exclusion from an already expensive market. In fact, many international investors in the city's housing market are middle-class individuals, and focusing on Hong Kong as an emblematic example of such processes, we examine their motives and the products offered to them by important investment intermediaries. We find that an important rationale for these investments lies in local class-based uncertainties and existential anxieties concerning the future of Hong Kong itself. We focus on the cultural roots of these investor rationalities but also consider the role of investment intermediaries who have helped bolster confidence while shielding investors from the consequences of their aggregated market power – concerns in London over household displacement from foreign investment. We suggest that what may seem to be the predatory search to 'fry' property (炒樓), a Hongkonger colloquialism referring to the search for high performing investments, should also be understood as actions anchored in and generated by the habitus of the Hong Kong middle class whose lives have been moulded by historical geopolitical uncertainty and worries about its longer-term social positioning and security.