Globalisation and the 'paradox of state power': perspectives from Latin America

The changes associated with the globalising international economy have had significant effects on the nature and functions of national states. Rather than being in a process of decline in both relevance and effectiveness, the state remains central to the study of IPE and to processes of transformation at the national, regional and global levels. The process of globalisation has created a situation which we can call the ‘paradox of state power’, in which the national state is simultaneously weakened and strengthened. In the Latin American case, the ‘internationalisation of the state’ was engineered very consciously by government elites as a means of using international constraints to overcome domestic constraints. As a result of the location of significant decision-making authority at the regional and global levels, and also as a result of the changing policy environment associated with financial globalisation, the policy-making options available to national governments were significantly diminished. On the other hand, the ‘internationalisation of the state’ provided precisely the conditions in which the state was able to recompose itself and recover its coherence vis-à-vis societal interests following the conditions of economic and political collapse which characterised the region at the end of the 1980s. In this way, state power was simultaneously weakened at the global level, as a result of the changing structures of rewards and punishments in the international economy, and strengthened at the domestic level as a result of the space created by the internationalisation of the state for the consolidation of economic and political reform

Global governance and the public domain: collective goods in a 'Post-Washington Consensus' era

As a consequence of the financial crises of 1997-9, the question of ‘global governance’ appears to have come into its own as an ‘agenda’ for thinking about the rules and norms which underpin the present global order. One of the dominant understandings of the public domain, especially in Asian and Latin American countries, is of its essential (re)vitalisation or utilisation as a mechanism for the provision of a range of public goods crucial to the socioeconomic sustainability of markets. This has found its way into the policy debates currently dominating the agendas of the international financial institutions, couched broadly in the emerging language of the ‘Post-Washington Consensus’. However, the extent of the compatibility between the processes of reformulating policy strategies appropriate to specific historical-institutional settings and the mainstream of the ‘governance’ debates in the corridors of the international financial institutions is over-stated for at least three reasons. First, the globalisation backlash is likely to prevent the emergence of a settled intellectual consensus of what constitute global public goods. Second, the debates have to date largely been conducted in arenas from which ‘developing countries’ are excluded. Third, the capacities of the states of Asia and Latin America have been seriously eroded by the negative impact of financial crisis. As a result, we argue (a) that the dynamics of multilateral collective action have been altered in important ways under the impact of financial crises in Asia and Latin America, and (b) that the role of national states in Asia and Latin America is concerned less with the provision of public goods than with the minimisation of ‘public bads’. This minimisation of ‘bads’ is, at the end of the twentieth century, an inherent part of the debates about the appropriate role of public authorities, and their relationship with other elements of the state—civil society—market nexus

The limits of global liberalisation: lessons from Asia and Latin America

We are in the midst of a series of economic crises that have altered the economic and socio-political fortunes of several heretofore rapidly developing states. At a second, more abstract though no less significant level, the East Asian economic crises and the global contagion that has emanated from them represent a set-back for the inexorable process of international economic liberalisation that has come to be known as ‘globalisation’. On the eve of the twenty-first century we are experiencing the first serious challenges to the hegemony of neoliberalism as the dominant form of economic organisation since the end of the Cold War. This resistance is not uniform, nor is it restricted to one site or group of actors. Moreover, in many instances, resistance is often to practice more than to principle. Events in Asia and Latin America represent less the final ideological triumph of liberalism in a post-Cold War era rather than a context for rethinking the significant aspects of the neoliberal project. The aim of this paper, embedded in a comparative discussion of the initial economic crises in East Asia with unfolding events in Latin America, is to make some judgements about the broader implications for the potential management of the global economic order at the end of the twentieth century

Non-custodial deaths: Missing, ignored or unimportant?

This article presents the findings from two separate pieces of research that were conducted by the authors on deaths that occur within the criminal justice system, but outside custodial settings. The article begins with a review of the literature on deaths both within and outside custody before going through the research findings which inform the paper. The overarching argument is that deaths outside custodial settings are less understood, and receive much less scrutiny and public attention than equivalent deaths that occur in custody. We explore the reasons for this neglect, drawing attention to policy, methodological, and sociological factors. We conclude by reflecting on possible ways of overcoming this neglect by drawing on a body of work which argues in favour of an ethic of care