Financial Globalization, Local Debt Markets and New State Financial Activism in Middle-income Countries

Since the global financial crisis of 2008–09, there has been a renewed interest in the role of the state in processes of financial development and globalization. This article explores new forms of state economic activity via the development of debt capital markets in Southeast Asia, specifically Indonesia and Malaysia. It suggests that the expanding profile of various state-controlled entities in local capital markets constitutes a new form of state financial activism responsive to (upper) middle-class consumption preferences such as modern infrastructure, urban housing and low-risk investments. This activism highlights state agency and complicates the propositions of the emergent literature on state capitalism and financial de-risking that focuses on increasingly close alignment of the interests of states and international portfolio investors. Accordingly, the authors caution against unilinear conceptions of the state in which activism is primarily geared towards accommodating the preferences of international investors. The article posits that states are actively trying to establish new market logics for the benefit of their domestic middle classes via the development of domestic capital markets, and that the emergent role of middle-income country (upper) middle classes as financial consumers reconfigures processes of state-managed financialization

Islamic legal methodologies and Shariah screening standards: application in the Indonesian stock market

This article provides a framework for applying the principles of Islamic legal methodology to determine the optimal Shariah screening standards for Islamic equity markets. It is argued that using maslahah mursalah (unrestricted benefit) is an appropriate method for identifying appropriate financial standards and its principles stipulate that the benchmark that yields the best economic returns to investors should be chosen. The methodological framework is applied to the Indonesia equity market where the economic implications of the Islamic stock screening standards of the Indonesian Islamic Shariah Stock Index and four global indices are assessed. Portfolios are constructed by applying Islamic stock screening standards for each of the indices by using data on 377 stocks listed in the Indonesian stock market for 5 years. The performances measured by the Sharpe ratio, Treynor index, and Jensen alpha reveal that the Dow Jones Islamic Index screening criteria performs the best. Based on the method of maslahah mursalah, the article recommends using the screening standard of this index in the Indonesian stock market to maximize benefits to investors. While the approach used in this article is applied to Islamic equity markets, the methodological framework can also be used for other similar cases in Islamic finance

Metabolic Rift or Metabolic Shift? Dialectics, Nature, and the World-Historical Method

Abstract In the flowering of Red-Green Thought over the past two decades, metabolic rift thinking is surely one of its most colorful varieties. The metabolic rift has captured the imagination of critical environmental scholars, becoming a shorthand for capitalism’s troubled relations in the web of life. This article pursues an entwined critique and reconstruction: of metabolic rift thinking and the possibilities for a post-Cartesian perspective on historical change, the world-ecology conversation. Far from dismissing metabolic rift thinking, my intention is to affirm its dialectical core. At stake is not merely the mode of explanation within environmental sociology. The impasse of metabolic rift thinking is suggestive of wider problems across the environmental social sciences, now confronted by a double challenge. One of course is the widespread—and reasonable—sense of urgency to evolve modes of thought appropriate to an era of deepening biospheric instability. The second is the widely recognized—but inadequately internalized—understanding that humans are part of nature

IPE and IPS meet in Jakarta: feminist research agendas seen through everyday life

Feminist International Political Economy (IPE), with its focus on the gendered dimensions of social reproduction and market life, provides ground for fruitful engagements between IPE and IPS. Indeed, from this perspective, the boundaries between IPE and IPS are much more porous than assumed in some other contributions to this forum. Pushing against the boundaries of narrowly demarcated disciplinary divides is something that feminist political economists have been actively engaged in since the early days. Our approach is one in which we call for a simultaneous recognition of both the ‘International’ and the ‘Everyday’ in research agendas, speaking as much to new research directions in the field of IPE as to writings in IPS. To illustrate our claim, this short piece reflects on a recent research project into the gendered everyday political economy of housing resettlement schemes in Jakarta, Indonesia – pointing to the interrelationships between everyday gendered practices of work, finance and caring, and how these relationships come to be transformed within the context of the global city. Such an intervention, we hope, points to the significant insights that a feminist lens brings to the development of an ever more sociologically informed international studies

Introduction: the production and contestation of exemplary centres in Southeast Asia

Southeast Asian cities have long been produced as the ‘exemplary centres’ of the region, shaped in various and overlapping ways by the imperial gaze, nationalist visions (and their democratised versions), and by the familiar blueprints of international capital. Through such exemplary visions, the region’s cities have been designed to cultivate collective memories and subjectivities, as well as to project power and authority. In addition, and often as an integral result of the realisation of grand visions, regional metropolises are also dynamic sites of rapid urbanisation, of contested processes of expropriation and eviction, and places of dissent and resistant subject formation. Further, impoverished urban populations increasingly suffer environmental discrimination and bear the worst of the effects of contamination and climate change, while at the same time, discourses of hygiene, criminality, and uninhabitability are employed to denigrate the urban poor and their environments. This special issue adopts the concept of the ‘exemplary centre’ —the coordinates and complexities of which are mapped by Abidin Kusno in the Foreword to this collection— in order to explore the often-contradictory realities of urban scale contemporary change

Undoing ruination in Jakarta: the gendered remaking of life on a wasted landscape

This intervention shares images and stories from the women evictees in Jakarta who collectively give voice to the psychic, physical, and material injuries inflicted by state dispossession in the city. Engaging Ann Laura Stoler’s (2013) language to expose the politics of ruination and preservation, we illustrate the gendered nature of the remaking of life on the most wasted of urban landscapes. The focus of this piece is Kampung Akuarium, a neighborhood violently evicted in April 2016 as part of a broader evictions regime in Jakarta under the governorship of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, popularly known as Ahok. In the aftermath, Kampung Akuarium became the most restive of Jakarta’s landscapes as residents returned to make claims for justice and compensation, and to remake their lives directly on the rubble of their old homes in defiance of the city government. Flanked by the preserved warehouses of the VOC, the ruined neighbourhood ultimately became a site where colonial histories, state- and capital-inflicted expropriation and ruination, and gendered forms of injury and struggle all found material modes of expression alongside one another