Uneven Development

The collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory building in Bangladesh, which resulted in the loss of at least 1134 lives and injuries to hundreds more, exposed the brutality of a global production system in which labour rights have become privatised, circumscribed, and deterritorialised. Unprecedented for an incident of its kind, affected families received $30 million in "compensation" from global apparel companies through the Rana Plaza Arrangement, a voluntary initiative overseen by the International Labour Organization (ILO). This article situates the Arrangement in debates over labour rights in global supply chains, presenting it as a hybrid mechanism that recognises workers' right to compensation for injury or death but relies on the voluntarism of corporate social responsibility for funding. Exploring the complex role of neoliberal regulation in reproducing geographies of uneven development, I show how a transnational initiative can restrict labour rights even as it attempts to expand such rights.

The uneven and combined development (U&CD) approach in International Relations (IR) claims to offer a solution to the question of “the international” with a single, coherent theory capable of uniting both sociological and geopolitical factors in the explanation of social change. The approach thus claims to provide what IR theorists have long been searching for: a social theory of the international. While acknowledging the importance of this research programme to the field of IR scholarship, this article argues that the U&CD approach takes for granted what needs to be theorised, failing to provide the theoretical solution to the “domestic analogy” problem it so powerfully identifies.

In the US, the idea of " smart cities " is coming to dominate federal government involvement in, and funding for, urban places. But the smart cities approach, which focuses on using digital applications to promote efficiency, competitiveness, and citizen participation in governance, raises questions about technocentrism in the reproduction of inequality and socio-spatial fragmentation.

The Tweed Ring spawned a vibrant financial sector that was integral to its brief success but has never been previously examined. William “Boss” Tweed and his allies employed banks controlled or comanaged by Tammany politicians to embezzle funds, build political alliances, and invest in a wide array of business ventures. The capital of these savings and commercial banks—city money, deposits from Catholic charities, and the savings of immigrant laborers—was accumulated through political channels. During their operation between 1867 and 1871, politician-bankers engaged in a mix of patronage deals and profit-driven financial speculation. In effect, Tammany banks were ground zero for the Ring's conversion of political hegemony into a windfall of economic capital that fueled party activities and buoyed personal fortunes. Importantly, the anti-Ring mobilization by upper-class reformers was more than a revolt of wealthy taxpayers concerned with abstract goals of good government or rescuing city credit; it was also a reaction by old-line bankers in direct competition with Tammany upstarts. A dramatic bank run catalyzed by reformers in November 1871 drove them into bankruptcy, bringing this novel experiment in political capitalism to an end.

The task of studying the impact of social class on physical and mental health involves, among other things, the use of a conceptual toolbox that defines what social class is, establishes how to measure it, and sets criteria that help distinguish it from closely related concepts. One field that has recently witnessed a wealth of theoretical and conceptual research on social class is psychology, but geographers' and sociologists' attitude of diffidence toward this " positivistic " discipline has prevented them from taking advantage of this body of scholarship. This paper aims to highlight some of the most important developments in the psychological study of social class and social mobility that speak to the long-standing concerns of health geographers and sociologists with how social position, perceptions, social comparisons, and class-based identities impact health and well-being.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.11.037

Capital creates a world after its own image. Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Although the uneven character of capitalist development has received considerable attention within Marxist circles -Amin, Aglietta, Furtado, Emmanuel, Mandel and Frank among others-Neil Smith's Uneven Development is a comprehensive and one of the most systematic inquires about the geography of capitalism. Part of the insightfulness of Smith's work is because it is not a mere exposition of the origins and patterns of the geography of capital. Uneven Development's final goal is to understand exactly how -the production of space has contributed to the survival of capitalism.‖ (Smith 1984: 96), and with this aim in mind Smith advances good part of his hypothesis:

This article examines the contemporary mining industry in Nunavut, Canada to determine whether land claims and other negotiated agreements have enabled Inuit to capture wealth produced by extraction. It examines the geographic distribution of wealth produced by Nunavut’s extractive economy and considers several structural limits to economic development through private-sector extraction in Northern Canada. Although the 1993 Nunavut Agreement has allowed Inuit to increase their share of extraction based wealth, most wealth still accrues to other jurisdictions. The extractive economy therefore remains a colonial economy, because it continues to benefit external interests disproportionately.

While ‘neoliberalization’ is increasingly used to conceptualize concrete realities of China’s economic development, it is not employed in dialectical relation with China’s prevailing developmental ideology – ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. This paper offers a fresh framework and research agenda from which to examine this relation. It argues that neoliberalization across China is a variegated process, formed and fractured by actually existing uneven state spatiality and the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) ostensibly contradictory historicization of a Marxian socialist end-state. How neoliberalization works simultaneously in/through multiple sites in China and consequently reproduces the CPC’s ideological legitimacy has become a theoretically significant question for research on geographical political economy.

Simandan D (2009) Industrialization, In R Kitchin & N Thrift, (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography , Oxford: Elsevier, volume 5, pp. 419-425.
ABSTRACT: This article (1) defines industrialisation and indicates ways in which it can be measured, (2) highlights the importance of the timing of industrialisation and the inherent limits to the proper scientific explanation of this phenomenon, (3) disentangles the often confused conceptual relation between industrialisation and capitalism, (4) explicates the causal links between industrialisation and modernisation, (5) undertakes a brief assessment of the relative costs and benefits of industrialisation, and (6) discloses the defining contours of scholarship on industrialisation in Anglo-American human geography and illustrates it with a recent attempt to integrate the field with the help of a master metaphor called ‘recursive cartographies’. Its portrayal of economic reality as interplay of legacies, rhythms, and events conveys the usefulness of spatial thinking in industrialisation research.

Ever since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) declared a national “People’s War on Terror” in May 2014, the presence of heavily armed Chinese paramilitary forces has become a common sight in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

Home to China’s predominantly Muslim and ethnically Turkic Uyghur population, the CCP has transformed Xinjiang into what some western journalists have dubbed the “perfect police state” in response to a series of past domestic terrorism incidents involving Uyghur “extremists”. Islamic radicalism in China has become synonymous with the Uyghur population from the perspective of Beijing. As a result, the CCP has marked the bodies of all Uyghurs as potential security threats, and institutionalized discrimination has become an everyday reality for Uyghurs living in Xinjiang.

The ongoing state crackdown against the Uyghur population in Xinjiang informs us, however, only half of the story. China’s historical leap into globalization since the opening of its economy in the late 1970’s has changed the face of Xinjiang completely. Since the implementation of market reforms, scholars on Xinjiang such as Michael Clarke argue that the CCP has made the deliverance of economic growth in Xinjiang the Party’s primary strategy for ensuring its political legitimacy over the region. Once considered a largely underdeveloped and peripheral backwater territory, Xinjiang has  been reimagined as a site of great geopolitical importance for the future of the country due to both its location as a gateway to the rest of Central Asia and its immense energy and raw resource potential. Consequently, Xinjiang has now become a developmental region that the state is pouring investment in for it to become the basis of Xi Jinping’s economic policy to develop a new inland “Silk Road” for China: A momentous initiative that aims to connect the country to Europe and Central Asia through trade, infrastructure development, and investment.

This course is part of the doctoral programme in Regional Science and Economic Geography of the Gran Sasso Science Institute, a state-funded university dedicated to doctoral education in Italy. The course is offered at the first year, aiming to get PhD candidates acquainted with the main themes, methodologies and epistemologies, and related academic debates, in qualitative/heterodox economic geography.
The course is divided into two main parts. The first part of the course deals with theoretical, methodological and epistemological issues, such as the decolonisation of geographical knowledge; the geographical political economy approach; the rise of feminist and postcolonial sensibilities in economic geography; the engagement with contextualist, comparative and conjunctural approaches to economic geography; questions of reflexivity, positionality and performativity in today’s publicly engaged scholarship.
The second part of the course focuses on key topics in critical economic geography, such as racial capitalism and uneven geographical development; the urban question in the age of knowledge and technology; climate change and urban sustainability; experiments with community economies and the emergent challenges of local and regional development. The ultimate goal of this course is to provide a sense of qualitative/heterodox economic geography as an intellectually engaged, pluralistic discipline.

Housing is a key object of financialization. There is a small but growing literature on the financialization of housing that has demonstrated how housing is a central aspect of financialization. Despite the varied analyses of the financialization of housing and the importance of housing to financialization, the relations between housing and financialization remain under-researched and under-theorized. The financialization of housing is not so much a specific from of financialization, as it transcends several of the different forms of financialization. Housing systems, in particular, differ widely across the globe, which implies that housing financialization will be inherently variegated, path-dependent and uneven. In this introduction to the Symposium, I will discuss how the articles in this Symposium contribute to the literature on the financialization of housing. Housing has entered a post-Fordist, neoliberal and financialized regime. Both mortgaged homeownership and subsidized rental housing increasingly are there to keep financial markets going, rather than being facilitated by those markets. There is little evidence that the global financial crisis has resulted in a de-financialization of housing. There are common trajectories within uneven and variegated financialization rather than radically different and completely unrelated forms of housing financialization.
Key words: housing, financialization, mortgage markets, rental housing, home ownership, state and public sector

This work aims to study the processes of production of the social phenomenon of forced migration, as well as its criminalization and resistance, in contemporary capitalism. It is proposed to understand Brazil as part of these historically produced and increasingly global dynamics, particularly in the period after the outbreak of the economic crisis in 2007/2008. It seeks to investigate forced migration as an analytical category in its entanglements with the unequal and destructive logic of capital, highlighting gaps and silences of theories based on the abstraction of human rights, like the right to migrate. The study presents the trends of the phenomenon beyond the limitations of the legal categories, especially the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, reflecting about the production of undocumented, the State racism and the juridical limbo of the category “forced displacements” in the international system of human rights. From the analytical perspectives developed in Latin America, the labor category is discussed as a key to understand the complexity of this trends considering the neoliberal scenario. These issues are analyzed in the Brazilian context, in its particularities of being a country with slave heritage and dependent capitalism, highlighting, based on Brazilian authors, the importance to debate forced migration today. Willing to capture the national conjuncture of deep setbacks in dialogue with the idea of the “migratory control policy with a human face” inaugurated with the approval of the new migration law (Law 13.445 / 2017), it intends to analyze the phenomenon from the perspective of labor, rights and resistances. This analytical spectrum serve as a basis for the case study on the motivations and impacts of the #NduduzoTemVoz Campaign, performed by the South African immigrant Nduduzo G. D., which depicts an emblematic resistance against an expulsion decree published in her name by the Brazilian Ministry of Justice. For the research, in addition to the extraction of databases, a qualitative methodology was used, in order to combine theoretical review, with legal analysis and monitoring of media content. In the case study, the methodology included a bibliographical review of the social history of expulsion policy in Brazil, specifically its current relationship with the mass incarceration of "mules" of drug trafficking, as well as participatory observation of the Campaign, with an analysis of the juridical proceedings regarding Nduduzo expulsion, both administrative and judicial, not yet concluded.

Since the 1990s there has been an upsurge of academic interest in Trotsky's concept of uneven and combined development, but relatively little attention has been paid to its intellectual antecedents. This first of two articles will reconstruct the sources and components of uneven and combined development, in particular the strategy of permanent revolution, the conditions for which it was intended as an explanation, and the theory of uneven development, which Trotsky had to extend in order to provide that explanation. The article moves between the concepts of permanent revolution and uneven development, tracing their historical development from emergence in the eighteenth century until the era of the first Russian Revolution. By this point a relationship between the two had begun to be established by Marxists on the centre and left of the Second International, and in turn made possible the formulation of the " law " of uneven and combined development, which will be discussed in the second article.

This paper uses Leon Trotsky's theory of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD) in order to transcend both globalising and metho-dologically nationalist theories of the global political economy. While uneven development theorists working in economic geography have demonstrated the logical corollary of capitalist development and the completion of the world market in the persistence of geographic uneven-ness, they fail to specify or problematise the role of states in this process. This leads to an ambiguity about why the states system has persisted under conditions of deep economic integration across states. State theorists, meanwhile, tend to exclude the world market and system of states as conditioning factors in state (trans)formation. For this reason, much state theory offers only a contingent account of the relationship between patterns of capital accumulation and states' institutional forms. Geopolitical economy, with its focus on the competitive 113 interrelations between states as constitutive of capitalist value relations, is well placed to transcend the pitfalls of these twin perspectives by closely engaging with the theory of UCD. UCD provides a nonreductionist means of integrating global processes of capital accumulation with their distinctive and peculiar national mediations. A research programme is developed to operationalise UCD for purposes of concrete research À something lacking from recent development in the field.

This chapter synthesizes the asymmetrical violence on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border. It includes open violence in Mexico, and hidden violence in the United States. By violence I mean both direct physical violence, including mental health, and so-called structural violence (Galtung 1969). The latter term includes reduction of human capacity caused by broader societal conditions. For example, U.S. refusals of asylum-seekers make them wait in places where violent criminals victimize them; the violence is done by the U.S. government as well as the criminals in Mexico. As Slack et al. (2018: 85–87) point out, so-called U.S. border “security” policy actually makes
many migrants insecure, to deadly effect. Here I build on that insight. I propose that it occurs through processes of hiding of violence in the United States and displacement of violence into Mexico. Both sides are thus implicated in violence. A central argument at the core of my work (Heyman 2017) has been that at the U.S.–Mexico border, safety and wealth accumulate on the U.S. side, and poverty, risk, and insecurity on the Mexican, but they constitute one dynamic whole. This unifying pattern of uneven and combined development (Smith 1984) cuts across specific phenomena: money, drugs, guns, migration, etc.

This course introduces students to regions of the world in historical and geographical context. We focus both on geographical locations and patterns, which we will learn to describe, and also on processes by which regions come to be, which we will learn to explain. We also learn concepts that are useful for describing and explaining regional differences. The course stands alone, but it can also serve as preparation for upper division courses. I am happy to discuss relevant courses or programs of study with interested students.

This course is taught in person, unless the societal or institutional conditions require us to change modality. Any such change will be duly communicated. To be a successful student, you must regularly attend our class meetings and actively engage with course material (lectures, readings, videos, handouts, and assignments). See more details below, under “Habits of Successful Students.”

This course begins with an activity that prompts us to account for our preconceptions about world regions, as well as an example of how regions are made. In subsequent weeks, we focus on processes through which regions take shape, and we substantiate our understanding of these processes with examples of regions and their histories. Emphases of this course include regional and national identity formation, state formation, migration, environmental change, and trade and the production of value through economic circuits. We cannot discuss all regions in one semester, but the course provides tools with which students can develop an understanding of regions we do not have time to examine in the course.

This article puts forward two main arguments. First, it highlights the relation between different phases of neoliberalism in Morocco together with the specific methods and techniques of urban government that were deployed in efforts to govern the slums and their populations. A period of roll back neoliberalism during the 1980s generated reforms that tried to increase government control over the urban territory to compensate for the negative social outcomes of structural adjustment. The subsequent period of roll out neoliberalism coincided with the attempt to manage and regulate the slum population as such, through new modalities of state intervention. Secondly, while evolutions in neoliberal government reflected a gradual process, this transition in Morocco was accelerated by security concerns following two severe moments of urban violence: the 1981 riots and the 2003 suicide bombings in Casablanca. Therefore, Morocco’s recent political transformations cannot be understood in terms provided by the mainstream narrative linking economic liberalization to democratization. Rather, it reflects a profound shift towards intrinsically authoritarian modalities of neoliberal government which are clearly revealed at the urban scale.

Despite being highly infl uential during the fi rst half of the 1980s, the new international division of labour (NIDL) thesis advanced by Fröbel et al. (1980) seemed to fall out of favour in the 1990s. Prompted principally by some empirical developments which seemed to contradict the major claims of the NIDL thesis (especially the industrial upgrading of the fi rst generation of 'Asian Tigers', which would eventually include relatively complex, 'capital-intensive' sectors rather than simply unskilled-labour-intensive ones, as predicted by Fröbel, Heinrichs and Kreye), many scholars then started to voice strong reservations about the NIDL approach. While many of these objections uncovered real weaknesses in the NIDL thesis, I argue that the critics' alternative explanations were not free from shortcomings themselves, and that debates on late-industrialisation eventually threw the baby out with the bath water. I show that many of those critiques were misguided and that there still is much of value to be recovered from the original insights contained in Fröbel, Heinrichs and Kreye's contribution for a critical approach to the contemporary dynamics of the international division of labour.

Since the 1970s, “urban rehabilitation” has been the main territorially focused policy through which the Hungarian state has tried to intervene into urban spaces that are negatively affected by uneven development. Though “urban rehabilitation” as a concept has been used extensively in the last five decades, both the practices and representations attached to it have changed significantly according to the actual ideological, institutional and structural contexts of the different historical periods.
Through interviews, archival materials, document analyses, macro-statistical data collection and ethnographic observations, I track these changes in order to show how the relation of the Hungarian state to urban decline has been reworked by politicians, scholars, bureaucrats and various expert groups on different scales. I identify four historical junctures that I analyze in detail as periods of intensified changes in urban policy: the unfolding global crisis in the 1970s and 1980s in Hungarian state socialism; the radical institutional and geopolitical changes around 1989; Hungary's EU accession in 2004 after more than a decade of liberal hegemony; and the landslide political and economic changes around 2008-2010 when, amidst the global economic crisis, the right-wing regime took an authoritarian turn.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s – within the broader trend of a global economic crisis which took the form of a debt crisis in semi-peripheral Hungary – the concept of “urban rehabilitation” was introduced in opposition to the previous modernist urban planning ideas, i.e. “urban reconstruction” and green field socialist prefab constructions. Thus the introduction of urban rehabilitation as a concept in the late 1970s can be studied parallel to other crisis-driven institutional and ideological changes, and in tandem with the emerging field of experts working with the concept. In the 1990s – as a part of the policy package of the transition from socialism to capitalism – urban rehabilitation was seen as a tool to adapt to “capitalist” processes and to attract private capital in an entrepreneurial manner. In this period the field of experts became adapted to the new “liberal” institutional architecture. From the mid-2000s, and particularly after EU accession in 2004, urban rehabilitation
became a wide-spread urban policy tool due to the significant amount of EU funds dedicated to “integrated urban interventions”, which led to the emergence of “social urban rehabilitation”. In the field of experts it brought professionalization and the inflow of a new generation. Since the authoritarian turn in 2010 urban rehabilitation has gradually begun to focus on governing marginalized territories with social tensions in a paternalist way– as an element of the post-crisis polarizing politics
of the right-wing regime. By 2014 it brought changes in the expert field as well, with the appearance of a new, ambiguous relation to politics.
Through following the history of urban rehabilitation as a policy, this dissertation shows how different actors in different periods tried to problematize and change urban processes in different Hungarian cities. More broadly, through this historical journey I show how state representations and practices have been rescaled in the last five decades in Hungary, and how the work of governing cities has been changed in tandem with the restructuring of the institutional architecture of policy making. I argue that instead of a simplified “socialist city” – “capitalist/post-socialist city” dichotomy, a more nuanced analysis is needed in order to understand the role of urban policies. Moreover, instead of seeing urban policy making as a merely “urban” or “national” issue, I demonstrate the significance of the interplay between global historical ruptures and local (dis)continuities in the practices of urban
policy making animated by different acts of brokerage.
For this reason throughout the thesis I pay specific attention to the ever-changing functions of creating and dissolving institutions. I show that these acts of (de/re)-making institutions are practices of brokerage that mediate between different domains of politics, markets and society, for example between “global” and “local” processes, between the “state” and the “people”, or between political cosmologies and state practices.

An account of Deleuze's late philosophy, especially in the age of neoliberalism and our "society of control." Includes discussions of (1) the marketplace of idea and the emergence of the "New Philosophers"; (2) the relation between thought and opinion (doxa); (3) chaos and cosmology; (4) the problem and politics of life; (5) modern philosophy as an institution of capitalism; and (6) Deleuze and Guattari's late recourse to the concept of utopia.

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Sustainable development aims to address economic, social, and environmental imperatives; yet, in practice, it often embodies a neoliberal market logic that reinforces inequalities. Thus, as the social work profession grapples with its role in advancing environmental sustainability, practice models must explicitly attend to social and economic justice. For example, environmental gentrification refers to situations in which the cleanup of contaminated land or the installation of environmental amenities intentionally or unintentionally catalyzes increased housing costs, thereby contributing to the displacement of vulnerable residents. With the goal of contributing to practice knowledge, we conducted a systematic review of peer-reviewed articles (1997−2017) to learn how community groups have responded to the threat of environmental gentrification. We found that community organizations employ a range of strategies, including blocking development, negotiating for protections, planning alternatives, and allying with gentrifiers. We conclude by exploring ethical implications and practice principles to help social workers engage in truly sustainable development.

Within the field of criminology, the ecological perspective argues for an implicit notion of spatiality, one which reduces the physical environment to nothing more than a basic geographical site, thereby excluding the power relationships, as well as the social and cultural dynamics, or values- and meaning-based dynamics, conveyed therein. As such, this study investigates the importance of geographical space in criminology. By employing the concept of liminality, defined as a symbolic space-time, this thesis also specifically studies the role space plays in the (re)production of both illegalisms and playful deviance, their respective regulation, as well as in the production of knowledge. In order to shed light on the liminality concept, this thesis draws on a five-and-a-half-month-long ethnography, carried out in two Costa Rican beach towns. It also illustrates how the tourism industry’s neoliberal practices produce a liminal space that caters to quests for the exoticism, and especially the hedonism and authenticity, sought by tourists seeking to escape the confines of their everyday lives. While a segment of the scientific literature views liminality as a space where everyday norms are suspended, this thesis instead suggests that tourists adhere to norms already present in such spaces, ones specifically based on an aggressive form of hedonism, which in turn result in “out of the ordinary” alcohol and drug consumption, as well as sexuality, on the part of tourists. In adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this study initially employs cultural geography’s notion of space. This conception of space, which employs an idealist-materialist dialectic, also allows for the adoption of an analytical perspective based on the concept of uneven development. It also makes it possible to understand not only why certain places, regions, and countries are recognized as being so-called liminal spaces, but also how the practices of a capitalist economy push them to rely on an image of liminality in order to survive and operate within the market economy. In additionally taking inspiration from social anthropology, this thesis views the touristic experience as a rite of passage, while also proposing that tourists are subjected to a symbolic device, which leads them to perform a site-specific tourist identity. This performance, given concrete form by the consumption of transgressions, results in the (re)production of the liminal space. The thesis also shows that this symbolic device is a regulating mechanism in regard to conducts, but additionally to bodies. Lastly, the thesis illustrates the ways in which the research field is also a liminality for researchers, one which affects them, as well as the knowledge produced therein.

Attempts to understand the wider context of the Arab uprisings in Morocco mainly focus on the dynamic created by the 20 February Movement, while the long history of increasing socio-economic struggle tends to be underestimated. This article argues that the political and democratic protests of the last two years and the history of socio-economic protests cannot be viewed as unrelated phenomena but must be understood as part of the same process. The account focuses on different disturbances, such as the riots in the phosphate mining region of Khouribga, to show the particular dynamic between civil democratic and socio-economic struggles.

[The first paragraph of this conclusion chapter is provided here] This edited collection has been like a leap onto a moving train, not quite knowing where it might lead, and having only a vague sense of where it has been. It has been exciting and we have learnt a lot.What the different chapters offer is a wider and deeper view of ‘gentrification’ from around the globe than has been managed to date. However, here, the editors and contributors have done more than merely offer a large number of empirical accounts of the diverse forms of gentrification (and its interaction with other urban processes) around the world. In this conclusion, drawing on Ward (2010), we conceptualise and theorise back from the different empirical cases in this book to reveal what we have learned from looking at gentrification globally,and from comparing beyond the usual suspects.

In 2007, Ghana joined the club of Gulf of Guinea oil-rich countries when transnational corporations discovered proven reserves in the Jubilee Field, off of the Cape Three Points along its Western coast. This
has generated debate on whether Ghana would escape the resource curse. The orthodox resource curse approach (ORCA), dominant in most discussions on the issue to date, offers some valuable theoretical and policy insights but is also highly problematic: it is uncritical, ahistorical and reductionist. Fixated on internal political and economic factors, the ORCA ignores the longue durée of capitalist exploitation and its negative structural effects on the economy. This article formulates a critical political economy approach (PEA) which brings a fresh perspective on the oil-curse debate, focusing specifically on the case of Ghana. Using theoretical argumentation and empirical evidence, the paper explains why, in the context of ORCA, many would argue that a liberal democratic context, relatively good governance and long history of gold mining will help Ghana minimise the probability of a resource curse. But when analysed using a more dynamic PEA, it becomes clear that the danger of a resource curse ‘epidemic’
surfacing in Ghana is very real: the continuous exploitation by global capital, which has perpetuated the existence of enclave extractive industries and a dependence on the export of low-value commodities. A PEA brings into sharper focus the global political economy underpinnings of the resource curse in Sub-Saharan Africa by highlighting the way in which the dynamics of ‘uneven and combined’ capitalist development have conditioned the region, both resource-rich and poor, to become dependent on the
production and export of raw commodities.

Der Beitrag analysiert am Beispiel der Eurasischen Wirtschaftsunion, wie sich Asymmetrien auf den regionalen Integrationsprozess auswirken. Dabei wird zuerst geklärt, welche theoretischen Grundannahmen es zu dieser Fragestellung gibt. Dann wird analysiert, welche strukturellen, institutionellen und informellen (Macht-)asymmetrien in der Eurasischen Wirtschaftsunion vorherrschen und mit welchen Maßnahmen diesen politisch begegnet wird. Abschließend wird die Rolle Russlands aus der Perspektive der kleineren Mitgliedsstaaten beleuchtet, die zwischen Ernüchterung und Hoffnung schwanken.

This article draws on theories of uneven development to deconstruct a set of universalising assumptions in the critique of American capitalism. While these theories have called for more relational understandings of capitalism, there is a tendency to naturalise the United States as an instance of universal capitalist relations. Engaging such diverse thinkers as Paul Baran & Paul Sweezy, Michel Aglietta, and Cedric Robinson, the article identifies three recurrent universals, including: (1) abstraction from the U.S. as the most “advanced” capitalist formation, (2) assumption of American capitalism as developing in a particularly “pure” state, and (3) subsumption of the dynamics of American capitalism under universal logics. Reading these against the methodological principles of Uneven & Combined Development, the article argues for provincialising the capitalist formation that appears the most “complete.”

Capitalism is a particular mode of production, dominant since the 18th Century, based around the private ownership of the means of production (MP) and its operation for exchange value, and the related need for people to sell their own labor power (LP) to make a living. Dialectics and class struggle From a Marxist dialectical perspective, society is personified by two fundamentally opposed classes (capitalist and proletariat). As an outcome of class struggle, society can be transformed through time, from one hegemonic mode of production to another (e.g., feudalism to capitalism, capitalism to communism) as the oppressed class (e.g., workers) seeks to overthrow and liberate itself from the oppressor (e.g., the capitalist class). Surplus value Surplus value is value created by the unpaid labor of wage workers, over and above the value of their LP (necessary labor time), and appropriated without compensation by the capitalist. For Marxists, the production and appropriation of surplus value is a fundamental aim of capitalism. Commodity fetishism The term used critically by Marxists to describe mainstream economists' failure to acknowledge, and attempts to mystify, the social relations (and exploitation) that underlie the production of commodities. Uneven development The tendency under capitalism for some places to develop very rapidly while other places experience decline. The Marxist theory contends that the two countervailing tendenciesdof growth and declinedare fundamentally related and intrinsic to capitalist forms of production. Spatial fix The stabilization of capitalist production through geographical extension and reconfiguration via particular organizational place-based forms and locational arrangements for the purpose of expanded capital accumulation.

A recent Special Issue in this journal devoted its pages to discuss the varied forms of capitalist development in different countries and regions across the globe. Specifically, the contributions offered a critical assessment of the hegemonic 'neo-institutionalist' approach to the study of national diversity of capitalism, with particular focus on the 'varieties of capitalism' approach. This article critically engages with the different alternatives to the varieties of capitalism approach that were put forward and shows that these other perspectives also fall short of providing a convincing framework to address the problematique of national or regional particularities as posed in the debate. In order to offer a more solid explanation of the phenomenon of 'capitalist variety', the article draws upon Marx's fundamental insight into the determination of capital as a materialised social relation which becomes the immediate alienated subject of the organisation of the process of social life and also moves some way beyond it so as to cast fresh light on global transformation and uneven development in recent decades. More concretely, the article further submits that the specificity of the Latin American 'variety of capitalism' must be grounded in the constitution and dynamics of the