This volume assesses the growing role of popular icons in the construction of a culture that appears to incorporate a critical attitude towards the capitalist experience while, in fact, legitimizing the neoliberal character of the modern world.
In a world of high finance, unprecedented technological change, and cyber billionaires, it is easy to forget that a major source of global wealth is, literally, right under our noses. Coffee is one of the most valuable Southern exports, generating billions of dollars in corporate profits each year, even while the majority of the world’s 25 million coffee families live in relative poverty. But who is responsible for such vast inequality? Many analysts point to the coffee market itself, its price volatility and corporate oligarchy, and seek to "correct" it through fair trade, organic and sustainable coffee, corporate social responsibility, and a number of market-driven projects. The result has been widespread acceptance that the "market" is both the cause of underdevelopment and its potential solution. Against this consensus, Gavin Fridell provocatively argues that state action, both good and bad, has been and continues to be central to the everyday operations of the coffee industry, even in today’s world of "free trade". Combining rich history with an incisive analysis of key factors shaping the coffee business, Fridell challenges the notion that injustice in the industry can be solved "one sip at a time" - as ethical trade promoters put it. Instead, he points to the centrality of coffee statecraft both for preserving the status quo and for initiating meaningful changes to the coffee industry in the future.
Over the past two decades, sales of fair trade coffee have grown significantly and the fair trade network has emerged as an important international development project. Activists and commentators have been quick to celebrate this sales growth, which has allowed socially just trade, labour, and environmental standards and practices to be extended to hundreds of thousands of small farmers and poor rural workers throughout the Global South. While recent assessments of the fair trade network have focused on its impact on local poverty alleviation, however, the broader political-economic and historically rooted structures that frame it have been left largely unexamined. In this study, Gavin Fridell argues that while local level analysis is important, examination of the impacts of broader structures on fair trade coffee networks, and vice versa, are of equal if not greater significance in determining their long-term developmental potential. Using case studies from Mexico and Canada, Fridell examines the fair trade coffee movement at both the global and local level, assessing its effectiveness and locating it within political and development theory. In addition, Fridell provides in-depth historical analysis of fair trade coffee in the context of global trade, and compares it with a variety of postwar development projects within the coffee industry. Timely, meticulously researched, and engagingly written, this study challenges many commonly held assumptions about the long-term prospects and pitfalls of the fair trade network's market-driven strategy in the era of globalization.
Free trade does not make a significantly positive contribution to a society's well being, nor does real free trade exist. In Alternative Trade, Gavin Fridell confronts these assumptions through a passionate and rigorous appraisal of alternative trade and its imperfect legacy. Examining the history of alternative trade models - the International Coffee Agreement, the Canadian Wheat Board and the European-Caribbean banana regime - Fridell exposes the unbridgeable gap between "free trade" proclamations and the lack of actually existing free trade, arguing that the alternative trade models are much more socially efficient than what followed in their wake. Additionally, Fridell places politics, history, social change, class power and violence front-and-centre in his analysis and examines alternative trade within a broader social and historical context to uncover lessons for a more cooperative, socially just world order.
In this innovative book, Ilan Kapoor and Gavin Fridell rethink development politics psychoanalytically, investigating its unconscious. Whereas mainstream development politics is organized around stability and rationality, psychoanalysis points to disharmony and irrationality, helping to explain the development subject’s often self-defeating behaviour.
This is the first book to examine global political economy from a psychoanalytic perspective. It claims that the libidinal—the site of unconscious desire—plays not a supplementary or trivial, but a constitutive role in global political economy. Consumption, for example, is not simply a way of satisfying a material or biological need but a doomed attempt at soothing our deeply held sense of loss; and capital is not just a means to material growth and prosperity but is invested with "drive" that seduces, beguiles, and manipulates in the service of unending accumulation. Thus, in contrast to political economy, which assumes a rational subject, libidinal economy is founded on the notion of a desiring subject, who obeys a logic not of good sense or self-interest but profligacy and irrationality. By applying a psychoanalytic lens, Global Libidinal Economy thereby seeks to uncover the unconscious excesses and antagonisms emergent in such key political economy categories as "production," "trade," and "ecology," while also bringing out significant contemporary themes relating to "gender" and "race.
Framed within the common goal of advancing trade justice and South-North solidarity, The Fair Trade Handbook presents a broad interpretation of fair trade and a wide-ranging dialogue between different viewpoints. Canadian researchers in particular have advanced a transformative vision of fair trade, rooted in the cooperative movement and arguing for a more central role for Southern farmers and workers. Contributors to this book look at the issues within global trade, and assess fair trade and how to make it more effective against the broader structures of the capitalist, colonialist, racist and patriarchal global economy. The debates and discussions are set within a critical development studies and critical political economy framework. However, this book will appeal to a wide range of readers, as it translates the key issues for a popular audience. Includes : A Lively Bean that Brightens Lives: A Graphic Story by Bill Barrett and Curt Shoultz
In this innovative book, Ilan Kapoor and Gavin Fridell rethink development politics psychoanalytically, investigating its unconscious. Whereas mainstream development politics is organized around stability and rationality, psychoanalysis points to disharmony and irrationality, helping to explain the development subject’s often self-defeating behaviour.
Using case studies from Mexico and Canada, this book examines the fair trade coffee movement at both the global and local level, assessing its effectiveness and locating it within political and development theory. It provides an analysis of fair trade coffee in the context of global trade.
This is the first book to examine global political economy from a psychoanalytic perspective. It claims that the libidinal—the site of unconscious desire—plays not a supplementary or trivial, but a constitutive role in global political economy. Consumption, for example, is not simply a way of satisfying a material or biological need but a doomed attempt at soothing our deeply held sense of loss; and capital is not just a means to material growth and prosperity but is invested with "drive" that seduces, beguiles, and manipulates in the service of unending accumulation. Thus, in contrast to political economy, which assumes a rational subject, libidinal economy is founded on the notion of a desiring subject, who obeys a logic not of good sense or self-interest but profligacy and irrationality. By applying a psychoanalytic lens, Global Libidinal Economy thereby seeks to uncover the unconscious excesses and antagonisms emergent in such key political economy categories as "production," "trade," and "ecology," while also bringing out significant contemporary themes relating to "gender" and "race.
Framed within the common goal of advancing trade justice and South-North solidarity, The Fair Trade Handbook presents a broad interpretation of fair trade and a wide-ranging dialogue between different viewpoints. Canadian researchers in particular have advanced a transformative vision of fair trade, rooted in the cooperative movement and arguing for a more central role for Southern farmers and workers. Contributors to this book look at the issues within global trade, and assess fair trade and how to make it more effective against the broader structures of the capitalist, colonialist, racist and patriarchal global economy. The debates and discussions are set within a critical development studies and critical political economy framework. However, this book will appeal to a wide range of readers, as it translates the key issues for a popular audience. Includes : A Lively Bean that Brightens Lives: A Graphic Story by Bill Barrett and Curt Shoultz
In a world of high finance, unprecedented technological change, and cyber billionaires, it is easy to forget that a major source of global wealth is, literally, right under our noses. Coffee is one of the most valuable Southern exports, generating billions of dollars in corporate profits each year, even while the majority of the world’s 25 million coffee families live in relative poverty. But who is responsible for such vast inequality? Many analysts point to the coffee market itself, its price volatility and corporate oligarchy, and seek to "correct" it through fair trade, organic and sustainable coffee, corporate social responsibility, and a number of market-driven projects. The result has been widespread acceptance that the "market" is both the cause of underdevelopment and its potential solution. Against this consensus, Gavin Fridell provocatively argues that state action, both good and bad, has been and continues to be central to the everyday operations of the coffee industry, even in today’s world of "free trade". Combining rich history with an incisive analysis of key factors shaping the coffee business, Fridell challenges the notion that injustice in the industry can be solved "one sip at a time" - as ethical trade promoters put it. Instead, he points to the centrality of coffee statecraft both for preserving the status quo and for initiating meaningful changes to the coffee industry in the future.
Oil pulses through our daily lives. It is the plastic we touch, the food we eat, and the way we move. Oil politics in the twentieth century was about the management of abundance, state power, and market growth. The legacy of this age of plenty includes declining conventional oil reserves, volatile prices, climate change, and enduring poverty in many oil-rich countries. The politics of oil are now at a turning point, and its future will not be like its past. In this in-depth primer to one of the world’s most significant industries, authors Gavin Bridge and Philippe Le Billon take a fresh look at the contemporary political economy of oil. Going beyond simple assertions of peak oil and an oil curse, they point to an industry reordered by global shifts in demand toward Asia, growing reliance on unconventional reserves, international commitments to reduce carbon emissions, a growing campaign for fossil fuel divestment, and violent political struggles in many producer states. As a new geopolitics of oil emerges, the need for effective global oil governance becomes imperative. Highlighting the growing influence of civil society and attentive to the efforts of firms and states to craft new institutions, this fully updated second edition identifies the challenges and opportunities to curtail price volatility, curb demand and the growth of dirty oil, decarbonize energy systems, and improve governance in oil-producing countries.
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