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This book explores the potential creation of a broader collaborative economy through commons-based peer production (P2P) and the emergent role of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The book seeks to critically engage in the political discussion of commons-based peer production, which can be classified into three basic arguments: the liberal, the reformist and the anti-capitalist. This book categorises the liberal argument as being in favour of the coexistence of the commons with the market and the state. Reformists, on the other hand, advocate for the gradual adjustment of the state and of capitalism to the commons, while anti-capitalists situate the commons against capitalism and the state. By discussing these three viewpoints, the book contributes to contemporary debates concerning the future of commons-based peer production.

Further, the author argues that for the commons to become a fully operational mode of peer production, it needs to reach critical mass arguing that the liberal argument underestimates the reformist insight that technology has the potential to decentralise production, thereby forcing capitalism to transition to post-capitalism. Surveying the three main strands of commons-based peer production, this book makes the case for a post-capitalist commons-orientated transition that moves beyond neoliberalism.

Are humans hard-wired to make good decisions about managing their privacy in an increasingly public world? Or are we helpless victims of surveillance through our use of invasive digital media? Exploring the chasm between the tyranny of surveillance and the ideal of privacy, this book traces the origins of personal data collection in digital technologies including artificial intelligence (AI) embedded in social network sites, search engines, mobile apps, the web, and email. The Future of Digital Surveillance argues against a technologically deterministic view—digital technologies by nature do not cause surveillance. Instead, the shaping of surveillance technologies is embedded in a complex set of individual psychology, institutional behaviors, and policy principles.

How the global supply chain developed in response to postcolonial struggles for independence

No part of the global economy today remains untouched by the logistics sector. Each time we make a purchase online, buy a car, or shop for groceries, we interact with planetary supply chains that connect industrial, transport, and service workers across vast distances. The Logistics Counterrevolution critically reexamines the history of global logistics from the perspective of anticolonial struggles that coincided with its emergence. Positioning this history as a counterrevolution on behalf of powerful state and capitalist interests, Charmaine Chua underscores how subaltern resistance shaped the development of the supply chains, containerization, and maritime logistics that underpin our daily lives.

This book charts how the logistics economy emerged after World War II as a response to the perceived threat of national liberation and economic autonomy among developing nations. Drawing from case studies in Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, and in international institutions, Chua demonstrates how the global supply chain not only sped up the international circulation of goods but also enacted new forms of imperialism leveled against the emerging nations of the Global South.

With insights from Filipino seafarers, Amazon warehouse workers, postcolonial leaders, and shipping executives, The Logistics Counterrevolution uncovers the enormous infrastructures and economic mechanisms that sustain capital distribution systems across the world. Combining ethnography with historical research from company and colonial archives, this book offers a necessary reconsideration of the logistics industry by illuminating the internationalist struggles that precipitated its rise.

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For five months in 2013–2014, Dušan Pavlović took time off from teaching to accept a senior position in Serbia’s Ministry of Economy. This short period was long enough for him to make a penetrating diagnosis of the economic activity of the postcommunist government. He found that a coterie of tycoons and politicians live off the wealth of the majority of citizens and smaller entrepreneurs, while the economy performs below its capacities. In academic terms, extractive economic institutions create allocative inefficiency.

Vivid, suggestive, and even entertaining accounts depict how privatization is administered and foreign investment projects are handled, and how party members, relatives, and friends are hired into public administration and state-owned companies. They show how the managers of firms that queue for state subsidies resist the systematic screening of their businesses. The principles of Keynesian economics are distorted and misused to conceal deliberate fiscal mismanagement. Huge ill-conceived development projects siphon taxpayers’ money from “non-economic” activities like social services, health, education, science, and culture.

What Pavlović found in Serbia is acutely symptomatic of many other European post-communist regimes of our time, lending his book singular importance.

An authoritative look at how artificial intelligence both shapes and is shaped by the political and economic forces of the modern world.

As the effects of artificial intelligence are felt across economies and societies, many of its ramifications are still emerging. This volume brings together economists and political scientists to examine how AI intersects with regulation, military power, and political identity—offering analytical frameworks and identifying key open questions for future research.

The contributions address topics such as the allocation of property rights for AI inputs, trade-offs among alternative regulatory regimes, and the role of interest groups in shaping the technology’s trajectory. They explore how AI-related capabilities influence military effectiveness, resource allocation, and bargaining power among nations, and consider AI’s effects on political preferences, from the influence of AI-curated information on polarization to the implications of targeted political advertising and personalized education for national identity formation. The volume highlights key trade-offs that arise in AI’s political economy, and points toward empirical strategies and theoretical models that can advance understanding in this emerging field.

Drawing on diverse disciplinary perspectives, the collection provides a foundation for rigorous inquiry into how AI both shapes and is shaped by political and economic forces.

The transition from authoritarian to democratic government in Brazil unleashed profound changes in government and society that cannot be adequately understood from any single theoretical perspective. The great need, say Graham and Wilson, is a holistic vision of what occurred in Brazil, one that opens political and economic analysis to new vistas. This need is answered in The Political Economy of Brazil, a groundbreaking study of late twentieth-century Brazilian issues from a policy perspective.

The book was an outgrowth of a year-long policy research project undertaken jointly by the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, both at the University of Texas at Austin. In this book, several noted scholars focus on specific issues central to an understanding of the political and economic choices that were under debate in Brazil. Their findings reveal that for Brazil the break with the past—the authoritarian regime—could not be complete due to economic choices made in the 1960s and 1970s, and also the way in which economic resources committed at that time locked the government into a relatively limited number of options in balancing external and internal pressures.

These conclusions will be important for everyone working in Latin American and Third World development.

Any student, academic or practitioner wanting to succeed in development studies, radical or mainstream, must understand the World Bank's role and the evolution of its thinking and activities. The Political Economy of Development provides tools for gaining this understanding and applies them across a range of topics.

The research, practice and scholarship of development are always set against the backdrop of the World Bank, whose formidable presence shapes both development practice and thinking. This book brings together academics that specialise in different subject areas of development and reviews their findings in the context of the World Bank as knowledge bank, policy-maker and financial institution. The volume offers a compelling contribution to our understanding of development studies and of development itself.

The Political Economy of Development is an invaluable critical resource for students, policy-makers and activists in development studies.

The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories since 1967 has many important economic aspects that are often overlooked. In this highly original book, Shir Hever shows that understanding the economic dimensions of the occupation is crucial to unravelling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Hever rejects the premise that Israel keeps control over Palestinian territories for material gain, and also the premise that Israel is merely defending itself from Palestinian aggression. Instead, he argues that the occupation has reached an impasse, with the Palestinian resistance making exploitation of the Palestinians by Israeli business interests difficult, but the Israeli authorities reluctant to give up control.

With traditional economic analysis failing to explain this turn of events, this book will be invaluable for students, activists and journalists struggling to make sense of the complex issues surrounding Israel's occupation.

The historic and increasing interdependence of the Latin American and U.S. economies makes an understanding of the political economies of Latin American nations particularly timely and important. After World War II, many nations initially implemented import substituting industrialization policies. Their outcomes, and the shift in policies, are related to the domestic policies and world economic conditions that led to government deficits, inflation, foreign borrowing, debt renegotiation, and renewed emphasis on common markets and other devices to stimulate trade and investment.

In The Political Economy of Latin America in the Postwar Period, important policy measures are evaluated, such as indexation of prices and contracts; special provisions for financing the government through the Central Bank; stabilization; and deregulation of the economy.

The introduction presents trends in Latin American growth and the factors that influence them. This is followed by parallel studies of the economic development of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru from 1945 to the mid-1990s. Noted experts bring their considerable experience to analyzing the content and impact of the economic theories that guided policymaking and their effects on output, income, and quality of life.

Jude L. Fernando explores the paradoxical relationship between NGOs and capitalism, showing that supposedly progressive organisations often promote essentially the same policies and ideas as existing governments.

The book examines how a diverse group of NGOs have shaped state formation in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. It argues that, rather than influencing state formation for the better, NGOs have been integrated into the capitalist system and their language adopted to give traditional exploitative social relations a transformative appearance.

This enlightening study will give pause to those who see NGOs as drivers of true social change and will encourage students of development studies to make a deeper analysis of state formation.

Despite gloomy prophecies, democracy and the market economy seem to be taking root throughout Central and Eastern Europe, although set against a background of a recession deeper and longer than that of the Great Depression. How is this possible? Why did Eastern Europeans protest less about the brutal social consequences of systemic change than the people of Latin America a decade earlier? Why has the region-wide authoritarian or populist turnabout not occurred? Why has democracy in these countries proved to be crisis-proof? In what ways has economic crisis impacted on the politics of the region?

In addressing these questions, Béla Greskovits uses a comparative analysis of the structures, institutions, cultures, and actors shaping both the Eastern European and the Latin American transformations. He argues that structural, institutional, and cultural factors have put a brake on destabilizing collective actions and have paved the way for the emergence of the enduring, low-level equilibrium between incomplete democracy and imperfect market economy which seems set to characterize the Central and Eastern European experience for the foreseeable future.

In this first overview of the Brazilian republican state based on extensive primary source material, Steven Topik demonstrates that well before the disruption of the export economy in 1929, the Brazilian state was one of the most interventionist in Latin America. This study counters the previous general belief that before 1930 Brazil was dominated by an export oligarchy comprised of European and North American capitalists and that only later did the state become prominent in the country’s economic development.

Topik examines the state’s performance during the First Republic (1889–1930) in four sectors—finance, the coffee trade, railroads, and industry. By looking at the controversies in these areas, he explains how domestic interclass and international struggles shaped policy and notes the degree to which the state acted relatively independently of civil society.

Topik’s primary concern is the actions of state officials and whether their decisions reflected the demands of the ruling class. He shows that conflicting interests of fractions of the ruling class and foreign investors gradually led to far greater state participation than any of the participants originally desired, and that the structure of the economy and of society—not the intentions of the actors—best explains the state’s economic presence.