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Martin Guzman, Argentina’s former Minister of Economy, explains how the role of power should be central to economic research – especially when it comes to sovereign debt.
Over half of all developing countries in the world are either currently in, or headed toward debt distress.
People are waking up to discover that another international debt crisis of enormous proportions looms on the horizon of a scale not seen since the early 1980s, after which Latin America and Africa slogged through a “lost decade.” Implosions of this magnitude can wipe out years of progress in health, education, and social stability. Yet not many people understand why and how this is happening.
As a new crisis gains momentum, economist Martin Guzman, former Minister of the Economy of Argentina and co-president of Columbia University’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue offers his perspective on what has gone wrong and what can be done to address it. In his view, you can’t understand debt crises without confronting the power dynamics at play.
In May 2011, 20,000 people took to the streets of San Cristóbal de Las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico. The Zapatista support movement had called for a ‘march of silence’ against the government’s so-called ‘war on drugs’. Women, children, and men walked in silence, holding up banners saying “no more blood” and “we are fed up” (“estamos hasta la madre”). Their clarity about the violence not only by so-called cartels, but also by state institutions, exposes what much state theory on the 'war on drugs' has lacked — an idea of the state's role. In my new book Selective Security in the War on Drugs, on security policies in the 2000s in Mexico and Colombia, I contribute to the emerging debate on the state in this so-called ‘war’.
The post Selective Security: The Coloniality of State Power in Colombia and Mexico appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
Before a Chinese-brokered Saudi-Iran détente accelerated ceasefire talks, U.S. intelligence reported Saudi Arabia and the Houthis were gearing up for brinksmanship.
The post Leaked Pentagon Doc Gives Unprecedented U.S. Intel View Into Secret Yemen War Talks appeared first on The Intercept.
In the year since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the discussions of what this violence might mean for the future of Russian culture have generated more heat than light. Ukrainian interventions in the debate, however, equipped as they are with an intimate knowledge of both Russian civilisation and Russian barbarism, have tended to be more […]