Confronting Global Neoliberalism: Third World Resistance and Development Strategies

Description

The collection is a tour de force,an effective counter to the neoliberal ideology of developmet. It addresses both the monstrous misallocation of global resources wrought by the so-called “Washington Consensus” and the suffering and destruction this has wreaked on third world peoples and economies.

Questioning potential pitfalls in the neoliberal policy package – which the third world (unlike Western Europe and Japan) was largely forced to adopt – has never been counternanced, whether by international institutions or by mainstream crisis discourse. One third world state after another discovered that international institutions were in effect hostile to their governments if they chose alternative developmental models or otherwise resisted the neoliberal triage of liberalization, privatization and deregulation.

Nonetheless, alternative options for countering or working within globalization for domestic advantage are widely sought by governments and progressives – and increasingly so, in light of the current global crisis.

These specially commissioned and peer reviewed chapters on key states such as Brazil, China, Cuba, Egypt, India, Mexico, Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam), South Africa, South Korea, Syria, Thailand, and Venezueka shed light on both the failures of global neoliberalism and on the strategies some third world countries have developed to manage or resist it.

Contributors are experts in the fields of economics, politics, sociology and international studies, hailing from around the world.

Richard Westrais Associate Professor at Pukyong National Univeristy, South Korea. He is author ofPolitical Economy and Globalization(London: Routledge, 2009), and has published numerous articles in scholarly peer reviewed journals such asReview of Radical Political EconomicsandJournal of Contemporary Asia. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Political Studies, Queen’s University, Canada, in 2001.