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1 – 10 of 438The goal of this chapter is to reexamine the nature and structure of the military–industrial complex (MIC) through the works of John Kenneth Galbraith. MIC, or military power as…
Abstract
The goal of this chapter is to reexamine the nature and structure of the military–industrial complex (MIC) through the works of John Kenneth Galbraith. MIC, or military power as he prefers, is a coalition of vested interests within the state and industry that promoted the military power in the name of “national security” for their interests. Galbraith’s theory of giant corporations helps us understand the role of military corporations in the MIC. Moreover, he is a critical scholar in examining this topic because he was a political insider in the Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations and a prominent public intellectual against the Vietnam War. Against this background, this chapter has three parts. After explaining the development of military Keynesianism with respect to the main economic thoughts, it examines the history of the MIC and its impact on economic priorities during and after the Cold War through Galbraith’s works. Finally, this chapter discusses MIC’s relevancy today and evaluates Galbraith’s prophecies.
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Napoleon Kurantin and Bertha Z. Osei-Hwedie
The chapter examines the current trade war between the United States and China and its impact on the two countries’ military industrial complex in relation to economic growth and…
Abstract
The chapter examines the current trade war between the United States and China and its impact on the two countries’ military industrial complex in relation to economic growth and development. The trade war has both positive and negative impacts on the country’s economic growth and development. Both countries depend heavily on each other for trade and account for an incredibly significant portion of the global trade. The trade war also impacts on the military industrial complex with respect to the defense budgetary allocation and trade in arms. One of the rationales for the trade war by the Trump Administration is to boost up the domestic economy, which would benefit the military industrial complex. Likewise, the retaliatory tariffs by China are designed to protect the domestic economy and showcase its ability to withstand and challenge the United States. The military industrial complex is important to both the countries. The chapter applied a quantitative design with canonical correlation method to multiple regression, where there are multiple intercorrelated outcome variables relative to military industrial complex and the processes of economic growth and development. It shows that trade wars in the form of increased imposed tariffs on each other by the United States and China has had no significant adverse effect on the Military Industrial Complexes of the two biggest economies of the world.
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Using Marcuse and the 2008 economic crisis as a starting point, this work proposes a feminist critical theory for public administration that could inform how public…
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Using Marcuse and the 2008 economic crisis as a starting point, this work proposes a feminist critical theory for public administration that could inform how public administrationists can see themselves as defenders of human values against a status quo which favors masculine and market forces. Through an exploration of Marcuse's concepts of one-dimentionality, foreclosure, masculinization, and feminist socialism, this work asserts the need for a feminist critical theory for public administration theory and praxis that responds to current social injustices and explores a more complex analysis of the subject as subjugated and dispossessed. The conclusion proposes some directions that such a theory might take in the future.
Wim Dierckxsens, Andrés Piqueras and Walter Formento
The concept of productive/unproductive work is relevant for better understanding the current capitalist economy. As the contradiction between production and the appropriation of…
Abstract
The concept of productive/unproductive work is relevant for better understanding the current capitalist economy. As the contradiction between production and the appropriation of surplus value by financial capital becomes more pronounced as it expands, it exerts intense pressure on the appropriation and redistribution of the surplus value. It puts different factions of capital into growing conflict with each other and defines the boundaries of the current geopolitical map of power. The maximization of profits in the productive sector carries on until the possibilities of greater profits are exhausted and the rationale of the capitalist system of exploitation becomes virtually meaningless. The current level of technology with Artificial Intelligence eliminates at the same time any technical impediment to planning an economy. It also has the potential to create the objective conditions for making the move to the most democratic forms of participation in planning.
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MCF aims to harness the inventiveness of the country’s private-sector technology firms to strengthen its military capabilities. It is partially based on the US military-industrial…
Gives a brief account of what has happened, what is happening and whatis going to happen in the country formerly called the Soviet Union.Analyses the socio‐economic nature of the…
Abstract
Gives a brief account of what has happened, what is happening and what is going to happen in the country formerly called the Soviet Union. Analyses the socio‐economic nature of the Soviet system and its evolution prior to Gorbachev′s reforms. Presents the causes for the emergence of perestroika and for the collapse of the system and the State. Discusses the reasons for the arrival of Yeltsin and his policies to the political scene. Examines the core of the current crisis and the means to resolve it. Speculates on the country′s distant future.
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This paper aims to analyze a decolonized peace with gender perspective. Liberal democracies had consolidated on conquest, slavery, racism, sexism, colonialism, raw material…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to analyze a decolonized peace with gender perspective. Liberal democracies had consolidated on conquest, slavery, racism, sexism, colonialism, raw material extraction and female exploitation. Additional burdens came from neoliberal globalization with the massive burning of fossil oil, changing the Earth's history from the Holocene toward the Anthropocene. Multiple nexus between the human and environmental system requires an epistemology from the Global South. The paper explores alternative peace paradigms enabling poor and exploited people to overcome the destructive outcomes of patriarchal violence and extractivism. Regionally and locally, they are experimenting with just, safe, equal and sustainable alternatives of free societies.
Design/methodology/approach
The nexus approach focuses on system efficiency, internal and external feedbacks and allows decision-making processes with stronger cross-sectoral coordination and multi-level governance. It includes the understanding of the policy agenda and the political actors at different levels, explaining the discrimination of gender from local to global. The analysis establishes complex relations between theory and political actions, due that all actions are inherently mediated by gender. A key focus is a relationship and the outcomes of policies, where communication and collaboration at the local level grant efficient peaceful resource management with gender equity.
Findings
An engendered-sustainable peace approach is culturally decentralized and may offer alternatives to the ongoing destruction process of neoliberal corporatism and violence. Drastic systemic change requires massive changes from bottom-up and top-down before 2030–2050. Global solidarity among all excluded people, especially women and girls, promotes from childhood an engendered-sustainable peace-building process, where positive feedbacks may reduce the tipping points on Earth and among humankind. Engendered-sustainable peace can mitigate the upcoming conflicts and catastrophes, limiting the negative feedbacks from abusive, selfish and destructive corporations. A greater self-regulating sustainable system with a HUGE-security could promote a decolonized, engendered and sustainable peace for everybody.
Research limitations/implications
The interconnected risks are cascading across different domains, where systemic challenges have intensified conflicts and violence, due to uncertainty, instability and fragility. Cascading effects not only demand prevention for sudden disruptions (hurricanes, floods) but also for slow-ongoing processes (drought, sea-level rise, lack of water availability, etc.), which are equally or more disruptive. Women suffer differently from disasters and are prone to greater impacts on their life and livelihood. An engendered peace is limited by the deep engrained patriarchal system. Only a culture of peace with gender recognition may grant future peace and also the sustainable care of ecosystems.
Practical implications
The Global South is exploring alternative ways to overcome the present violent and destructive globalization by promoting deep engrained indigenous values of Aymaras’ living well, the shell model of commanding by obeying of the Zapatistas or Bhutan’s Happiness Index. Globally, critical women and men are promoting subsistence agriculture, solidarity or gift economy, where local efforts are restoring the equilibrium between humans and nature. An engendered-sustainable peace is limiting the destructive impacts of the Anthropocene, climate change and ongoing pandemics.
Social implications
An engendered-sustainable peace is culturally decentralized and offers alternatives to the ongoing destruction process of neoliberal corporatism, climate change and violence. The text explores how to overcome the present hybrid warfare with alternative HUGE security and peace from the bottom-up. Regional reinforcement of food security, safe water management, local jobs and a concordian economy for the most vulnerable may change the present exploitation of nature and humankind. Growing solidarity with people affected by disasters is empowering women and girls and dismantling from the bottom-up, the dominant structures of violence and exploitation.
Originality/value
The military-industrial-scientific corporate complex and the exploitation of women, men and natural resources, based on patriarchy, has produced climate change, poverty and global pandemics with millions of unnecessary deaths and suffering. A doughnut engendered peace looking from the outside and inside of the system of globalization and environmental destruction proposes to overcome the growth addiction by a growth agnostic society. Engendered peace explores alternative and sustainable values that go beyond the dominant technological changes. It includes a culturally, politically and institutionally ingrained model where everybody is a participant, reinforcing an engendered-sustainable peace and security for everybody.
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The purpose of this paper is to consider the national and international political-economic environment in which Australian university research grew. It considers the implications…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to consider the national and international political-economic environment in which Australian university research grew. It considers the implications of the growing significance of knowledge to the government and capital, looking past institutional developments to also historicise the systems that fed and were fed by the universities.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is based on the extensive archival research in the National Archives of Australia and the Australian War Memorial on the formation and funding of a wide range of research programmes in the immediate post-war period after the Second World War. These include the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, the NHMRC, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, the Australian Pacific Territories Research Council, the Commonwealth Office of Education, the Universities Commission and the Murray review. This research was conducted under the Margaret George Award for emerging scholars for a project entitled “Knowledge, Nation and Democracy in Post-War Australia”.
Findings
After the Second World War, the Australian Government invested heavily in research: funding that continued to expand in subsequent decades. In the USA, similar government expenditure affected the trajectory of capitalist democracy for the remainder of the twentieth century, leading to a “military-industrial complex”. The outcome in Australia looked quite different, though still connected to the structure and character of Australian political economics.
Originality/value
The discussion of the spectacular growth of universities after the Second World War ordinarily rests on the growth in enrolments. This paper draws on a very large literature review as well as primary research to offer new insights into the connections between research and post-war political and economic development, which also explain university growth.
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This chapter is a contribution to the intellectual history of the anxiety that full employment in the modern United States depended somehow on military spending. This discourse…
Abstract
This chapter is a contribution to the intellectual history of the anxiety that full employment in the modern United States depended somehow on military spending. This discourse (conveniently abbreviated as “military Keynesianism”) is vaguely familiar, but its contours and transit still await a full study. The chapter shows the origins of the idea in the left-Keynesian milieu centered around Harvard’s Alvin Hansen in the late 1930s, with a particular focus on the diverse group that cowrote the 1938 stagnationist manifesto An Economic Program for American Democracy. After a discussion of how these young economists participated in the World War II mobilization, the chapter considers how questions of stagnation and military stimulus were marginalized during the years of the high Cold War, only to be revived by younger radicals. At the same time, it demonstrates the existence of a community of discourse that directly links the Old Left of the 1930s and 1940s with the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, and cuts across the division between left-wing social critique and liberal statecraft.
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The federal budget deficit target for 2023, set at RUB2.9tn (USD35.8bn), is likely to be exceeded for the second year in a row. Federal expenditure is showing no signs of slowing…