Susanne Soederberg
Biographic Data
| ID | 269284 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susanne Soederberg |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susanne |
| FAMILY NAME | Soederberg |
| SIGNATURE | SOEDERBERG S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen's University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9246-3560 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 61 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 596 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 60 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
The Value of Assetised Highways in City Logistics
Urban highways are built to accelerate the circulation of commodities—including labour power—across space, and they play a central role in global supply chains within urban landscapes. What happens when highways themselves are transformed into commodities, or asset classes? How can we understand the role of the state in these dynamics and its social reproduction? Drawing on a historical‐geographical materialist approach, I examine the relationshi…
Towards a radical highway geography
Highways are vital to global supply chains, enabling the dominant form of circulating goods inland by truck. Within critical economic geography and related disciplines, however, insufficient attention has been placed on developing a radical highway geography that positions highways within the evolving relationships between global capital, state scales and the labour of moving goods. I fill this silence by applying a historical-geographical materi…
Making and Mastering Violent Environments
Louisiana’s coastal wetlands have been disappearing at an alarming rate over the past several decades, with the greatest harm experienced by vulnerable populations (poor and racialised residents). It was not until 2005 that the state legislature responded with a much‐lauded Master Plan tasked with integrating the construction of new flood control infrastructure with wetland restoration. Seeking to unsettle this initiative, we develop a historical…
The New Urban Displacements? Finance-Led Capitalism, Austerity, and Rental Housing Dynamics
As this was written, 81,664 households were on the active waiting list for social housing in the City of Toronto (City of Toronto, 2021). While this number was down from the 100,515 people listed a
Urban Displacements
WINNER of the BISA IPEG Book Prize 2021 https://www.bisa.ac.uk/members/working-groups/ipeg/articles/ipeg-2021-book-prize-winner-announced With an eye to further our understanding of everyday life in global capitalism, Urban Displacements provides the first systemic critical political economy analysis of low-income rental housing and social dislocations, combining both theoretical advancements and detailed empirical studies, centering on Berlin, D…
Relative surplus populations and the crises of contemporary capitalism
Redesigning the business of development
Global risk management (GRM) has become a central organizing framework in global development governance, yet despite its ubiquity, it has received little attention. Relatedly, few scholars have explored the connection between GRM and what has become an influential private international organization, namely: the World Economic Forum (WEF). Contributing to this Special Issue on managerialism, we explore GRM as an emerging development paradigm linke…
Governing Global Displacement in Austerity Urbanism
A surge of forcibly displaced migrants into Europe in 2015 culminated in what has been referred to as the 'refugee crisis'. As the continent's top destination country, Germany has been widely praised for its welcoming culture while heavily criticized for failures of integration. This is particularly true of Berlin - a city that has absorbed the highest number of war refugees in Europe, many of whom remain without stable accommodation. Despite its…
Placing Refugees in Authoritarian Neoliberalism
In 2015, a large influx of people forcibly displaced into Europe culminated in what has often been referred to by the media, government officials, and policymakers as the refugee crisis. This trope typically describes the tension between, on the one hand, a general willingness of many European countries to resettle refugees, and fiscal constraints allegedly beyond the control of governments, on the other. In the bounds of this apolitical and ahis…
"Perigoso aval dos BRICS à "inclusão financeira
do Sul
Evictions
Despite its reach and impact, little scholarly attention has been granted to what is becoming a silent social tsunami of our times: evictions. Tens of millions of rental households across the globe, who are too poor to own their own dwellings, are continually exposed to the violence of contemporary capitalism marked by, among other things, a dangerous mix of impoverishment, austerity, debtfarism and speculation. These factors combined have greatl…
Producing and governing inequalities under planetary urbanization
The rental housing question
Universal Access to Affordable Housing? Interrogating an Elusive Development Goal
Universal access to safe and secure housing has long been a central concern of the international development community. Since 2001, this aspiration has taken the form of global benchmarking embodied in the UN Millennium Development Goal 7–11 and its successor the Sustainable Development Goal 11. Despite these targets, hundreds of millions of households continue to be excluded from this basic human right. How might we understand the politics drivi…
Governing stigmatised space
Spatial stigmatisation – naming spaces with high concentration of poverty as a slum or ghetto – has been well covered in the critical urban geography and sociological debates. Yet, these discussions have neglected to theorise the intersection between the production of stigmatised space and the governance of its inhabitants within the context of one of Germany’s most stigmatised boroughs. By situating Berlin-Neukölln within historical processes of…
Debtfarism and the Violence of Financial Inclusion
The official development literature is replete with studies about the alleged benefits of financial inclusion in reducing poverty in the global South. Few analyses have sought to critically explore advanced forms of financial inclusion in the global North, particularly with regard to the highly lucrative and controversial payday lending industry in the USA. This article fills this void by examining the political economic landscape of payday lendi…
Subprime Housing Goes South
Mexico represents the largest market for residential mortgage‐backed securitization (RMBS) in Latin America. Despite its significance to questions of development, there has been no critical analysis on the social implications and power dimensions of RMBS with regard to low‐income housing in Mexico. This essay fills this gap by demystifying the technical and thus apolitical nature of RMBS as well as by explaining how and why state‐sponsored securi…
Debtfarism and the Student Loan Industry
This chapter aims to denaturalise a key feature upon which the student loan industry has been constructed: the continued expansion of a loan-based system of higher education. The Guaranteed Student Loan Program was established in the Higher Education Act and was later renamed the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP). The chapter demonstrates the state, through its unfolding forms of debtfarism, has facilitated the rapid rise of for-profi…
Preface to Part II Debtfarism in the United States and the Making of the Poverty Industry
Demystifying Money
This chapter argues that money can be viewed as a social relation of power only if it is contextualised within the wider dynamics of capital accumulation. It distinguishes between economism with which Marxian theory is conventionally but incorrectly charged, and a historical materialist method of deconstruction. The chapter aims at demystifying money as an economic category or thing by drawing on the tools of historical materialism. This chapter …
The Power and Paradoxes of Credit
This chapter focuses on the Marxian conceptualisation of the social power of money in such a way so as to facilitate a more complete understanding of credit and its extension to the surplus population. The social power of credit money and the continual dispossession leveraged through the poverty industry has facilitated an increase in the power of capitalists over the regulation and mediation of surplus workers. When credit money circulates as fi…
Debtfarism and the Credit Card Industry
This chapter argues that the United States (US) debtfare state has played a crucial role in both the expansion and the reproduction of the credit card industry. It describes some of the key features of the credit card industry and its relationship to the US surplus population. The chapter explores the rise of the credit card industry in the US by tracing three institutionalised regulative and rhetorical features: consumer protection, usury laws a…
Global Debtfarism and the Universalisation of Financial Inclusion
This chapter analyses the Group of Twenty (G20) Principles and to explain why the G20&s;s representation and promotion of financial inclusion is a social construct that entails the expansion and imposition of monetised social relations. It discusses the meaning of soft law with regard to transnational regulatory strategies before turning to an outline of the G20 Principles. The chapter examines the G20 Principle of Proportionality and its emphasi…
Debtfare States
This chapter presents the debtfarist feature of neoliberal states that provides vital institutional and ideological support to the growth of the poverty industry, not least by normalising and disciplining the dependency of the surplus population on credit. Marxist or materialist, state theories represent a diverse and contested terrain. The chapter explores the rhetorical and regulative manifestations of neoliberal state forms of intervention and…
Preface to Part III Debtfarism, Development and Disposession
Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry
Under the rubric of 'financial inclusion', lending to the poor -in both the global North and global South -has become a highly lucrative and rapidly expanding industry since the 1990s.A key inquiry of this book is what is 'the financial' in which the poor are asked to join.Instead of embracing the mainstream position that financial inclusion is a natural, inevitable and mutually beneficial arrangement, Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry sug…
The rental housing question
Universalising Financial Inclusion and the Securitisation of Development
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis the G20 leaders have attempted to universalise financial inclusion as a key development strategy Financial inclusion, which has long been championed by official development institutions as a sound and effective market-based solution to combat poverty, is also now promoted by the G20, not only as a way out of the ongoing global recessionary environment but also as an important scheme to stabilise the world …
Relative surplus populations and the crises of contemporary capitalism
Producing and governing inequalities under planetary urbanization
The US Debtfare State and the Credit Card Industry
Credit card debt is a ubiquitous feature of neoliberal capitalism. To explain the notable growth of credit card usage in the US, I adopt a historical materialist approach that employs two key analytical concepts—cannibalistic capitalism and the debtfare state—to capture the material, institutional and ideological dimensions of this process. Viewed within the bounds of cannibalistic capitalism, a mode of accumulation primarily based on the expansi…
Gender Equality as Smart Economics ? A critique of the 2012 World Development Report
Business now plays an increasingly prominent role in development. While the implicit links between private actors and international development institutions have been widely debated, the explicit role of financial corporations in shaping official development policy has been less well documented. We employ a feminist Marxian analysis to examine the material and discursive landscape of the 2012 World Development Report: Gender Equality and Developm…
Subprime Housing Goes South
Mexico represents the largest market for residential mortgage‐backed securitization (RMBS) in Latin America. Despite its significance to questions of development, there has been no critical analysis on the social implications and power dimensions of RMBS with regard to low‐income housing in Mexico. This essay fills this gap by demystifying the technical and thus apolitical nature of RMBS as well as by explaining how and why state‐sponsored securi…
Taming Corporations or Buttressing Market-Led Development? A Critical Assessment of the Global Compact
Voluntary-based corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies have become a fashionable response of the business community and international organizations to the growing discontent over flagrant abuses of corporate power against humanity and the environment. A case in point is the Global Compact (Compact or GC), which was forged by the United Nations in 2000. The GC represents the world's largest initiative and involves a wide range of diverse…
The New Urban Displacements? Finance-Led Capitalism, Austerity, and Rental Housing Dynamics
As this was written, 81,664 households were on the active waiting list for social housing in the City of Toronto (City of Toronto, 2021). While this number was down from the 100,515 people listed a
Politicizing Debt and Denaturalizing the 'New Normal
American empire and ‘excluded states’
In March 2002 President George W Bush announced the creation of what many insiders have heralded as a revolutionary development initiative: the Millennium Challenge Account (mca). The latter seeks to provide assistance to 79 of the world's poorest countries—many of which have been often equated with the term 'failed states'—so that they may reap the benefits of neoliberal-led globalisation. One of the most novel, and coercive, features of this de…
The Transnational Debt Architecture and Emerging Markets
The Argentine default at the end of 2001 highlighted the ongoing problems plaguing the existing transnational debt architecture, namely the tensions between creditor rights and human rights. While these debates have thrown important light on what needs to be done in terms of improving the transnational debt architecture, few studies have actually attempted to evaluate critically the manner in which transnational debt has been managed since the ou…
Redesigning the business of development
Global risk management (GRM) has become a central organizing framework in global development governance, yet despite its ubiquity, it has received little attention. Relatedly, few scholars have explored the connection between GRM and what has become an influential private international organization, namely: the World Economic Forum (WEF). Contributing to this Special Issue on managerialism, we explore GRM as an emerging development paradigm linke…
Evictions
Despite its reach and impact, little scholarly attention has been granted to what is becoming a silent social tsunami of our times: evictions. Tens of millions of rental households across the globe, who are too poor to own their own dwellings, are continually exposed to the violence of contemporary capitalism marked by, among other things, a dangerous mix of impoverishment, austerity, debtfarism and speculation. These factors combined have greatl…
The Politics of Debt and Development in the New Millennium
This article serves as an introduction to this special issue of twq on ‘Debt and Development in the New Millennium’. It highlights the gaps in our knowledge about debt that the following contributions seek to fill and why this is important, both analytically and politically. In doing so, it discusses two core objectives of the special issue: first, to examine the role(s) that debt plays in mediating the underlying tensions of neoliberal-led devel…
Recasting Neoliberal Dominance in the Global South? a Critique of the Monterrey Consensus
The UN Financing for Development conference (FfD) was held in Monterrey, Mexico, in March 2002 to gain international financial and political support for the Millennium Development Goals. Various multilevel consultations were held with “equal stakeholders” ranging from the IMF and WTO to civil society organizations in order to forge a consensus-based framework for substantially reducing world poverty. However, despite the FfD's seemingly novel att…
The promotion of 'Anglo-American' corporate governance in the South
In response to the recent spate of financial crises in East Asia (1997-98), the imf has established a core set of international standards to regulate market behaviour in the global South. These standards are embodied in 11 modules that comprise the imf 's Reports on the Observance of Standards and Codes ( rosc s). Both content and form of the rosc s warrant further consideration. That said, the main objective of this paper is to explain how and w…
Student Loans, Debtfare and the Commodification of Debt
Student loans represent the largest and fastest growing segment of unsecured consumer debt in the US; yet, the literature is silent on the power relations of the industry. Who benefits from the expansion and reproduction of student debt to low-income students, and how? To address these questions, I explore two key features of the industry: the high level of upstream repackaging of student loan asset-backed securities (SLABS) and the high default …
The Marketisation of Social Justice
Governing Global Displacement in Austerity Urbanism
A surge of forcibly displaced migrants into Europe in 2015 culminated in what has been referred to as the 'refugee crisis'. As the continent's top destination country, Germany has been widely praised for its welcoming culture while heavily criticized for failures of integration. This is particularly true of Berlin - a city that has absorbed the highest number of war refugees in Europe, many of whom remain without stable accommodation. Despite its…
Universal Access to Affordable Housing? Interrogating an Elusive Development Goal
Universal access to safe and secure housing has long been a central concern of the international development community. Since 2001, this aspiration has taken the form of global benchmarking embodied in the UN Millennium Development Goal 7–11 and its successor the Sustainable Development Goal 11. Despite these targets, hundreds of millions of households continue to be excluded from this basic human right. How might we understand the politics drivi…
The Mexican Debtfare State
In the context of the 2008 financial crisis and how it has impacted on countries across the globe, it is striking how few scholars have critically analysed why and how past crises have created opportunities for states and capitalists to exploit the so-called ‘bottom of the pyramid consumers’ in the developing world. By situating the analysis within the wider neoliberalization processes, this article seeks to denaturalize the extension of consumer…
A Critique of the Diagnosis and Cure for 'Enronitis
The Enron collapse in 2001 represented a high-water mark in the recent round of corporate scandals in the United States. In response to this crisis, the US government introduced the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Act or SOX) in July 2002. Until now, the debates have remained silent on the political and social dimensions of the Act. By situating the discourse of corporate governance within the context of capitalist society, I offer an alternative explanation…
On the contradictions of the New International Financial Architecture
The New International Financial Architecture (NIFA) was created by powerful G-7 countries in response to the growing volatility in the developing world. Some key components of the NIFA include: the G-20, the Financial Stability Forum and the Reports on Observance of Standards and Codes, the latter involving areas such as corporate governance. The aim of this article is to address some important yet largely neglected questions. Why the new buildin…
State, Crisis, and Capital Accumulation in Mexico
Susanne Soederberg State, Crisis, and Capital Accumulation in Mexico Introduction Over the past two decades, ‘globalisation’ has become coterminous with the emergence of neoliberalism in bourgeois political science. In this frame, the pow- erful forces of globalisation have essentially tipped the balance-of-power between states and markets in favour of the latter. 1 While this conceptualisation is clearly problematic in the context of industriali…
Grafting stability onto globalisation? Deconstructing the IMF's recent bid for transparency
This article sets out to critically explore an important dimension of the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) recent bid for economic stability, namely the transparency requirements vis-à-vis emerging market economies. The article argues that this requirement symbolises an attempt to bolster ideological obligation to neoliberalism while progressing towards a certain form of legal obligation between states. This claim is developed by first identif…
The Emperor’s New Suit
Many analysts have studied the New International Financial Architecture (NIFA) as a reaction to the growing financial instability in emerging market economies. The NIFA, like its predecessor the Washington Consensus, is an emerging conjuncture of institutions, practices, and discourses that aim to provide a managing infrastructure for the movement of global capital flows. Until now, the debate surrounding the NIFA has, for the most part, remained…
A historical materialist account of the Chilean capital control
After the tumultuous 1990s, capital controls are making a comeback. Although about 14 emerging markets have implemented capital constraints, the Chilean variant (1991-8) has drawn the most attention. Many scholars and policymakers, especially of the Keynesian variant, are quick to support country-level capital controls as a useful device to quell further socio-economic devastation largely brought about by the speculative activities institutional …
On the contradictions of the New International Financial Architecture
The New International Financial Architecture (NIFA) was created by powerful G-7 countries in response to the growing volatility in the developing world. Some key components of the NIFA include: the G-20, the Financial Stability Forum and the Reports on Observance of Standards and Codes, the latter involving areas such as corporate governance. The aim of this article is to address some important yet largely neglected questions. Why the new buildin…
The promotion of 'Anglo-American' corporate governance in the South
In response to the recent spate of financial crises in East Asia (1997-98), the imf has established a core set of international standards to regulate market behaviour in the global South. These standards are embodied in 11 modules that comprise the imf 's Reports on the Observance of Standards and Codes ( rosc s). Both content and form of the rosc s warrant further consideration. That said, the main objective of this paper is to explain how and w…
The International Dimensions of the Argentine Default
Aside from representing the biggest default of its kind in history, the Argentine default in December 2001 triggered several important, albeit largely neglected, debates on how best to manage future sovereign bankruptcies. These debates centre on the key policy to emerge from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the so-called Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism (SDRM). Despite the significance of the debates around this mechanism, particular…
Neoliberalism in crisis, accumulation, and Rosa Luxemburg's legacy
American empire and ‘excluded states’
In March 2002 President George W Bush announced the creation of what many insiders have heralded as a revolutionary development initiative: the Millennium Challenge Account (mca). The latter seeks to provide assistance to 79 of the world's poorest countries—many of which have been often equated with the term 'failed states'—so that they may reap the benefits of neoliberal-led globalisation. One of the most novel, and coercive, features of this de…
Unravelling Washington's Judgement Calls
While the option of constraining cross‐border financial flows to emerging markets (capital controls) has taken a backseat in the official policy debates about strengthening the global financial architecture, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has ceded that certain temporary measures to limit the inflow of hot money may be beneficial in achieving some breathing space for governments. In this sense, capital controls are only to be used as a mea…
Internalizing Globalization
This book explores how a wide range of countries attempt to cope with the challenges of globalization. While the internalization of globalization proceeds in significantly different ways, there is a b
Internalizing Globalization
Recasting Neoliberal Dominance in the Global South? a Critique of the Monterrey Consensus
The UN Financing for Development conference (FfD) was held in Monterrey, Mexico, in March 2002 to gain international financial and political support for the Millennium Development Goals. Various multilevel consultations were held with “equal stakeholders” ranging from the IMF and WTO to civil society organizations in order to forge a consensus-based framework for substantially reducing world poverty. However, despite the FfD's seemingly novel att…
The Transnational Debt Architecture and Emerging Markets
The Argentine default at the end of 2001 highlighted the ongoing problems plaguing the existing transnational debt architecture, namely the tensions between creditor rights and human rights. While these debates have thrown important light on what needs to be done in terms of improving the transnational debt architecture, few studies have actually attempted to evaluate critically the manner in which transnational debt has been managed since the ou…
Taming Corporations or Buttressing Market-Led Development? A Critical Assessment of the Global Compact
Voluntary-based corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies have become a fashionable response of the business community and international organizations to the growing discontent over flagrant abuses of corporate power against humanity and the environment. A case in point is the Global Compact (Compact or GC), which was forged by the United Nations in 2000. The GC represents the world's largest initiative and involves a wide range of diverse…
The ‘New Conditionality’ of Socially Responsible Investing Strategies
Socially responsible investment and the development agenda
One of the most striking trends in global development finance has been the growing role of Western-based, institutional investors. Pension funds in particular have played a leading part in supplying capital to publicly traded corporations in emerging market economies. An important feature of this type of financing has been the trend to make investment conditional not only on sound economic fundamentals, but also on a series of non-financial (or s…
A Critique of the Diagnosis and Cure for 'Enronitis
The Enron collapse in 2001 represented a high-water mark in the recent round of corporate scandals in the United States. In response to this crisis, the US government introduced the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Act or SOX) in July 2002. Until now, the debates have remained silent on the political and social dimensions of the Act. By situating the discourse of corporate governance within the context of capitalist society, I offer an alternative explanation…
Corporate Power and Ownership in Contemporary Capitalism
Part 1: Introduction 1. Repoliticizing Corporate Power and Ownership in Contemporary Capitalism Part 2: Power and Paradoxes of Corporate Power and Mass Investment 2. Repoliticizing the Ownership Society and the Marketization of Security 3. Repoliticizing Corporate Governance: Scandals, Struggles, and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act 4. Deconstructing the Myth of Corporate Democracy: The Case of the Equal Access Proposal Part 3: The Changing Forms of and Li…
Corporate Power and Ownership in Contemporary Capitalism
Despite the influence corporations wield over all aspects of everyday life, there has been a remarkable absence of critical inquiry into the social constitution of this power. In analysing the complex relationship between corporate power and the widespread phenomenon of share ownership, this book seeks to map and define the nature of resistance and domination in contemporary capitalism. Drawing on a Marxist-informed framework, this book reconnect…
The Marketisation of Social Justice
Cannibalistic Capitalism and the Current Crisis
The Mexican competition state and the paradoxes of managed neo-liberal development
This article explores the extent to which the ‘competition state’ model has taken hold in Mexico. Applying four main characteristics of Cerny's competition state, I consider the policy directives of the Mexican state over the past several decades, from the rise of market-led reforms in the wake of the 1982 balance of payments crisis to the end of Vicente Fox's presidential term in 2006. Two observations can be drawn from this survey. First, aside…
The Politics of Representation and Financial Fetishism
One year after the 2008 crash, policy makers and international lending institutions declared the crisis over and assured the world that recovery was underway. The efforts of the Group of Twenty (G20) have been widely credited with securing economic recovery. In this article I examine the politics of representation of the crisis by the G20. I argue that the G20 summits have served to naturalise and depoliticise the crisis, thereby legitimating a n…
The Mexican Debtfare State
In the context of the 2008 financial crisis and how it has impacted on countries across the globe, it is striking how few scholars have critically analysed why and how past crises have created opportunities for states and capitalists to exploit the so-called ‘bottom of the pyramid consumers’ in the developing world. By situating the analysis within the wider neoliberalization processes, this article seeks to denaturalize the extension of consumer…
Economics (41 works) · Political science (40 works) · Law (32 works) · Politics (31 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (29 works) · Political economy (28 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Law (24 works) · Finance (16 works) · Capitalism (15 works)