Japhy Wilson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3673923 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Japhy Wilson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Japhy |
| FAMILY NAME | Wilson |
| SIGNATURE | WILSON J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manchester |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2053-8022 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 210 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Cannibal Salvage Expenditure: The Subaltern Style of the Urban Peruvian Amazon
This paper explores the political ecology of subaltern existence at the urban cutting edge of our apocalyptic present, in the case of Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon. Through an ethnographically surrealist montage of multiple elements across the themes of accumulation, architecture, and art, cannibal salvage expenditure emerges as a subversive urban style. This style is rooted in the material dynamics of cannibal capitalism, which thrives on the m…
Disintegration highway: Towards a psychogeography of planetary urban breakdown
This paper develops a psychogeographical approach to our apocalyptic urban present, based on a journey down a highway on the outskirts of the city of Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon. The intensity of psychogeographical method brings out elements of the senselessness and violence of planetary urbanization imperceptible at more abstract levels of analysis, while the subjective impact of this spatial unravelling demands a surrealist psychogeography l…
Roadkill: The extended urbanization of cannibal capitalism in the Peruvian Amazon
Mortal Feast: Cannibal Capitalism Meets Covid-19 in the Urban Peruvian Amazon
This article presents a surrealist urban political ecology of cannibal capitalism in the zoonotic city. It does so through an account of the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, which was the worst-hit city in the world during this initial wave. Iquitos embodies multiple dimensions of zoonotic urbanization identified in the literature on this theme, including integration into planetary urban networks; expansi…
Space out of joint: Absurdist geographies of the Anthropocene
This paper seeks to demonstrate the critical utility of the concept of the absurd in the exploration of the combined and uneven apocalypse known as the Anthropocene. Drawing inspiration from absurdist literature, and based on extensive field research, it takes the form of a psychogeographical journey down a non-existent highway in the Peruvian Amazon. The route of this long-promised megaproject is inhabited by people adrift in the midst of meanin…
Apocalypse and utopia in the salvagepunk metropolis
This paper explores the nature of utopia in the context of our apocalyptic present. Drawing on Evan Calder Williams’ concepts of salvagepunk, it interprets the city of Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon as a (post)apocalyptic metropolis. It excavates the origins of Iquitos in genocidal violence and extractivist destruction, deconstructs the modernising megaprojects designed to rescue the city from its isolated status, and explores the subaltern forms…
The Rotting City: Surrealist Arts of Noticing the Urban Anthropocene
This article develops a surrealist approach to researching and writing about the urban Anthropocene, as a critical contribution to existing literatures on “arts of noticing” and “staying with the trouble.” Drawing on psychogeographical explorations of the city of Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon and distancing itself from conventional modes of academic writing, the article presents a montage of surrealist images of this (post)apocalyptic metropolis…
Apocalyptic urban surrealism in the city at the end of the world
This paper responds to calls for radical experimentation in urban theory in the context of the material and psychological upheavals of Anthropocene. It does so through the development of an apocalyptic urban surrealism, based on a set of principles drawn from surrealist attempts to simulate the experience of reality characteristic of psychotic breakdown. These principles are put to work in the psychogeographical exploration of an urban resettleme…
Extractivism and Universality: Inside an Uprising in the Amazon
The Insurgent Universal: Between Eurocentric Universalism and the Pluriverse
"We Are All Indigenous!" Insurgent Universality on the Extractive Frontier
This paper tells the inside story of a spontaneous uprising in the Ecuadorian Amazon in 2017, in which mestizo, Afro-descendant and Indigenous workers and communities confronted the combined forces of a multinational oil company and a militarized state. The paper documents a rapidly evolving battle that achieved a remarkable victory, and bears witness to the fleeting emergence of an insurgent form of political universality. It suggests that the d…
Three Questions to Consider before Signing Up for Jeffrey Sachs’s Global Education Plan
Potemkin Revolution: Utopian Jungle Cities of 21 st Century Socialism
This paper explores the entanglement of ideology and materiality in the production of the spaces of 21 st century socialism. “Millennium Cities” are currently being constructed for indigenous communities throughout the Ecuadorian Amazon, with revenues derived from petroleum extracted within their territories. As iconic spatial symbols of the “Citizens’ Revolution”, the Millennium Cities would appear to embody “the original accumulation of 21 st c…
Sabotage of Development: Subverting the Censorship of Renegade Research
In 2014, a prominent radical publishing house released a book about the influential development economist Jeffrey Sachs. The published version was one chapter shorter than the final proofs. This chapter had been removed after the publisher sought legal advice on content pertaining to fieldwork conducted in Uganda on Sachs's Millennium Villages Project (MVP), an international development programme financed by some of the wealthiest individuals and…
The nature of post-neoliberalism: Building bio-socialism in the Ecuadorian Amazon
Fantastical materializations: Interoceanic infrastructures in the Ecuadorian Amazon
This paper explores the entanglement of dreams and reality in the production of economic infrastructures. It focuses on the Manta-Manaus multimodal transport corridor, which is currently being constructed between the Pacific coast of Ecuador and the Atlantic coast of Brazil, with the aim of integrating the Amazon into global production networks. Drawing on extensive field research conducted in Ecuador, we develop a fantastical materialism, as a t…
Paradoxical Utopia: The Millennium Villages Project in Theory and Practice
The Millennium Villages Project (MVP) aims to achieve the Millennium Development Goals in villages across sub-Saharan Africa, through an integrated set of interventions designed to catalyse the transformation of 'sub-subsistence farmers' into 'small-scale entrepreneurs'. I conceptualize the MVP as a paradoxical utopia, which is attempting to socially produce the supposedly natural order of a market society, through the staging of a fantasy of har…
Black hole capitalism: Utopian dimensions of planetary urbanization
The planetary urbanization of capital entails the collapse of all traditional morphological distinctions into a seething morass of implosion–explosion that recalls the creative–destructive fury of a black hole. As an invisible presence–absence only identifiable by its spatiotemporal effects, the black hole resembles both the Lacanian Real and Marx’s value-theoretical understanding of capital. Utopian fantasies of postmodern hyperspace and rationa…
The Village that Turned to Gold: A Parable of Philanthrocapitalism
International development is increasingly financed and implemented by a nexus of billionaires and corporate foundations known as 'philanthrocapitalism'. This article develops a critique of this paradigm, focusing on the case of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), and its implementation in Bonsaaso, Ghana. The author interprets the MVP as a staging of the neoliberal fantasy of origins - an imagined history of the spontaneous emergence of capita…
Concrete Jungle: The Planetary Urbanization of the Ecuadorian Amazon
This paper explores the possibilities and limitations of a post-neoliberal political project under conditions of planetary urbanization. We conceptualize planetary urbanization in terms of a tendency towards the real subsumption of space to capital on a global scale, through which capital is empowered as an abstract form of domination. We then relate this tendency to the ideology of ‘systemic competitiveness’ that has dominated the post-neolibera…
A Strange Kind of Science: Making Sense of the Millennium Villages Project
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are often critiqued as a strategy of social engineering. This analysis would seem to be supported by the case of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), the world's leading programme for the achievement of the MDGs. At the level of its discursive articulation, the MVP appears as a scientific ‘proof of concept’ for the comprehensive engineering of neoliberal social orders. But its evaluation methodology has b…
Seeds of Dystopia: Post-Politics and the Return of the Political
There Is No Alternative
This is a theoretical and practical interrogation of how the post-political has come to dominate governance. We are told that we live in a 'post-ideological' era - that we have moved 'beyond Left and Right' and that we are 'all in it together'. Democracy has been reduced to the consensual administration of economic necessity. How can we make sense of this form of depoliticisation? How does it manifest itself in different spheres of social life? A…
The Post-Political and Its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticization, Spectres of Radical Politics
"Urges us to confront the closure of our political horizons and re-imagine the possibility of emancipatory change."--Publishers website
Jeffrey Sachs: The Strange Case of Dr. Shock and Mr. Aid
Jeffrey Sachs is a man with many faces. A celebrated economist and special advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, he is also no stranger to the world of celebrity, accompanying Bono, Madonna and Angelina Jolie on high-profile trips to Africa. Once notorious as the progenitor of a brutal form of free market engineering called 'shock therapy', Sachs now positions himself as a voice of progressivism, condemning the '1 per cent' and promoting h…
The Devastating Conquest of the Lived by the Conceived”: The Concept of Abstract Space in the Work of Henri Lefebvre
This article presents a reinterpretation of abstract space, the key concept of Henri Lefebvre’s magnum opus, The Production of Space. I argue that the full significance of the concept is only revealed through an engagement with Lefebvre’s broader work, which emphasizes his lifelong concern with abstraction, and which draws out the relationships between the concept and Lefebvre’s scattered writings on alienation, productivism, the state, spatial p…
Fantasy machine: Philanthrocapitalism as an Ideological Formation
Philanthrocapitalism is promoted as a form of development funding that infuses philanthropy with the dynamism and innovation of capitalist enterprise. Millennium Promise is a philanthrocapitalist organisation based in New York, which finances the Millennium Villages Project (mvp) across 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. At the level of its discursive articulation Millennium Promise appears as a Foucauldian ‘anti-politics machine’: a mechanism o…
The nature of post-neoliberalism: Building bio-socialism in the Ecuadorian Amazon
Model villages in the neoliberal era: The Millennium Development Goals and the colonization of everyday life
What explains the recent re-emergence of 'model village'-style social experiments, and what does this tell us about the contradictions of neoliberal development? This paper focuses on two experiments of this kind - the Millennium Villages Project in sub-Saharan Africa and the Rural Cities Project in southern Mexico - both of which aim to achieve the Millennium Development Goals through an integrated set of interventions at the village level. Draw…
Fantastical materializations: Interoceanic infrastructures in the Ecuadorian Amazon
This paper explores the entanglement of dreams and reality in the production of economic infrastructures. It focuses on the Manta-Manaus multimodal transport corridor, which is currently being constructed between the Pacific coast of Ecuador and the Atlantic coast of Brazil, with the aim of integrating the Amazon into global production networks. Drawing on extensive field research conducted in Ecuador, we develop a fantastical materialism, as a t…
Concrete Jungle: The Planetary Urbanization of the Ecuadorian Amazon
This paper explores the possibilities and limitations of a post-neoliberal political project under conditions of planetary urbanization. We conceptualize planetary urbanization in terms of a tendency towards the real subsumption of space to capital on a global scale, through which capital is empowered as an abstract form of domination. We then relate this tendency to the ideology of ‘systemic competitiveness’ that has dominated the post-neolibera…
Notes on the Rural City: Henri Lefebvre and the Transformation of Everyday Life in Chiapas, Mexico
In the work of Henri Lefebvre the new town is frequently referred to as a ‘social text’ in which the nature of capitalist modernity can be deciphered with unusual clarity. This paper locates Lefebvre's seminal “Notes on the new town” within his broader political and philosophical project and employs it as the theoretical basis for a critique of the Rural Cities, a series of new towns currently being constructed in Chiapas, Mexico, in which the re…
Black hole capitalism: Utopian dimensions of planetary urbanization
The planetary urbanization of capital entails the collapse of all traditional morphological distinctions into a seething morass of implosion–explosion that recalls the creative–destructive fury of a black hole. As an invisible presence–absence only identifiable by its spatiotemporal effects, the black hole resembles both the Lacanian Real and Marx’s value-theoretical understanding of capital. Utopian fantasies of postmodern hyperspace and rationa…
The Shock of the Real: The Neoliberal Neurosis in the Life and Times of Jeffrey Sachs
This paper draws on Slavoj Žižek's critique of ideology in seeking to account for the persistence and transformability of the neoliberal project. Against understandings of neoliberalism as a utopian representation projected onto an external reality, I argue that neoliberal ideology operates as a social fantasy, which structures reality itself against the traumatic Real of Capital. The evolution of the neoliberal project should be understood, not …
The Violence of Abstract Space: Contested Regional Developments in Southern Mexico
The article proposes a reinterpretation of Henri Lefebvre's concept of abstract space, emphasizing the significance of the 'violence of abstraction' within the concept itself, and within the concrete process of the capitalist production of space. This interpretation of abstract space is developed through the case of the Plan Puebla Panama (PPP) as an 'actually existing' abstract space. Launched in 2001 and abandoned in 2008, the PPP was a regiona…
Colonising Space: The New Economic Geography in Theory and Practice
The New Economic Geography (NEG) incorporates social space into neoclassical models, and claims to provide an explanation of uneven development within the parameters of economic orthodoxy. It is among the most influential recent innovations in mainstream economics – Paul Krugman was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics for his contributions to the NEG, and it provided the theoretical inspiration for the World Bank's 2009 World Development Re…
Space out of joint: Absurdist geographies of the Anthropocene
This paper seeks to demonstrate the critical utility of the concept of the absurd in the exploration of the combined and uneven apocalypse known as the Anthropocene. Drawing inspiration from absurdist literature, and based on extensive field research, it takes the form of a psychogeographical journey down a non-existent highway in the Peruvian Amazon. The route of this long-promised megaproject is inhabited by people adrift in the midst of meanin…
Potemkin Revolution: Utopian Jungle Cities of 21 st Century Socialism
This paper explores the entanglement of ideology and materiality in the production of the spaces of 21 st century socialism. “Millennium Cities” are currently being constructed for indigenous communities throughout the Ecuadorian Amazon, with revenues derived from petroleum extracted within their territories. As iconic spatial symbols of the “Citizens’ Revolution”, the Millennium Cities would appear to embody “the original accumulation of 21 st c…
"We Are All Indigenous!" Insurgent Universality on the Extractive Frontier
This paper tells the inside story of a spontaneous uprising in the Ecuadorian Amazon in 2017, in which mestizo, Afro-descendant and Indigenous workers and communities confronted the combined forces of a multinational oil company and a militarized state. The paper documents a rapidly evolving battle that achieved a remarkable victory, and bears witness to the fleeting emergence of an insurgent form of political universality. It suggests that the d…
The Village that Turned to Gold: A Parable of Philanthrocapitalism
International development is increasingly financed and implemented by a nexus of billionaires and corporate foundations known as 'philanthrocapitalism'. This article develops a critique of this paradigm, focusing on the case of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), and its implementation in Bonsaaso, Ghana. The author interprets the MVP as a staging of the neoliberal fantasy of origins - an imagined history of the spontaneous emergence of capita…
Apocalyptic urban surrealism in the city at the end of the world
This paper responds to calls for radical experimentation in urban theory in the context of the material and psychological upheavals of Anthropocene. It does so through the development of an apocalyptic urban surrealism, based on a set of principles drawn from surrealist attempts to simulate the experience of reality characteristic of psychotic breakdown. These principles are put to work in the psychogeographical exploration of an urban resettleme…
A Strange Kind of Science: Making Sense of the Millennium Villages Project
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are often critiqued as a strategy of social engineering. This analysis would seem to be supported by the case of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), the world's leading programme for the achievement of the MDGs. At the level of its discursive articulation, the MVP appears as a scientific ‘proof of concept’ for the comprehensive engineering of neoliberal social orders. But its evaluation methodology has b…
The Rotting City: Surrealist Arts of Noticing the Urban Anthropocene
This article develops a surrealist approach to researching and writing about the urban Anthropocene, as a critical contribution to existing literatures on “arts of noticing” and “staying with the trouble.” Drawing on psychogeographical explorations of the city of Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon and distancing itself from conventional modes of academic writing, the article presents a montage of surrealist images of this (post)apocalyptic metropolis…
The Urbanization of the Countryside: Depoliticization and the Production of Space in Chiapas
The Plan Puebla Panamá (PPP) is a development program for the modernization of southern Mexico and Central America through the construction of transnational urban networks. The implementation of the PPP in Chiapas provides a significant example of the relationship between depoliticization and planned urbanization in the context of contemporary neoliberal governance. The production of space embodied in the PPP advances the consolidation of capital…
Roadkill: The extended urbanization of cannibal capitalism in the Peruvian Amazon
The Insurgent Universal: Between Eurocentric Universalism and the Pluriverse
Sabotage of Development: Subverting the Censorship of Renegade Research
In 2014, a prominent radical publishing house released a book about the influential development economist Jeffrey Sachs. The published version was one chapter shorter than the final proofs. This chapter had been removed after the publisher sought legal advice on content pertaining to fieldwork conducted in Uganda on Sachs's Millennium Villages Project (MVP), an international development programme financed by some of the wealthiest individuals and…
Mortal Feast: Cannibal Capitalism Meets Covid-19 in the Urban Peruvian Amazon
This article presents a surrealist urban political ecology of cannibal capitalism in the zoonotic city. It does so through an account of the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, which was the worst-hit city in the world during this initial wave. Iquitos embodies multiple dimensions of zoonotic urbanization identified in the literature on this theme, including integration into planetary urban networks; expansi…
Apocalypse and utopia in the salvagepunk metropolis
This paper explores the nature of utopia in the context of our apocalyptic present. Drawing on Evan Calder Williams’ concepts of salvagepunk, it interprets the city of Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon as a (post)apocalyptic metropolis. It excavates the origins of Iquitos in genocidal violence and extractivist destruction, deconstructs the modernising megaprojects designed to rescue the city from its isolated status, and explores the subaltern forms…
Colonising Space: The New Economic Geography in Theory and Practice
The New Economic Geography (NEG) incorporates social space into neoclassical models, and claims to provide an explanation of uneven development within the parameters of economic orthodoxy. It is among the most influential recent innovations in mainstream economics – Paul Krugman was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics for his contributions to the NEG, and it provided the theoretical inspiration for the World Bank's 2009 World Development Re…
Notes on the Rural City: Henri Lefebvre and the Transformation of Everyday Life in Chiapas, Mexico
In the work of Henri Lefebvre the new town is frequently referred to as a ‘social text’ in which the nature of capitalist modernity can be deciphered with unusual clarity. This paper locates Lefebvre's seminal “Notes on the new town” within his broader political and philosophical project and employs it as the theoretical basis for a critique of the Rural Cities, a series of new towns currently being constructed in Chiapas, Mexico, in which the re…
The Devastating Conquest of the Lived by the Conceived”: The Concept of Abstract Space in the Work of Henri Lefebvre
This article presents a reinterpretation of abstract space, the key concept of Henri Lefebvre’s magnum opus, The Production of Space. I argue that the full significance of the concept is only revealed through an engagement with Lefebvre’s broader work, which emphasizes his lifelong concern with abstraction, and which draws out the relationships between the concept and Lefebvre’s scattered writings on alienation, productivism, the state, spatial p…
The Urbanization of the Countryside: Depoliticization and the Production of Space in Chiapas
The Plan Puebla Panamá (PPP) is a development program for the modernization of southern Mexico and Central America through the construction of transnational urban networks. The implementation of the PPP in Chiapas provides a significant example of the relationship between depoliticization and planned urbanization in the context of contemporary neoliberal governance. The production of space embodied in the PPP advances the consolidation of capital…
Seeds of Dystopia: Post-Politics and the Return of the Political
There Is No Alternative
This is a theoretical and practical interrogation of how the post-political has come to dominate governance. We are told that we live in a 'post-ideological' era - that we have moved 'beyond Left and Right' and that we are 'all in it together'. Democracy has been reduced to the consensual administration of economic necessity. How can we make sense of this form of depoliticisation? How does it manifest itself in different spheres of social life? A…
The Post-Political and Its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticization, Spectres of Radical Politics
"Urges us to confront the closure of our political horizons and re-imagine the possibility of emancipatory change."--Publishers website
Jeffrey Sachs: The Strange Case of Dr. Shock and Mr. Aid
Jeffrey Sachs is a man with many faces. A celebrated economist and special advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, he is also no stranger to the world of celebrity, accompanying Bono, Madonna and Angelina Jolie on high-profile trips to Africa. Once notorious as the progenitor of a brutal form of free market engineering called 'shock therapy', Sachs now positions himself as a voice of progressivism, condemning the '1 per cent' and promoting h…
The Post-Political and Its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticisation, Spectres of Radical Politics
An exploration of the post-politics of global capitalism in theory and practice GBS_insertPreviewButtonPopup(['ISBN:9780748682973','ISBN:9780748682980','ISBN:9780748683000']); Our age is celebrated as the triumph of liberal democracy. Old ideological battles have been decisively resolved in favour of freedom and the market. We are told that we have moved ‘beyond left and right’; that we are ‘all in this together’. Any remaining differences are to…
The Shock of the Real: The Neoliberal Neurosis in the Life and Times of Jeffrey Sachs
This paper draws on Slavoj Žižek's critique of ideology in seeking to account for the persistence and transformability of the neoliberal project. Against understandings of neoliberalism as a utopian representation projected onto an external reality, I argue that neoliberal ideology operates as a social fantasy, which structures reality itself against the traumatic Real of Capital. The evolution of the neoliberal project should be understood, not …
Fantasy machine: Philanthrocapitalism as an Ideological Formation
Philanthrocapitalism is promoted as a form of development funding that infuses philanthropy with the dynamism and innovation of capitalist enterprise. Millennium Promise is a philanthrocapitalist organisation based in New York, which finances the Millennium Villages Project (mvp) across 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. At the level of its discursive articulation Millennium Promise appears as a Foucauldian ‘anti-politics machine’: a mechanism o…
The Violence of Abstract Space: Contested Regional Developments in Southern Mexico
The article proposes a reinterpretation of Henri Lefebvre's concept of abstract space, emphasizing the significance of the 'violence of abstraction' within the concept itself, and within the concrete process of the capitalist production of space. This interpretation of abstract space is developed through the case of the Plan Puebla Panama (PPP) as an 'actually existing' abstract space. Launched in 2001 and abandoned in 2008, the PPP was a regiona…
Model villages in the neoliberal era: The Millennium Development Goals and the colonization of everyday life
What explains the recent re-emergence of 'model village'-style social experiments, and what does this tell us about the contradictions of neoliberal development? This paper focuses on two experiments of this kind - the Millennium Villages Project in sub-Saharan Africa and the Rural Cities Project in southern Mexico - both of which aim to achieve the Millennium Development Goals through an integrated set of interventions at the village level. Draw…
Concrete Jungle: The Planetary Urbanization of the Ecuadorian Amazon
This paper explores the possibilities and limitations of a post-neoliberal political project under conditions of planetary urbanization. We conceptualize planetary urbanization in terms of a tendency towards the real subsumption of space to capital on a global scale, through which capital is empowered as an abstract form of domination. We then relate this tendency to the ideology of ‘systemic competitiveness’ that has dominated the post-neolibera…
A Strange Kind of Science: Making Sense of the Millennium Villages Project
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are often critiqued as a strategy of social engineering. This analysis would seem to be supported by the case of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), the world's leading programme for the achievement of the MDGs. At the level of its discursive articulation, the MVP appears as a scientific ‘proof of concept’ for the comprehensive engineering of neoliberal social orders. But its evaluation methodology has b…
Black hole capitalism: Utopian dimensions of planetary urbanization
The planetary urbanization of capital entails the collapse of all traditional morphological distinctions into a seething morass of implosion–explosion that recalls the creative–destructive fury of a black hole. As an invisible presence–absence only identifiable by its spatiotemporal effects, the black hole resembles both the Lacanian Real and Marx’s value-theoretical understanding of capital. Utopian fantasies of postmodern hyperspace and rationa…
The Village that Turned to Gold: A Parable of Philanthrocapitalism
International development is increasingly financed and implemented by a nexus of billionaires and corporate foundations known as 'philanthrocapitalism'. This article develops a critique of this paradigm, focusing on the case of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), and its implementation in Bonsaaso, Ghana. The author interprets the MVP as a staging of the neoliberal fantasy of origins - an imagined history of the spontaneous emergence of capita…
The nature of post-neoliberalism: Building bio-socialism in the Ecuadorian Amazon
Fantastical materializations: Interoceanic infrastructures in the Ecuadorian Amazon
This paper explores the entanglement of dreams and reality in the production of economic infrastructures. It focuses on the Manta-Manaus multimodal transport corridor, which is currently being constructed between the Pacific coast of Ecuador and the Atlantic coast of Brazil, with the aim of integrating the Amazon into global production networks. Drawing on extensive field research conducted in Ecuador, we develop a fantastical materialism, as a t…
Paradoxical Utopia: The Millennium Villages Project in Theory and Practice
The Millennium Villages Project (MVP) aims to achieve the Millennium Development Goals in villages across sub-Saharan Africa, through an integrated set of interventions designed to catalyse the transformation of 'sub-subsistence farmers' into 'small-scale entrepreneurs'. I conceptualize the MVP as a paradoxical utopia, which is attempting to socially produce the supposedly natural order of a market society, through the staging of a fantasy of har…
Potemkin Revolution: Utopian Jungle Cities of 21 st Century Socialism
This paper explores the entanglement of ideology and materiality in the production of the spaces of 21 st century socialism. “Millennium Cities” are currently being constructed for indigenous communities throughout the Ecuadorian Amazon, with revenues derived from petroleum extracted within their territories. As iconic spatial symbols of the “Citizens’ Revolution”, the Millennium Cities would appear to embody “the original accumulation of 21 st c…
Sabotage of Development: Subverting the Censorship of Renegade Research
In 2014, a prominent radical publishing house released a book about the influential development economist Jeffrey Sachs. The published version was one chapter shorter than the final proofs. This chapter had been removed after the publisher sought legal advice on content pertaining to fieldwork conducted in Uganda on Sachs's Millennium Villages Project (MVP), an international development programme financed by some of the wealthiest individuals and…
Three Questions to Consider before Signing Up for Jeffrey Sachs’s Global Education Plan
The Insurgent Universal: Between Eurocentric Universalism and the Pluriverse
"We Are All Indigenous!" Insurgent Universality on the Extractive Frontier
This paper tells the inside story of a spontaneous uprising in the Ecuadorian Amazon in 2017, in which mestizo, Afro-descendant and Indigenous workers and communities confronted the combined forces of a multinational oil company and a militarized state. The paper documents a rapidly evolving battle that achieved a remarkable victory, and bears witness to the fleeting emergence of an insurgent form of political universality. It suggests that the d…
Sociology (26 works) · Political science (25 works) · Law (21 works) · Politics (19 works) · Law (13 works) · History (12 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Aesthetics (9 works) · Economics (9 works) · Epistemology (9 works)