Political Economy Seminar with Ilias Alami "Foreign investment screening mechanisms and emergent geographies of (post)globalization"
| Dates: | 6 June 2023 |
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| Times: | 15:00 - 16:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Ilias Alami |
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Abstract. Technologically advanced states and large emerging economies increasingly use foreign investment screening mechanisms (FISM) to block inward foreign investment targeting sectors considered critical. Is the proliferation of FISM auguring an era of deglobalization and a re-assertion of national-state sovereignty over globalized economic ties? Is this signaling the end of neoliberal orthodoxies of liberalized investment regimes and norms of free capital mobility? To answer these questions, the article draws upon geographic political economy and legal geographies. It argues that the multiplication of FISM must be understood as a response to a strategic context defined by three macrogeographic trends: (1) contemporary industrial restructuring and the salience of intellectual monopolies; (2) a historic episode of centralization of capital driven by strategic mergers and acquisitions; (3) evolving landscapes of state capitalism under conditions of intensified geoeconomic competition. Although FISM reproduce the fiction of state power as expressing the will and interest of the sovereign nation to defend itself against foreign interference, market distortion, and technology theft, they essentially consist in legally enshrining state authority to support national champions and other domestic firms, and making sure they engage favorably with competitive dynamics of centralization of capital, notably by conserving their monopoly over key intangible assets and strategic resources. As such, they are best seen as tools that explicitly mobilize state power and coercion to aggressively (re)negotiate globalization.
Speaker
Ilias Alami
Role: Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellow
Organisation: Uppsala University
Biography: Ilias is a political economist and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellow based at Uppsala University. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of global political economy, economic geography, the political economy of money and finance, state capitalism, development and international capital flows, and the articulations between race/class/coloniality. He is the author of Money Power and Financial Capital in Emerging Markets, which was shortlisted for the British International Studies Association’s best book in International Political Economy 2020 award.
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HANSON ROOM
Humanities Bridgeford Street
Manchester
