The Limits to Globalization - Disruptive Geographies of Capitalist Development

26/06/2017

Lecture / discussion

Eric Sheppard, Professor for Economic Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) will present the central theses of his recent book “The Limits to Globalization” published by Oxford University Press.

Speaker

Eric Sheppard, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

Organizers

Institute for Economic Geography and GIScience and
Department of Socioeconomics, WU

Location

WU, 1020 Vienna, Welthandelsplatz 1, Teaching Center, TC.1.01.OeNB

Date

Monday, June 26, 6:00 pm

Contact

wgi-team@wu.ac.at

Abstract

The uneven geographies that are bound up with capitalist globalization undermine its capacity to bring prosperity to all. In a geographically differentiated world, the ‘free’ markets propounded by neoliberal visions of capitalism cannot be self-regulating and harmonious; their creation and maintenance require continual spatio-temporal interventions by extra-market forces, and market-based principles are not adequate for redressing political, cultural or biophysical entanglements. Capitalism exhibits out-of-equilibrium dynamical complexity characterized by path-dependence, instability, unpredictability and conflict. It follows that a territory’s economic performance cannot be explained by place-based thinking, or addressed through place-based strategies, but depends on asymmetric connectivities with the wider world. Rather than the solution to impoverishment, globalizing capitalism is productive of social and geographical inequality, making it necessary to provincialise globalizing capitalism, drawing on peripheral experiences and encounters with it to take seriously alternative, more-than-capitalist experiments and trajectories.

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