I examine five international investment cases that embrace the neoliberal vision. This economic model provides a new, contested space between the construction of hegemonic globalisations from above and the contestation of these globalisations from below. The first objective is to describe this space. Each ends the same way: the exit of an unwanted foreign investor after intense social mobilisation. The second objective is to show that counter-hegemonic victories are difficult to achieve: the regime relegates the voice of the subaltern to an inconsequential role, limits public interest state projects that may interfere with investor rights, and often includes a compensatory promise to foreign investors irrespective of the host state’s fiscal capacity. The third objective is to demonstrate the ambivalent role of the state in promoting such neoliberal projects, which necessitate that it adopt a more active role in either policing investment or policing society.

This thesis analyzes the teen-targeted website gURL.com, which is committed to providing safe space for young girls to explore different aspects of girlhood. I primarily focus on girls’ comments and conversations posted on the message boards in order to trace how teens mediate and extend the borders of the popular conceptualizations of contemporary girlhood. I interpret young women's online activities within the discursive framework of the complex relation between Girl Culture and feminism. Without overvaluing the freedom of online environments, I assume that the relatively unregulated space of the Internet enables girls to step outside the dominant stereotypes and discover alternative modes of doing feminist activism. I argue that these new venues of political engagement are adequate ways of resistance within the specific era of postmodern global capitalism.

Abstract This paper examines the lessons Ethiopia can learn from East Asia’s growth to sustain its recent economic growth. By an in-depth analysis of the role of government in East Asian’s development it provides recommendations for Ethiopia. The study is based on the experiences of South Korea, Taiwan and Japan in the context of three issues: selective intervention policies, coordination problem and export orientation. Results of the study show that governments in East Asia have used phased selective intervention mechanism to nurture their industries and coordinated private investment to ensure national development. They have also targeted export markets to make their firms competitive and upgrade exports from primary products to higher value goods. The selective intervention suggests a greater role for government, however targeting of exports and the efficiency from international competition indicates the virtue of market mechanisms as well. Government intervention however must be phased, moving from targeting primary products to higher value goods. This paper suggests that government intervention has to be supplemented by a government-firm relationship that avoids too much government autonomy, which is meant to solve rent-seeking problem. Rent-seeking problem can instead be solved through performance requirement and time limits on protection.

This essay is about the European union freetrade treaty negations with Mercosur. I have in this essay used a qualitative content analysis, to study from the EU perspective the reasons to why, the EU and Mercosur suspended the free trade treaty negations 2004, and after several years resumed the negotiations again in 2010. The purpose of this study is to gain a deeper understanding from the EU perspective of why free trade negotiations were suspended and then resumed. In order to achieve a deeper understanding of this event, I have applied neorealism and neoliberalism on the explicit statements and the implied actions, as these theories may provide different explanatory power of implied causes of negotiations. I have come to the conclusion that the theoretical perspectives can indeed explain explicit statements and implicit actions for suspended and resumed negotiations with Mercosur. The implicit reasons for suspended negotiations are among others that the EU has an egoist thinking concerning a free trade treaty. The EU wish to gain more benefits then Mecosur with a free trade treaty, which lead to Mercosur wanted to suspend the negotiations. Another implicit reason is that the EU was thinking entirely on how much that were going to gain in relation mercosur, because of this kind of thinking, the EU probably realized that they were going to loose on a treaty. The implicit reasons for resumed negotiations are among others are that the EU genuinely wants to collaborate with Mercosur as much as they can with the purpose to gain together as much as possible. Other implicit reason is mutual dependence, which means that the EU needs Mercosur and vice versa to strengthen the global economy, and to give job opportunities and growth on both sides. Another implicit reason to resume the negotiations again is that the EU has grown stronger as an economic block, because of this, the EU has greater advantage of their demands with Mercosur. Further more, this essay surely point out that the EU has a lot of difficulties to come up with an agreement with Mercosur. But hopefully the EU can in the nearest future reach a free trade treaty with Mercosur.

The current of private participation in the public infrastructure buildings is dramatically spreading in Taiwan. Neoliberalism promotes development of privatization, and it is thought that privatization can release the financial, technical, and manpower burden of government. But it also seems to have the rational explanation that government avoids their responsibility. Pubic-Private Partnership does not simply transfer responsibility, it transfers the role and function between pubic and private sectors. As the Act for promotion of Private Participation in Infrastructure Projects (Act of public-private partnership) is carried out to establish the role of public and private sector in public-private partnership program. This study uses Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process to establish risk management in public-private partnerships. The inaccuracy questions are judged by attending quantification weights of principles. The conclusion for suggests to Public Construction Commission, Executive Yuan will amending Act of public-private partnerships. Keyword: Public-Private partnerships, Neoliberalism, Fuzzy Analytical- Hierarchy Process, Risk Management

This dissertation examines the reconfiguration of popular environmental politics in the context of so-called sustainable mining development in Ecuador. Progressive governments in Latin America herald sustainable mining initiatives as the lynchpin to development capable of generating revenues to finance social welfare programs and protecting the environment. If this is so, my dissertation asks, then why has a proposed sustainable gold mine provoked such bitter opposition from dairy farmers in the parish of Victoria del Portete? My dissertation follows a group of indigenous and mestizo dairy farmers in the southern Ecuadorian Andes to understand why they oppose gold mining in their watershed and traces the cultural and political transformations that followed from their activism. I make four key arguments in this dissertation. First, I argue that sustainable mining plans place a premium on local water resources and have the effect of rearticulating local water disputes. Whereas owners of small and large dairy farms have historically disputed local access to water resources now they have created a unified movement against the proposed gold mine project. Second, I argue that knowledge practices and political discourses enabled farmers with varying claims to ethnic ancestry and socio-economic standing to establish connections with each other and with national indigenous leaders, Catholic priests, artists, and urban ecologists. Together they have formed a movement in defense of life. My analysis extends common understandings of the nature of human agency and political life by examining the role that non-human entities play in shaping contemporary environmental politics. Third, as a result of the mobilizations, new socio-environmental formations have emerged. The watershed has become a sacred place called Kimsacocha, which is venerated by farmers through new cultural practices as the source of life. Finally, the mobilizations in defense of life have re-centered indigeneity in unexpected ways. Farmers with and without indigenous ancestry as well as their urban allies are now claiming an indigenous identity. Unlike previous understandings of identity in the region, indigeneity does not denote a shared racial, cultural, or class position but refers to a particular way of understanding and relation to the environment. / text

In this dissertation, I argue that the maternal body is a chief site of discursive political and cultural struggle over gender, family, and work in a neoliberal America. I consider contemporary discourses of maternity, an aggregate I call maternity culture, as cultural products and rhetorical expressions of the antagonistic arrangements in contemporary capitalism since the neoliberal turn. The complexities of maternity culture discourses can therefore be better understood when they are historicized alongside changing economic and political realities. Using materialist feminism as my primary methodology, I contend that maternity culture discourses express the ethics of neoliberalism including the privatization of social/political responsibility and self-actualization through entrepreneurialism and labor, while simultaneously justifying the intensification of maternal labor and the continued surveillance of women's bodies. I argue that maternity culture discourses are, therefore, rhetorics of reproduction and reproducing rhetorics. That is to say, they are a part of a larger set of discourses about the reproductive function that are themselves caught in the logics of capital that may result in the reproduction of unequal arrangements in material and symbolic life. In order to illuminate how maternity culture operates in neoliberal public life as a reproducing rhetoric, I provide a historical analysis of rhetorics of women's health, and analyze two case studies involving discourses surrounding breastfeeding and natural childbirth, major sites of struggle within maternity culture. / text

Chinese elitism and neoliberalism were the fundamental mechanisms that governed and shaped Hong Kong during the British colonial rule. These mechanisms, however, remains not only active 15 years after the handover of Hong Kong to People's Republic of China in 1997 – their domination has been heightened, particularly in the domain of the city's cultural policy making. This dissertation examines the key issues concerning the development of Hong Kong's post-colonial cultural policy under the frameworks of a renewed Chinese elitism and neoliberalism, to find out what kind of cultural policy does Hong Kong need and what cultural future is lying ahead of Hong Kong. / published_or_final_version / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

This dissertation starts from the proposition that globalization is a process of integration aided and abetted over centuries by technologies (e.g. transportation and today’s electronic communications) that have collapsed time and space among individuals and enabled the projection of power. This dissertation excavates and analyzes what are termed discourses of globalism, the rhetorical construction of a social order that transcends the nation-state. The primary form of globalism at this juncture is neoliberal globalism, an elite discourse that is hostile to the nation-state and promotes a world that organizes individuals into global markets as producers and consumers. One of the defining tenets of neoliberal globalism is the assertion that “there is no alternative” to organizing society, a phrase made (in)famous by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1990s. The project is framed as a search for the emerging rhetorical strategies that might reconstruct agency (the capacity for individuals to affect the world) at a grassroots level under that umbrella of neoliberal globalism and at least contemplate an alternative organization of a more integrated global society. Methodologically, the dissertation employs Kenneth Burke’s (1937) theory of discursive history as an interplay of acceptance and rejection frames over time. Using food talk, primarily Internet content concerning food and agriculture, as a corpus of texts the dissertation charts neoliberal globalism as an acceptance frame and its impact on agency and equipment for living, the embedded social rules and roles for living in a social order. Using the concept of the rejection frame, the dissertation then argues that a grassroots globalism is nascent as seen in food talk and is attempting to counter neoliberal globalism through constructing a theory of rights that transcends the nation-state and provides a new form of equipment for living in a globally organized world. The dissertation concludes by theorizing this emerging rhetoric of rights as a step toward a rhetoric of global personal sovereignty that might unite people in all locales in a balancing of neoliberal globalism. / text

Liberalism can be generally characterized as a political ideology that assumes the rational, self-interested nature of human beings. However, two distinct strands of liberal theory have evolved from this shared construction of the human agent, namely state-oriented and market-oriented liberalism. It will be shown that state-oriented liberalism provides the theoretical core of liberal democratic states, whereas market-oriented liberalism provides the theoretical core for the globalized market economy. This thesis will uncover a profound tension through a discussion of the new constitutional effects of the investor-state regime. Furthermore, this thesis will show that the recent changes of the investor-state regime have failed to resolve the theoretical tension between liberal democracies and the investor-state regime. And finally, this thesis argues that the only way to resolve the tension between the two strands of liberalism is to incorporate liberal democratic principles into the investor-state regime. / Graduate / 0615 / 0616 / matt.stuckenberg@gmail.com