Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper examines Antonio Gramsci’s theory of intellectuals. Although contemporary intellectuals readily appropriate many of his ideas, Gramsci’s theory of intellectuals remains curiously unappreciated. This is not because the theory is crude or anachronistic. On the contrary, Gramsci’s understanding of the intellectual is all too perceptive and revealing, particularly in a time of complacency and organic submission to a definite institutional model. I argue that, from the standpoint of the oft-lamented crisis of the contemporary intellectual, Gramsci stands as an indispensable resource for self-awareness and self-criticism. The paper offers an analysis of the historical and sociological nuances of Gramsci’s theory. In addition, his life as an intellectual provides powerful yet unheeded lessons. Today the early Gramsci who operated as a party intellectual devoted to the revolutionary transformation of society is ignored, but the later Gramsci who was imprisoned by fascism and had to submit to eerily familiar routines and constraints is celebrated. This peculiar reception measures a significant degeneration and suggests pressing questions concerning what today passes for the “critical” and “public” engagement of intellectuals

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper first highlights the value of Gramscian concepts to avoid the pitfalls of structuralism. Yet, most IR scholars drawing on Gramsci tend to concentrate on dominant political-economic forces and structures. They recognize the importance of subaltern forces, but these are not their primary focus. Cultural studies approaches deepen the analysis of subaltern forces, as agent of change in their own rights. Analyzing the dialectical relationship between political discourses (theories) and practices emerging from social movements and organic-intellectuals, the paper examines the role of cultural and socio-economic struggles, the processes taking place within and among subaltern forces, and how they challenge dominant structures of power and the neoliberal common sense. Based on fieldwork research, it draws from the experiences of sociopolitical forces (anti-FTAA movements), rooted in specific historical context, insisting on the need to avoid a solely state-centric approach. This analysis of the practices and knowledges of subaltern forces challenges the dominant understanding of hegemony and counter-hegemony in the field of IR. It also questions the role as intellectuals in reproducing these dominant understandings and power relations, by highlighting the assumptions that intellectuals tend to make about subaltern forces, but which not necessarily reflect the complexities of their day-to-day practices in resisting dominant structures of power.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: For intellectual generations born at the end of the 19th century in Europe, the discourses on rights were to a large measure determined by proponents and detractors of various versions of Marxism. Hence the debates on justice and rights predominantly operated with the conceptual and analytical instruments of European political economy. These debates also were premised on assumptions about the status of the political economy of Europe and North America in the distribution of global space. But the intellectual generations born at the end of the 19th century, and particularly those with interests in the Marxist project -- as Benjamin, Gramsci, and Polanyi were-- were also witnesses to the facts of the Soviet Revolution and its evolution into the Stalinist state. In this paper I will first of all examine the ways in which Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, and Karl Polanyi elaborated and expanded the concept of transatlantic space inscribed into the Marxist project. I will then investigate to which extent their familiarity with the rights practices of Stalinism impacted their elaboration of new forms of the space of rights: Benjamin’s concept of the historical space of ‘messianism’ that transcends the historical limits of the space of rights of historical materialism; Gramsci’s concept of cultural space as a struggle for rights that expands Marx’s terrain of political economy, and Polanyi’s concept of anthropological space that expands the conceptual space of economic analysis of classical Marxism. The purpose of the paper is to gain a measure of understanding of the links that obtain between conceptual apparatuses of leading intellectuals and global transformations in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly since these intellectuals developed their ideas relatively independently from the structures of organized knowledge production of universities and academies.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Just as globalization takes many forms and extends its hegemony through varous processes, resistance to globalization takes many forms and works through various counterhegemonic processes. This paper examines the forms and processes of changing consciousness brought about through women's grassroots activism in Morelos, Mexico.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Since the mid-1940s the academy has seen the rise and embedding of the field of international development studies especially in North America and Europe. While mediated by local historical, political and economic conditions, the ideas embodied in this field have greatly influenced academic and policy debates pertaining to processes of political, cultural and economic change in the diverse social formations commonly referred to as the global South. In the main, the hegemonic ideas underpinning the evolution of development studies have been ahistorical, reductionist and technocratic. This paper, then, interrogates the constitutive ideas underpinning development discourse in the current phase of globalization as they pertain to the role of institutions of global governance, specifically the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, in politico-economic processes in contemporary Africa.