The LPE Blog asks Odette Lienau some questions about global debt in the wake of COVID-19, recent international initiatives to provide debt relief, and the rise of China as a major lender to sovereign states.
On Oct. 13, 2021, the LPE Project and the Global Health Justice Partnership sponsored a panel discussion about How to Vaccinate the World. In the following excerpt, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity, the panelists discuss the development of mRNA vaccine manufacturing capacity in Africa and whether the U.S. government has done enough to encourage pharmaceutical companies to transfer their vaccine technology to countries that need it.
Understanding the law’s role in the project of Israeli colonization requires examining how distinct legal frameworks applied across a legally fragmented space can nevertheless share a common defining logic. One manifestation of this shared logic becomes evident by scrutinizing claims to land adjudicated by Israeli courts: Israeli state agencies and Jewish settler groups are treated as presumptively proper claimants of property while non-Jewish Palestinians are treated, at best, as dwellers who are not entitled to claim property but merely inhabit the land at the sufferance of Israeli authorities.
In liberal-leftist discourses, both Zionist and otherwise, the pivotal year for what is called the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is 1967. Israel’s control over all aspects of Palestinians’ lives, both those who live within the ‘Jewish state’ and those who reside in the Occupied Territories, renders the 1967 paradigm not only unpersuasive, but ridiculous.
Much attention has been rightly paid to the billions of dollars that the U.S. government hands over to Israel every year, regardless of Israel’s war crimes, or even the warnings of military and diplomatic experts’ that such support might harm U.S. strategic interests in the region. Less public scrutiny has been trained on the U.S. government’s indirect support to the Israeli settlement enterprise through the export of private actors, ideology and capital. But the colonization of Palestine has always been a multinational endeavor that extends beyond state-based support and that is inextricably intertwined with private forms of action.
This post is part of our symposium on The Neoliberal Republic by Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France. Read all posts here. The Neoliberal Republic offers an insightful portrayal of how neoliberalism has permeated France in the past decades. The book helps us to grasp how the legal universe has been deeply implicated in the power…
This post is part of our symposium on The Neoliberal Republic by Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France. Read all posts here. Like many other new shiny things, it ended with disappointment. Emmanuel Macron’s victory in 2017 was hailed as the advent of ‘le nouveau monde’ vis-à-vis the old political elites—a glimmer of hope in the…
This post is part of our symposium on The Neoliberal Republic by Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France. Read all posts here. The Neoliberal Transformation of the State Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France take the reader backstage in The Neoliberal Republic, providing empirically rich insights into how neoliberalism has permeated French state institutions. More specifically, their…
This post is part of our symposium on The Neoliberal Republic by Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France. Read all posts here. Here is a simple story. France, whose economy was largely in state hands, decides to privatize many state-owned enterprises. This move is inspired both by neoliberal theories promoting the superior economic benefits of markets…
This post is part of our symposium on The Neoliberal Republic by Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France. Read all posts here. For most scholars and commentators in France and abroad, the election of Emmanuel Macron as president was met with surprise and dismay. The rapid ascent to the apex of power of a thirty-nine-year-old technocrat…
The anti-discrimination framework imagines a situation where authorities unjustifiably favor some categories of its population over others. While this analysis is not wrong, it obscures how Zionism – the political movement for a state for all Jews in the world and Israel’s official ideology – privileges even foreign Jews, to varying extents, over indigenous Palestinians. The systemic harm here is not merely discrimination; it is one of colonialism. And when we speak of colonialism – and especially settler colonialism, which seeks not only to rule native populations but to replace them – the logic of racial capitalism is seldom far behind.
Is private violence simply an epiphenomenon in a settler colonial society like Israel – or does it, together with official indulgence of it, perhaps serve a more systemic function?
This weekend, Chileans will elect a Constitutional Convention. This Constitution will finally replace that which Pinochet’s junta put into place, in one of the first victories of neoliberalism. Why is this Convention happening now? And what are its prospects?
In a previous post, one of us described why we need global cooperation to achieve massively scaled up production of COVID vaccines. The United States must play a key role in this process, because it has the ability to mobilize resources, and powerful leverage over companies that have so far resisted serious participation in global efforts – especially Moderna, Pfizer, and J&J. Some commentators question whether the US has the power to compel this cooperation. Others have doubted the relevance of the demand coming from developing countries to temporarily waive the requirements of the World Trade Organization’s TRIPS Agreement to facilitate more manufacturing. In this post, we explain why existing US law gives the Biden Administration the power to mandate sharing and overcome IP barriers, and how the TRIPS waiver can contribute importantly to efforts to scale up production at a global scale.
The shortage of vaccines is a manmade problem, brought on by the false promise of innovation-by-monopoly and by reproduction of colonial dynamics. Our global R&D system layers privatized control and profits for huge firms based in rich countries atop a vast regime of open science and public subsidy. We can scale up production if we force pharma to share.
