scholarly journals Necroeconomics: Power, Ethics, and the Political Economy of Human-Animal Relations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jan Dutkiewicz

<p>This paper is an innovative addition to the ongoing debate about human-animal relations. It approaches the topic from the perspective of political economy rather than moral philosophy and seeks to provide an explanatory framework combining commodification of animals and death in the global economy. While acknowledging the importance of the ongoing debate about animal rights, it seeks to shift the focus of analysis of industries which create value through the killing of animals toward one based on the Foucauldian notions of power as biopolitics and governance. In order to reconceptualise the relations of power which exist between human business interests and animal life, it introduces the notion that animals killed for meat, by-products, or research purposes are treated as necrocommodities; that is, commodities whose value is created as a direct result of death. By challenging the prevalent notions of speciesist hierarchisation and property rights, it seeks to cast a new light on the tangible power relations which exist between humans and animal species which are hunted or fished for profit. In doing so, this paper challenges the notion that the economy is amoral. Instead, it presents a preliminary picture of an economy rooted in inter-species power relations which is necessarily subject to a moral critique. The case study of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and ongoing "scientific" whaling is used to elucidate and introduce the concept of necroeconomics, but the main goal is to present an analytical framework that has a bearing on wider moral and structural issues in the international animal and animal product industry. Moreover, it situates animal-human relations within broader problems of modernity, thereby broadening its scope and calling for more academic focus on the place of animals in the modern political economy and its attendant circuits of power.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jan Dutkiewicz

<p>This paper is an innovative addition to the ongoing debate about human-animal relations. It approaches the topic from the perspective of political economy rather than moral philosophy and seeks to provide an explanatory framework combining commodification of animals and death in the global economy. While acknowledging the importance of the ongoing debate about animal rights, it seeks to shift the focus of analysis of industries which create value through the killing of animals toward one based on the Foucauldian notions of power as biopolitics and governance. In order to reconceptualise the relations of power which exist between human business interests and animal life, it introduces the notion that animals killed for meat, by-products, or research purposes are treated as necrocommodities; that is, commodities whose value is created as a direct result of death. By challenging the prevalent notions of speciesist hierarchisation and property rights, it seeks to cast a new light on the tangible power relations which exist between humans and animal species which are hunted or fished for profit. In doing so, this paper challenges the notion that the economy is amoral. Instead, it presents a preliminary picture of an economy rooted in inter-species power relations which is necessarily subject to a moral critique. The case study of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and ongoing "scientific" whaling is used to elucidate and introduce the concept of necroeconomics, but the main goal is to present an analytical framework that has a bearing on wider moral and structural issues in the international animal and animal product industry. Moreover, it situates animal-human relations within broader problems of modernity, thereby broadening its scope and calling for more academic focus on the place of animals in the modern political economy and its attendant circuits of power.</p>


2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 247-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica Flegel

There is a central contradiction in human relationships with animals: as Erica Fudge notes, “We live with animals, we recognize them, we even name some of them, but at the same time we use them as if they were inanimate, as if they were objects” (8). Such a contradiction is also, of course, present in human interactions, in which power relations allow for the objectification of one human being by another. In an analysis of images and texts produced by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in the nineteenth-century, I want to examine the overlap in representations of animals and humans as subject to objectification and control. One common way of critiquing human treatment of animals within the RSPCA's journals, Animal World and Band of Mercy, was to have humans trade places with animals: having boys fantastically shrunk to the size of the animals they tortured, for example, or imagining the horrors of vivisection when experienced by humans. Such imaginative exercises were meant to defamiliarize animal usage by implying a shared experience of suffering: what was wrong for a human was clearly just as wrong for an animal. However, I argue that some of the images employed by the society suggest the opposite; instead of constructing animal cruelty in a new light, these images instead work to underline the shared proximity of particular humans with animals. In texts that focus specifically upon humans wearing animal bonds – reins, collars, and muzzles – the RSPCA's anti-cruelty discourse both critiqued the tools of bondage and, I suggest, invited the audience to see deep connections between animals and the humans taking their place. Such connections ultimately weaken the force of the animal/human reversal as an animal rights strategy, suggesting as they do that humans themselves often have use value in economies of labor, affect, and are subject to the same power relations that produce an animal as “animal.”


2004 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna Lee ◽  
David Hudson

In a growing number of countries diplomatic systems are being overhauled so that the commercial activities of diplomatic services have been centralised, the commercial activities of diplomats have been extended, and business interests have been formally integrated within diplomatic systems. These changes result directly from the tendency of governments to reorganise, and in many cases merge, their trade and foreign ministries, as well as the strategy of building formal business–government links within diplomatic institutions. While none of these features is unfamiliar to previous diplomatic systems, what is exceptional is the relative neglect of the commercial aspects of diplomacy within diplomatic studies. This lack of attention to the commercial and business elements of diplomacy in traditional theories of diplomacy means that we find ourselves trying to analyse contemporary changes to diplomatic organisation and practice without a suitable conceptual and analytical framework. Highlighting the significance of a political economy approach to diplomacy, and also engaging with orthodox approaches to diplomacy, this article begins to develop some analytical and conceptual tools to better identify, explain and understand changes in diplomatic systems as well as the increased influence of private interests in diplomatic practice now under way.


Author(s):  
Etel Solingen ◽  
Peter Gourevitch

The centrality of domestic coalitions serves as transmission belts between the domestic and international realms. Despite its long lineage in international and comparative political economy and its relevance to the understanding of contemporary responses to globalization, coalitional analysis has been typically neglected when explaining outcomes in international relations. The analytical framework adopted here builds on two “ideal-typical” coalitions—an “inward-nationalist” and an “outward-internationalist” model—each advancing competing models across industrialized and industrializing contexts alike. Several applications illustrate the breadth and scope of this framework, spacious enough to explain economic responses in Europe from the repeal of the Corn Laws to the 20th century; the security implications of economic responses leading to World War I; the impact of internationalization on regional orders in the industrializing world since 1945; the relationship between coalitional approaches to the global economy and nuclear weapons proliferation since 1970; and the relevance of coalitional divides to outcomes regarding Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, and beyond. Coalitional analysis thus (a) offers important insights on wide-ranging empirical phenomena in comparative and international politics that institutional approaches alone fail to explain; (b) provides a unifying framework addressing trans-historical responses to globalization, nationalism, ethno-confessionalism, and their effects on interstate relations; (c) attends to political cleavages in political economy that intersect with security; (d) transcends dated level-of-analysis categories by linking subnational and global processes; (e) is flexible enough to accommodate wide variation in state–society relations and political institutionalization; (f) grounds politics in a dynamic framework able to explain both continuity and change; and (g) clarifies contradictory findings regarding interdependence and war by providing a mechanism explaining why, when, and how economic exchange with the world may or may not inhibit war.


Author(s):  
Dale Chapman

Hailed by corporate, philanthropic, and governmental organizations as a metaphor for democratic interaction and business dynamics, contemporary jazz culture has a story to tell about the relationship between political economy and social practice in the era of neoliberal capitalism. The Jazz Bubble approaches the emergence of the neoclassical jazz aesthetic since the 1980s as a powerful, if unexpected, point of departure for a wide-ranging investigation of important social trends during this period. The emergence of financialization as a key dimension of the global economy shapes a variety of aspects of contemporary jazz culture, and jazz culture comments upon this dimension in turn. During the stateside return of Dexter Gordon in the mid-1970s, the cultural turmoil of the New York fiscal crisis served as a crucial backdrop to understanding the resonance of Gordon’s appearances in the city. The financial markets directly inform the structural upheaval that major label jazz subsidiaries must navigate in the music industry of the early twenty-first century, and they inform the disruptive impact of urban redevelopment in communities that have relied upon jazz as a site of economic vibrancy. In examining these issues, The Jazz Bubble seeks to intensify conversations surrounding music, culture, and political economy.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Falih Suaedi ◽  
Muhmmad Saud

This article explores in what ways political economy as an analytical framework for developmental studies has contributed to scholarships on Indonesian’s contemporary discourse of development. In doing so, it reviews important scholarly works on Indonesian political and economic development since the 1980s. The argument is that given sharp critiques directed at its conceptual and empirical utility for understanding changes taking place in modern Indonesian polity and society, the political economy approach continues to be a significant tool of research specifically in broader context of comparative politics applied to Indonesia and other countries in Southeast Asia. The focus of this exploration, however, has shifted from the formation of Indonesian bourgeoisie to the reconstitution of bourgeois oligarchy consisting of the alliance between the politico-bureaucratic elite and business families. With this in mind, the parallel relationship of capitalist establishment and the development of the state power in Indonesia is explainable.<br>


Author(s):  
Michael Goodhart

This chapter shows that three of the central debates within global normative theory are afflicted by the three pathologies associated with the dominant approach. Constructivist methods for identifying principles of justice are both blatantly undemocratic and severely distortional; debates about the scope of justice are depoliticizing, question begging, and philosophically irresolvable; claims about how the global order affects the poor depoliticize and distort power relations in the global economy and ignore the ideological context in which the claims themselves operate. The argument is not that IMT gives problematic answers to these questions but rather that the questions themselves are unhelpful and unnecessary, artifacts of the approach. In making these arguments, the chapter continues the work of defamiliarization begun in the previous chapter.


Author(s):  
Christine Cheng

This chapter introduces the concept of extralegal groups and a theoretical framework for analyzing them—how they emerge, develop, and become entrenched over time. It explores their dual nature as threats to the state and as local statebuilders. Formally, an extralegal group is defined as a set of individuals with a proven capacity for violence who work outside the law for profit and provide basic governance functions to sustain its business interests. This framing shows how political authority can develop as a by-product of the commercial environment, even where the state has little or no presence. In post-conflict societies, the predatory nature and historical abuses of citizens conducted in the name of the state means that government is not always more trusted or better able to look after the interests of local populations than an extralegal group. Ultimately, extralegal groups blur the lines between the formal and informal; the licit and illicit.


Author(s):  
Kenneth C. Shadlen

The concluding chapter reviews the main findings from the comparative case studies, synthesizes the main lessons, considers extensions of the book’s explanatory framework, and looks at emerging challenges that countries face in adjusting their development strategies to the new global economy marked by the private ownership of knowledge. Review of the key points of comparison from the case studies underscores the importance of social structure and coalitions for analyses of comparative and international political economy. Looking forward, this chapter supplements the book’s analysis of the political economy of pharmaceutical patents with discussion of additional ways that countries respond to the monumental changes that global politics of intellectual property have undergone since the 1980s. The broader focus underscores fundamental economic and political challenges that countries face in adjusting to the new world order of privately owned knowledge, and points to asymmetries in global politics that reinforce these challenges.


Animals ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 512
Author(s):  
Samuel Camenzind

Criticism of Kant’s position on our moral relationship with animals dates back to the work of Arthur Schopenhauer and Leonard Nelson, but historically Kantian scholars have shown limited interest in the human-animal relationship as such. This situation changed in the mid-1990s with the arrival of several publications arguing for the direct moral considerability of animals within the Kantian ethical framework. Against this, another contemporary Kantian approach has continued to defend Kant’s indirect duty view. In this approach it is argued, first, that it is impossible to establish direct duties to animals, and second, that this is also unnecessary because the Kantian notion that we have indirect duties to animals has far-reaching practical consequences and is to that extent adequate. This paper explores the argument of the far-reaching duties regarding animals in Kant’s ethics and seeks to show that Kantians underestimate essential differences between Kant and his rivals today (i.e., proponents of animal rights and utilitarians) on a practical and fundamental level. It also argues that Kant’s indirect duty view has not been defended convincingly: the defence tends to neglect theory-immanent problems in Kant’s ethics connected with unfounded value assumptions and unconvincing arguments for the denial of animals’ moral status. However, it is suggested that although the human-animal relationship was not a central concern of Kant’s, examination of the animal question within the framework of Kant’s ethics helps us to develop conceptual clarity about his duty concept and the limitations of the reciprocity argument.


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