The Secret Life of Waste: Recycling Dreams of Migration

This essay opens up a new perspective on migration through the lens of waste, tracing the effects of war, border securitization, and global capitalism on a local scale. The analysis of Afganistanbul (2018), a short documentary produced by a team at Kadir Has University in Istanbul where the book in hand originated, captures the predicament of undocumented waste workers in the city who lack the means to continue their journey to Europe or return to their homeland, while resources and revenue in the global recycling business circulate freely. Following the film in its close-up on a specific site of life and labour, this essay teases out competing aspirations among local and migrant city dwellers, arguing that representations of migrant experiences are prone to the temptation of poverty porn and calling on spectators to consider their own implication in interlocking systems of inequity.

Criticism of “Colonial Modernity” through Kurdish Decolonial Approaches

Western modernity with its colonial application has created an identity trauma and patriarchal domination of the memory of colonized and oppressed peoples. Critiques from colonized territories encourage us to reread the colonial epistemes of modernity, whether or not centered on the West. The Kurdish political movement thus defines a new interpretation of modernity based on the critique of colonialism and global capitalism: “democratic modernity.” This chapter problematizes the relations between modernity, the nation state, the destruction of ecology, social confinement, the relationship of the forces of these relations, but above all the modalities by which it becomes possible to act on them to break the “stalemate” of the modernity of thought in the twenty-first century.

Factors and directions of revision of the French social paradigm

Historically, France is home to a number of concepts and practices for the creation of the welfare state (État providence). The state social policy is organically woven into the economic mechanism of this country and, it seemed, is its integral part. The purpose of the article is to identify the main directions of the revision of the social French paradigm. The generalization of the bibliography, historical and statistical analysis made it possible to identify a number of factors of such a revision, including the processes of transnationalization of French business, the scaling of trade, and the crisis of the post-industrial phase of global capitalism. The conclusion is substantiated that the shocks of the 2019 pandemic at the beginning of 2021 accelerated the evolution of French social policy in favor of the communitarian level due to the limited opportunities for social reforms at the country level. The antithesis of the initiatives of Emmanuel Macron is the growth of nationalist sentiments and ideas of Charles de Gaulle against the background of the crisis of convergence of the economies of the member countries.

Critical Analysis of the Evolving Process of Neoliberal Global Capitalism

This chapter aims to make a critical analysis of the evolving process of neoliberal capitalism globalization. It begins with the assumption that the neoliberal capitalism system is undergoing a mutation in the globalization processes as a dynamic element in continuous economic and financial crisis representing the development of the logic of capital based on the neoliberal ideology that promotes the free market. The evolving process of globalization is the history of international free trade framed by the classical liberal and neoliberal economic theory. The discussion focuses on a critical analysis of the paradigm of deglobalization as an alternative to the global capitalist regime that proposes local and regional economic protectionism solutions as an alternative to keep growing the national economies but still neglecting social justice and inequality inclusiveness and socio-ecological development.

Depression and repression: Global capitalism, economic crisis and penal politics in interwar Greece

Notwithstanding the significant advances made over the last twenty years in terms of charting and explaining the ways in which state punishment is influenced by economic and political forces, little is still known about the penal effects of conditions of economic crisis and about the role the incumbent government's political orientation plays in this regard. Because the few available studies on these questions have been preoccupied with the Anglo-American sphere and only in the context of recent decades at that, even less is known either about the implications that different types or experiences of economic crisis carry for state punishment, or about the influence exerted in this respect by government political orientations other than those found in established democracies. Irrespective of geographical or temporal scope, moreover, the impact that different extranational factors and actors may have in terms of economic, political or directly penal matters domestically remains poorly understood. With a view to helping fill these gaps in the literature, this article explores the effects on state punishment that economic crisis and government political orientation had in interaction with one another in the context of interwar Greece. Attention is first paid to various ways in which global capitalism was decisive in creating within Greece an environment conducive to increased punitiveness on the part of the state. The focus is on the economic, social and political consequences of the Wall Street crash of 1929 and Britain's exit from the gold standard in 1931, as these were exacerbated by Greece's long-term exposure to predatory lending, speculative investing and external interference in her domestic affairs in the context of engaging international capital markets. The article then proceeds to discuss how the Liberal government of 1928–1932 sought to handle the situation, particularly the approach it took towards punishment.

Revisiting the Urban Question in the Age of the New Urban Crisis: The (Re)Production of the Regime of Flexible Accumulation

Scholars have recently remarked upon the emergence of what Richard Florida has termed The New Urban Crisis, a global phenomenon whereby cities are being lumped into winners and losers, with inequality rising in the winner cities where real estate prices are pushing out those who most need access to the opportunities hoarded within. In this article, I argue that the new urban crisis is not a crisis of the city per se but is itself a symptom of greater crises occurring at the level of global capitalism. By revisiting Castells’ The Urban Question, I read the new urban crisis as a product of how the urban social structure fits into the reproduction of capitalism on a global scale, arguing that, under the regime of flexible accumulation, the urban social structure is asked to reproduce two distinct circuits of capital accumulation set loose by the transition to post-industrialism: accumulation via production and accumulation via finance. These distinct circuits of accumulation utilize the elements of urban social structures differentially, often at cross purposes. This produces continued crises in the reproduction of capitalism, as well as continually shifting relations between elements of the urban social structure, producing a plurality of urban forms.

A Postmodern Cultural Study of Media Manipulation and Capital Market Expansion

Media manipulation is rampant in the present postmodern culture since people are constantly monitored by screens due to the advancement of technology. In the postmodern world, the media have become an inseparable part of everyday life, where there is hardly any scope to spend a single moment without the screen and media. Thus, the current researcher got the impetus to unravel the media's simulated world, which uses images, advertisements, and signs to expand global capitalism. The objective of the study is to explore inquisitively the power and influence of the media and the way these are used to manipulate people. This is a qualitative study that delves into media politics and media economy in an investigative way to uncover the covert targets of the media. The study's major finding is that the media play a vital role in attracting consumers and expanding world commercialism in today’s globalized world. Several modern and postmodern writings were extensively studied to scrutinize the manifold facets of media manipulation through different presentations of print and visual formats.