Event Description:
The state is back, and it means business. Since the turn of the 21st century, state-owned enterprises, sovereign funds, and policy banks have vastly expanded their control over assets and markets. Concurrently, governments have experimented with increasingly assertive modalities of statism, from techno-industrial policies and spatial development strategies to economic nationalism and trade and investment restrictions. Based on our book The Spectre of State Capitalism, (Oxford University Press, 2022 ) we argue that the proliferation of muscular modalities of statist interventionism and the increasing concentration of capital in the hands of states indicate foundational shifts in global capitalism. This includes a growing fusion of private and state capital, and the development of flexible and liquid forms of property that collapse the distinction between state and private ownership, control, and management. This has fundamental implications for the nature and operations of global capitalism and world politics.
Location: Bush House SE1.05, King's College London
About the speakers:
Dr Ilias Alami is an Assistant Professor in the Political Economy of Development in the Centre of Development Studies and the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining Cambridge, he held research and teaching positions at Uppsala University, Maastricht University, and Manchester University. He also held visiting positions at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Sao Paulo, the University of Johannesburg, and Sciences Po Paris. He holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Manchester. He is the author of Money Power and Financial Capital in Emerging Markets: Facing the Liquidity Tsunami (Routledge, 2019) and (with Adam Dixon) The Spectre of State Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2024).
Professor Adam Dixon hold the Adam Smith Chair in Sustainable Capitalism at Herriot Watt University, Edinburgh where he is Director of the Panmure House Project – based in Adam Smith’s final residence – Panmure House. Professor Dixon has previously held positions at University of Bristol and Maastricht where he led a large European Research Council project on Sovereign Wealth Funds. His works include The Spectre of State Capitalism (Oxford University Press: 2024); The Political Economy of Geo-economics: Europe in a Changing World (Palgrave, 2022); The New Frontier Investors (Palgrave 2016), and The New Geography of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2024).
