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Problems and Methods - Revolutions

Tags: problems and methods

Books

  • Bayat - Revolution without Revolutionaries
    • Questions
      • He makes the neoliberal claim, yet ignores the asian financial crisis of 1997
      • Places these revolutions temporally and within the same system
      • Unspoken is the “contagion” of revolutions, that it spreads
        • Is the contagion much like the finanical systems?
      • Three lessons out of the 1997 criss were:
        • dangers of sudden reversals of capital flows
        • problems of “contagion” - where crisis spread for now discernable reason
        • pro-cyclical nature of international finacnial markets
          • capital flows tend to come in during growth and overheating, exit during downturns, exasterbating swings
        • Changed how people thought about developing economies, maybe not better for them to open up
      • talks about IMF, but misses the mechanics of it
        • we elide all the bretton woods institutions into one
          • IMF failed horribly in 1997
          • World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, Paris Club, private sector, CEDAR conference (to unlock lebanese money), etc
      • Thailand/laos/indonesia/malaysia were not significantly more developed than the middle east, why no revolutions?
      • I think his neoliberal frame is correct, analysis is slightly off
      • Hong Kong and Lebanon - both financial clearing houses
        • financial literacy of the lebanese, knowledge of eurobonds has dramatically increased
      • His analysis leaves out the agencies of the state, in coalesing all the “revolutions”/“refolutions” into one, he misses out on how the state responds to such a turn

Focult & Iran

  • What is legible?
  • What is power being enacted

Hage

  • Discern new realities
  • Finding other realities
  • Questions:
    • To find those realities, you have to know how to look
  • Politics
    • Polities as monorealities?

    • The praxis of politics does have an agreed upon and final answer

Revolutions

  • Revolutions as spurning forward
  • What qualifies as a “revolution”?
    • Somewhat racialized qualification
    • What enters the “halls of revolution”
  • What tools do these texts give?
  • Taking daily realities about
  • The heritage of “revolution” matters because it is self legitimizing
  • Focoult never used the term “revolution” because it was too welded to another term