Description:
Recent changes in the global economy and in Southeast Asian national political economies have led to new forms of commodity production and new commodities. Using insights from political economy and commodity studies, the essays in Taking Southeast...
Brief description: Joseph Nevins is Associate Professor of Geography at Vassar College. He is author of A Not-So-Distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor, and co-editor, with Nancy Lee Peluso, of Taking Southeast Asia to Market: Commodities, Nature, and People in the Neoliberal Age, both from Cornell.
Review Quotes:
What unites these case studies is their view that commodification processes under the 'new' global order are increasingly complex and their critical stance toward the kinds of sociopolitical transformations that are wrought by a neoliberal market economy. The intractability of 'neoliberalist tendencies' is explained by, inter alia, the neoliberal market economy's ability to localize and contain fallouts; its effectiveness in limiting transnational resistance to its spread; and the particular historical, political contingencies in specific places that sustain such tendencies. Its resilience is also partly explained by its constant morphing into more (outwardly) benign forms. This edited volume is thus an important and much appreciated addition that deepens our understanding of pertinent social, economic, and political processes in Southeast Asia. It is especially significant and timely in illuminating how neoliberalizing processes make new commodities and remake old ones.
-- "Economic Geography"