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The Spectre of State Capitalism

14 November 2024, 5:30 pm–7:00 pm

Spectre of State Capitalism

Join IIPP in conversation with Ilias Alami and Cecilia Rikap

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

IIPP Comms



Join this fascinating discussionon Thursday 14th November2024at 17:30-19:00 (BST)at University College London () and online on zoom.

About this talk:

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.

This book argues that we are currently witnessing a historic arc in the trajectories of state intervention, characterized by a drastic reconfiguration of the state's role as promoter, supervisor, shareholder-investor, and direct owner of capital across the world economy. It offers a comprehensive analysis of this “new state capitalism”, as commentators increasingly refer to it, and maps out its key empirical manifestations across a range of geographies, cases, and issue areas. Alami and Dixon show that the new state capitalism is rooted in deep geopolitical economic and financial processes pertaining to the secular development of global capitalism, as much as it is the product of the geoeconomic agency of states and the global corporate strategies of leading firms. The book demonstrates 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.

Meet the panel:

  • Speaker: |Assistant Professor in the Political Economy of Development in the Centre of Development Studies (CDS) and the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS)at theUniversity of Cambridge
  • Chair: Dr Cecilia Rikap | Head of Research and Associate Professor in Economics at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP).

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About the Speakers

Ilias Alami

Assistant Professor in the Political Economy of Development in theCentre of Development Studies (CDS) and the Department of Politics andInternational Studies (POLIS) at University of Cambridge

Ilias Alami
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(Routledge, 2019) and (with Adam Dixon)(Oxford University Press, 2024).

Cecilia Rikap

Head of Research and Associate Professor in Economics at Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

Cecilia
Cecilia Rikap (PhD in economics from the Universidad de Buenos Aires) is associate professor in Economics and Head of Research at IIPP- . Until joining , she was a permanent Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy (IPE) at City, University of London and programme director of the BSc in IPE at the same university. She is a tenure researcher of the CONICET, Argentina’s national research council, and associate researcher at COSTECH lab, Université de Technologie de Compiègne.

Cecilia’s research is rooted in the international political economy of science and technology and the economics of innovation. She currently studies the rising concentration of intangible assets leading to the emergence of intellectual monopolies, among others from digital and pharma industries, the distribution of intellectual (including data) rents, resulting geopolitical tensions and the effects of knowledge assetization on the knowledge commons and development. She has published two books on these topics. 1) “” (Routledge), recently won the EAEPE Joan Robinson Prize Competition. 2) “” (Palgrave), co-authored with B.A.K. Lundvall, focuses on the artificial intelligence race and clashes of power between the US and Chinese Big Tech, the US state and the Chinese states. Her recent work includes corporate planning of global production and innovation systems driven by intellectual monopolization and how these leading corporations, in particular tech giants, are developing state-like features, thus reshaping core and peripheral states. More about Cecilia Rikap