Graduation Year
2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree
Ph.D.
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Degree Granting Department
School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies
Major Professor
Steven S. Roach, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Peter Funke, Ph.D.
Committee Member
M. Scott Solomon, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Julia Irwin, Ph.D.
Keywords
political economy, COVID-19, international security, polycrisis, anthropocene
Abstract
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers were forced to balance the maintenance of ongoing economic activity alongside the measures advised by epidemiologists and other public health officials to contain the viral spread. The magnitude of the pandemic forced major conduits of the global economy to come to a sudden halt through incidents such as border closures, supply chain disruptions, lockdowns and calls for individuals to distance themselves from one another. Like the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, COVID-19 was thought to signal an inflection point for neoliberal political economy where a possible post-neoliberal era would develop in the aftermath of a crisis. While COVID-19 persists over four years later, its priority status has considerably diminished as global health institutions have rolled back declarations of the pandemic as a global emergency. Accordingly, this implies that some degree of pre-pandemic normality has returned with little in the way of durable change to the global neoliberal status quo.
This project argues that this resilient status quo represents a complex, heterogeneous system that has metaphorically ‘overheated’ due to the friction caused by the negative externalities of the global neoliberal political economy. I build this framework on a perspective of neoliberalism as a type of malleable political technology that has evolved from its ‘thin’ origins in the 1970s as a policy implement advancing market rationality to its ‘thick’ permutations from the 1990s onwards that has considerable influence at both the material and abstract level. From this, I argue that we live in an ‘overheated’ world comprised of literal and metaphorical ‘overheating’ where uncertainty surrounding future crises continues to persist without a clear image of a post-neoliberal future. Ultimately, I stress that this is demonstrative of a neoliberal ‘anti-politics’ that forecloses on the prospect of new political possibilities.
Scholar Commons Citation
Chakrabarti, Shomik, "‘The Overheated World’: Crisis Politics and Neoliberal Inertia" (2024). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/10487
