Tag: decolonising-knowledge

Examining the Unsettling in the Settled Science

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A review of Alex M. Thomas, Macroeconomics: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, xx + 234 pages, 978-110873199-7

by Subhasree Ghatak1

“Textbooks often portray economics as a settled science, but this is far from the truth.”

Macroeconomics: An Introduction deals with pluralist ideas that challenge and unsettle the settled thoughts of orthodox economics. The book presents a view of economics as an everyday science embedded in the social fabric of human interactions while also dealing with the complex web of foundational macroeconomic theories.

Take, for instance, the emphasis placed by marginalist economics on the ‘rationality’ of an ‘economic man’, which relegates the economic position of women by disregarding the burden of unpaid care-work on which the economy thrives. The author points out not only the need to change the male pronoun, but also to question the failings of orthodox economics that lead to this neglect. Neoclassical economics determines wages as a function of the marginal productivity of labor. Given this reasoning, it fails to explain the wage gap between men and women in the same occupation with similar levels of skill and expertise. This is just one instance of how the author subjects macroeconomic theory to critical scrutiny in light of its real-world implications, a definitive characteristic of this textbook.

This book offers a novel problem-setting approach rather than a problem-solving one in the teaching and discussion of macroeconomics. This approach aims to construct the context around which the problem will be addressed. It relies on day-to-day observations made on the economy to answer macroeconomic questions.  The discourse and pedagogy around macroeconomics heavily center on the mainstream line of reasoning. Instead, this textbook focuses on the significance of pluralism and acknowledgment of contending to enrich the understanding of economic phenomena. Alternative perspectives rooted in Classical Political Economy and the Keynesian school of thought as propounded by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Kalecki, and Piero Sraffa are invoked to compare and contrast with the marginalist paradigm.

The study of macroeconomics as prescribed in the curriculum of Indian universities is widely Eurocentric, sidelining the unheard perspectives from the Global South. This book aims to improve accessibility of economics to readers in India by drawing on examples from the Indian context rather than from the Global North. Thomas also makes a point to urge the readers of the book to supplement reading with various governmental and non-governmental issued reports, releases, newspapers, and literary fiction.  A comprehensive list of suggested readings, including academic writing and fictional work, rooted in the local context accompany each chapter to enable the readers to study the subject further. For example, the sixth chapter on ‘Why Economic Theory Matters’ has a suggestive list of G. Omkarnath’s 2012 book Economics: A Primer for India (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan) and Arun Kumar’s 2017 book Understanding the Black Economy and Black Money in India (New Delhi: Aleph) among others.

The highlighting of economic thought in literary fiction and political writing is also a novel concept put to use in this work. For instance, to exhibit the complicacies in the land ownership issues in India, the author highlights the work of Hansda Sowvendra Sekhar in his short story, The Adivasi Will Not Dance. The story is centered on the fierce agitation by landless Adivasi people (tribals) to reclaim their land-owning status. A reference is also made to Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste, which analyses the role played by the caste system in the economy, arguing that caste is characterised not just a division of labour but a division of labourers. Thomas deftly incorporates gender concerns in the recognition of the extent of labor immobility that women face, depending on the specificities of caste, community, and region. India fares poorly in terms of female labor force participation, Thomas brings the manifold reasons behind this to the fore using literary texts. He cites Shrilal Shukla’s Raag Darbari, Kota Neelima’s Death of a Moneylender, and Skybaaba’s short story Vegetarians Only to exhibit the socio-cultural specificities that inhibit women’s labor mobility.  The author’s use of literary texts emphasises that economic behavior has been studied in fictional contexts as well. This further strengthens the understanding and provides a junction for the humanities and social sciences to interact.

The structure of the book reflects the author’s “context-measurement-theory-policy” approach, comprising nine chapters with detailed references and an index. Chapters 1 and 2 essentially introduce the idea of economics and conceptualize the macroeconomy. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 deal with the theoretical and foundational framework of the macroeconomy, addressing the issues of money, interest rate, output, employment levels, and economic growth. Chapters 7 and 8 concern itself with the understanding of ground realities and what could be the relevant policy implications for solving macroeconomic problems.  Chapters 6 and 9 ultimately provide a philosophy behind the study of the discipline, unearthing the underlying theory explaining both monetary and non-monetary transactions.

This book deserves ample praise for centering the role of socio-economic factors in economic processes, an approach lacking in textbooks set in the mainstream tradition. It leverages the social context of India to highlight issues of caste, class, and gender, and their importance for all-round development of the economy. Thomas’ Macroeconomics: An Introduction undoubtedly simplifies otherwise abstract macroeconomic theories by setting them in a context accessible to its readers through use of novel methods. Perhaps its most significant contribution is in equipping its readers to unlearn orthodox explanations and develop an enriched understanding of the economy that harnesses the wealth of the pluralist traditions in economics.

  1. Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Patna ↩︎

What Palestine teaches teachers of politics and law

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By Afreen Faridi1

Liberal legal and political theory, morality and institutions which uphold the Westphalian human rights charter have dug their grave in Palestine. Magna Carta, Bill of Rights, Universal Declaration of Human Rights … are dead. They have time and again failed to be useful to the Global South and its peoples who continue to face imperial and neo-colonial forces.

The death of over 8,000 Palestinians (editor’s note: the number of Palestinians murdered has risen to 31,184 since the original publication of this article) in the current assault on the Gaza Strip, excluding those in the West Bank, with no end in sight of the indiscriminate assault on civilians, is testament to the vacuous nature of such institutions. The cry of the people facing a genocide is not carried over to gilded halls where a spectacle is made by supposed White saviours over language to be utilised in powerless resolutions as children die.

We are witness to how post-War institutions like the United Nations, International Court of Justice, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the European Union filibuster, indulge and finance a racialised notion of exploitative violence as justice and freedom. Meanwhile, people of colour are demonised as barbarians who need to be occupied by “peacekeeping forces” and any resistance at their end is vilified as terrorism.

The televised genocide of Palestinians is clear evidence of how White liberal States and societies can flout international conventions— of their own creation— freely and with absolute impunity.

This lack of moral hesitation is clearly shared between States driven by hegemonic groups which rely on fascism and authoritarianism to fuel capitalist accumulation through a militarised industrial complex. One can see a complicity of the State, corporations and civil society in their hypocrisy while belittling and obfuscating the deaths of their counterparts in Palestine.

The most nefarious alliance is seen amongst Western media houses and their journalists as Palestinian journalists are killed and their families fatally targeted as retribution while they show the world the true toll of the occupation.

Our roles as scholars of law, political scientists and faculty in solidarity, and our moral duty, must be to rethink how Western morality, theory and institutions are taught in the classrooms of the Global South. We need to be cautious especially when the former are applied to the Global South as methodological tools for research, analysis and policy practice. As such, we must be conscious of three trends:

Appropriation of emancipatory ideals and language

The discourse on the Palestinian struggle is cornered by terms such as equality, feminism, decolonisation, and self-determination being usurped by a bigoted group in power while weaponising Islamophobia and anti-Semitism against Palestinians and their supporters.

The ongoing Nakba is couched in sectarian terms such as self-determination and decolonisation to justify the creation of an ethno-nationalist State masquerading as a democracy. One witnesses liberal feminisms creating the spectacle of Brown girl bosses in White spaces showing unfettered support for indiscriminate violence against Brown societies.

This has been spectacularly mobilised on social media with the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) women brigades posing for gender parity with guns which deny the same right to Palestinian women, and Kamala Harris’ endorsement of the American–Israeli nexus as the first woman of colour in the White House.

Furthermore, oppression of Palestine exhibits bias within political pundits and lobbyists preaching non-violence as the only legitimate tool of resistance for people of colour as they face erasure by a globally armed force. This stance exists in diametric opposition to the stance on Ukrainian response to Russian armed forces.

Human rights discourse is being used for rainbow washing to create a façade of democracy which hides majoritarian bias and apartheid laws which allow for political representatives to publicly dehumanise Palestinians as animals to be set for slaughter.

We see armed settlers hiding under the mask of civilians, acting as State-sponsored paramilitary forces while infiltrating refugee camps and residential settlements to kill and displace. We must be wary of convoluted statements by thinkers who engage in false equivalence and force the victim to justify their positions as they lay dying.

Privatised technology as a centre of power

In a continuation of history, the western military industrial complex develops weapons and tests them to kill and confine the oppressed while contravening international conventions. Technology has also been used by the settler State to develop architectures of control both in the physical and digital realm which are exported globally.

While the genocidal use of military tech against civilians is conspicuous, the use of artificial intelligence and social media platforms against Palestinians is nebulous but equally insidious. The role of the internet as a public good, as essential as the air needed to breathe and survive, cannot be overstated.

The power of corporations over access to the internet and the flow of information using social media platforms is understated. For Palestine, we see technology being used to perpetuate disinformation and erase the truth, surveil, and silence the voices of the victims and dissidents, and manufacture genocidal consent among a global audience. The suspension of internet and mobile services by the occupation, especially in Gaza, only aims to perpetuate unabated violence against Palestinians during the blackout.

The struggles to establish just perspectives and fact-check information flow are made even more difficult with the use of artificial intelligence which shows bias in their models. The pervasiveness of digital technologies and their significance within classrooms cannot be ignored owing to the increasing reliance of students on such technology to seek information, learn and develop opinions.

Palestine as a site of more-than-human injustice

The images of Palestinian children in Gaza emerging with their furry friends in their arms and cats being rescued from the rubble of bombed apartments have tugged the strings of our hearts.

However, this is not the extent of beyond-human trauma in Palestine. The struggle to save Palestinians is to stop the systemic erasure of indigenous societies which were tied to and co-existed alongside the land upon which they lived. The bombs that fall on the children of Palestine are enforcing a rift between people and the environment as a form of environmental apartheid.

We see a nation-State terraforming the environment and polluting it as settler colonialism is enacted. Agrarian lands are dug up and hillsides converted to settler residences. Sea shores and sea waters bear the brunt of occupational blockade. Olive trees are burned down, fertile lands ruined and cut off by apartheid walls. Water sources are poisoned as a form of biological warfare. Native pastoralists and their livestock are displaced, native flora and fauna killed alongside Palestinians. The air is poisoned by chemical warfare and bomb plumes, massive emissions due to military infrastructure.

The famed water management and agrarian practices which irrevocably change native biomes are a tool to wrest control over domestic production and finance the settler colonial project. The myth that settlers brought bloom to a desert which was uninhabited and untended is one of the myriad ways in which sustainability narratives are used to greenwash colonialism in Palestine and other regions of the Global South.

Justice for Palestine is simultaneously a preservation of animal and plant life, caring for diverse biospheres and a systemic change towards climate justice.

A question of education

So, what do we do as educators? There already exists evidence of White legal and political theorists selectively applying notions of fairness and justice using patriarchal and racist morality to create institutions which disrupt native values and provide for the extraction of wealth through modern regimes.

As legal and political thinkers and instructors, we need to re-centre such critiques in our classrooms and contextualise them against local injustices. At the same time, we need to rethink rights and justice as collaborative regimes by bringing back local knowledge from colonial obscurity, all the while being careful lest we fall for conservative interpretations of vain glorious pasts.

We must not teach young learners the quintessential colonial method— wait for a people to die, make a museum of their genocide, then set up departments of decoloniality over their mass graves. We must not follow tokenistic models set by prolifically White departments with indigenous names which sell the story of the dead native for academic funding.

Even as Palestinians struggle to survive, they are teaching us important lessons in humanity and critical thought. As legal scholars, political scientists and teachers we must borrow their courage and integrity and extend them to our classrooms.

As educators we must ask our students to speak truth to power when it is hardest and matters the most. Let us continuously speak about all the Palestines in the world and strive for a new Palestinian charter of more-than-human rights to emerge where children are not martyred before the rest of us learn our lessons.

This article was first published on 29 October 2023 by The Leaflet and is reposted here with permission.

  1. Afreen Faridi is a Doctoral Candidate at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and founder of the Pastoral and Himalayan Academic Discourses Network (PAHAD). They can be reached on Twitter/X @aamacademic. ↩︎

Statement: In Solidarity with Palestine

By Decolonising and Diversifying Economics (D-Econ)

Decolonising and Diversifying Economics (D-Econ) expresses its unreserved solidarity with the Palestinian civilians and an unequivocal condemnation of the war crimes perpetrated by the occupying Israeli regime. We stand in support of the hundreds of thousands of allies to the right of self-determination of the Palestinian people, who have been the target of a vicious and deceitful hate campaign. We appeal to academic workers and networks committed to human rights, social justice, and anti-imperialism, to speak out against the Israeli occupation of Palestine and oppression of Palestinians.

Recent events bear emphatic testimony to not only the brutal violence of imperialism, but also the hegemony of neocolonial powers over the public sphere. The brutal crimes of Israeli occupation have been justified by a misinformation campaign validated and perpetuated by the imperialist nations. Progressive and democratic voices against this violence have been sanctioned, criminalised, and remain under threat. The objective of this has been to dehumanise a whole people and rationalise their collective punishment. In this increasingly polarised media and political landscape, we appeal for a reclaiming of space to express support for the rights of oppressed people across the world.

As academics and activists committed to decolonisation, it is essential in our engagement with the media and in the classroom to situate recent events in a broader historical and political context. This includes but is not limited to the historical colonisation of Palestine, struggles for decolonisation and their suppression, the role of US and UK imperialism in shaping the global economic order, and the Global North’s complicity in the oppression of Palestinian people. It is imperative that we critique the marginalist and biased view of social conflict that currently dominates the public sphere, whereby the violence of the oppressed stands suspended in time and space. It has no history, it is asocial, it deserves no future, and is immoral as violence intrinsically is. But a moral imperative drives the violence of the oppressor to respond to immoral violence. This hierarchy of human lives is the letter and spirit of colonialism. We categorically reject this view.

Instead, we appeal to the scholarly and activist community to critically engage with these events through anti-colonial perspectives to understand and challenge the injustice that has been unfolding in Palestine. This Eurocentric distortion embedded in the dominant view of the world and the rights of Palestinians in it, is supported by unequal power relations in the production of knowledge. To challenge these power structures, we must reclaim space to articulate and protest for the rights of oppressed and colonised people across the world, the very praxis of decolonisation.

Finally, we call on institutions across the world, including our own universities, to stand up in solidarity with the Palestinian people and to protect those who speak up against the occupation of Palestine, including academics in Palestine itself. The role of universities should not be to parrot the Islamophobic anti-Palestine line of many governments simply, but rather to create safe spaces for critical thought and resistance to oppression.