Description
The use of Karl Polanyi’s concepts and theories is receiving a new wave of appreciation in Political Economy. In particular, scholars are frequently using the idea of the Double Movement to understand recent social, political, and economic transformations in countries of the Global South. What does the transposition of this concept through both space and time elucidate? What does it obscure? In this paper, I argue that Polanyian analysis remains especially useful to explain the evolution between states, societies, and the economy during neoliberal transitions. It accounts for the rise of neoliberal state/economies through processes of globalization, and is also well-suited to explain counter-movements that led to post-neoliberal compromises and the expansion of welfare and social security in many emerging economies. On the other hand, I argue that its explanatory power in non-democratic contexts, when “re-embedding” happens without a significant push from below, remains limited. What we can do in these cases, I propose, is to complement Polanyian analysis by looking into what kind of State Projects, from a strategic-relational perspective, support this process. I illustrate the theoretical argument through a discussion of Thailand’s “embedded neoliberal” compromise in the years following the Asian Financial Crisis and IMF austerity policies.
