The Spectre of State Capitalism

Name: The Spectre of State Capitalism
Start: 2025-04-16T15:15:00+02:00
Location: Sölvegatan 18 B, 223 62 Lund, Sweden

Schedule

Wed, 16 Apr, 2025 at 03:15 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Sölvegatan 18 B, 223 62 Lund, Sweden | Lund, SN

Open lecture with Dr Ilias Alami, Assistant Professor in the Political Economy of Development, University of Cambridge
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.
Based on a recently published book, the lecture will argue 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. The lecture will offer 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. The lecture will 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. It will demonstrate 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.
See our website for more information: https://www.ace.lu.se/calendar/spectre-state-capitalism