"Disrupted Dreams of Development: Neoliberal Efficiency and Crisis in Angola"

Seminários GI
Qui . 18 Fev . 11h00 a 12h30
ONLINE
"Disrupted Dreams of Development: Neoliberal Efficiency and Crisis in Angola"
Jon Schubert 
Organização: 
GI identidades, Identidades, Culturas e Vulnerabilidades

Jon Schubert (Brunel University London) falará sobre desenvolvimento, neoliberalismo e crise em Angola.

 

Entrar no seminário (18 de Fevereiro, 11h), pela platafporma Zoom:

https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/j/83081148262  

 

Título

Disrupted Dreams of Development: Neoliberal Efficiency and Crisis in Angola 

Resumo

Thanks to oil revenues Angola has, since the end of the war in 2002, largely eschewed the usual donor conditionalities in its state-led reconstruction process; the 2014 oil price drop, however, revealed the limits of this economic miracle. Coupled with a long-overdue political transition inside the ruling party this moment of designated crisis has opened spaces for elites to inject their continued projects of accumulation with the moralising language of neoliberalism — talk of efficiency, responsibility, and the proverbial tightening of the belt. Based on fieldwork around the recently modernised transport hub of Lobito, the article examines how these tropes have been deployed to position Angola as a ‘business-friendly’ environment and justify largely self-inflicted austerity measures. By examining the everyday working of real-existing neoliberalism, the paper suggests that moments of crisis provide a fertile ground to advance, through neoliberal rhetoric, agendas of capital capture, cloaking them in the mantle of commonsensical reasonableness and national solidarity.  

Bio

Jon Schubert is a political and economic anthropologist with extensive ethnographic fieldwork experience in urban Angola and Mozambique. He is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, Brunel University London, and carrying out research on infrastructures, oil-dependency, and crisis in Lobito, Angola. He has held teaching and research positions and fellowships at the Universities of Leipzig, Sussex, and the Graduate Institute, Geneva.  He is the author of Working the System: A Political Ethnography of the New Angola (Cornell University Press 2017), an editor at allegralaboratory.net, and a co-editor of the IAI's book series 'Politics and Development in Contemporary Africa'.