Progress in Political Economy Southern Interregnum

This book maps the ruptures and mutations that are currently reshaping the political economy of the global South and the wider world-system. Analysing political and economic dynamics across Brazil, India, China, and South Africa, it proposes a novel reading of durable crisis, hegemonic projects, and possibilities for popular resistance. Southern interregnum maps the ruptures and mutations that are reshaping the political economy of the global South. The contemporary global South, the book proposes, is in the throes of an interregnum – a period, as Gramsci put it in his reflections on the inter-war era, in which the old is dying and the new cannot be born.Crafted around a comparative conjunctural analysis of Brazil, India, South Africa, and China, and set against the backdrop of deep geopolitical transformations, the volume explores how governing elites across the global South work to remake hegemony in the face of deep disjunctures between accumulation and legitimation. In contexts where neoliberalization has generated perverse inequalities and rampant precarity, popular protests have unsettled hegemonic configurations and thrown up durable crisis across Asia, Latin America, and Africa. This book explores how dominant classes and governing elites across four emerging powers have attempted to navigate this interregnum.Focusing on the trajectories of hegemonic projects centred on distinctive ideologies, institutions, and practices – a new authoritarianism in Brazil; neoliberal Hindu nationalism in India; a patronage-violence complex in South Africa; digital accumulation and global expansion in China – Southern interregnum proposes a novel critical reading of the convulsions that are currently reshaping the political economy of the global South and reordering the vectors of economic and political power in the world-system in the early twenty-first century. How do governing elites in the global South attempt to remake hegemony in a conjuncture of durable crisis? This is the question at the core of Southern interregnum, a comparative conjunctural analysis of hegemonic projects in Brazil, India, China, and South Africa. Working with a Gramscian notion of crisis, centred on the interregnum as an enduring period of instability and uncertainty, in which hegemonic authority erodes and competing projects for crisis resolution emerge, the book proposes a novel critical reading of the convulsions that are currently reshaping the political economy of the global South and the world-system.Mapping the variegated trajectories of elite projects to reconcile accumulation and legitimation – and probing the limits of these projects – the book breaks new ground in the study of the contemporary global South.

Pages: 208, Hardcover, Manchester University Press