Kasper Arabi

Susan Strange meets the everyday: The mundane sources of structural power Kasper Arabi discuss the key points from his new RIS article.

'Susan Strange meets the everyday: The mundane sources of structural power' 🌎

🎉 Read a summary of this fascinating new @kasperarabi.bsky.social @risjnl.bsky.social article 👉 buff.ly/96iK4c2

🌟 Want more? Read the full article: buff.ly/sm0UU7q

@cambup-polsci.cambridge.org @warwickpais.bsky.social

🚨New First View Article🚨

"Susan Strange meets the everyday: The mundane sources of structural power" by Kasper Arabi is now available #OpenAccess!

Check it out here 📄 ➡️ buff.ly/JhgVo3k

Many thanks, Nat. This paper really grew out of the Strange conference in London last year.

Thanks for introducing me to both Susan Strange and everday research, Ben! Had to find my slightly warped copy of States and Markets, which I originally bought for the 2019 IPE specialization at UCPH, to write this!

The paper is published as open access and can be found here: doi.org/10.1017/S026...

While everyday grievances were filtered out by the selective context for decades (due to factors such as cheap credit), the perceptual selectivity of the US state has shifted and paved the way for those perceptions to inform the most powerful offices in DC.

I illustrate these mechanisms empirically using Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs. Zooming in on transformations of the American sphere of production, I conclude that the tariffs partly can be explained by shifting everyday perceptions in former US industrial powerhouses.

Drawing on state theory, I argue that a perceptual selectivity is key to understanding the relationship between the everyday and how the state projects its power internationally. While some everyday perceptions have access to (international) policymaking, others are blocked by the selective context.

To overcome this, I approach the state as an intermediary between the everyday on one hand and structural power in the international system on the other. A given state’s deployment of structural power, my argument goes, depends on everyday legitimacy to remain stable.

While more than 35 years have passed since Susan Strange published her four-faceted notion of structural power in States and Markets, the concept still offers much to analyses of contemporary international affairs. Yet, its everyday underpinnings remain vastly undertheorized.

New paper out in @risjnl.bsky.social! 🚨

I explore the everyday foundations of structural power in the international system and advance a new theoretical framework that reconceptualizes the state as a mediator between the two levels.

Time for a short thread! 🧵👇

Ketchup Is the Whitest Sauce: Memes as Silly/Serious Bordered Spaces in International Relations Abstract. This paper draws on previous scholarship on humor, memes, and seriousness in International Relations to produce a novel means for understanding o

Do you like ketchup? Not only are you wrong, but you may be a fascist. Not really, but in my 🍅New Publication🍅 "Ketchup Is the Whitest Sauce", in International Political Sociology, I argue that memes about ketchup showcase Neo-Nazi solidarity.
academic.oup.com/ips/article/...

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Happy pancake day everyone! Here’s a brand new recipe that I’ve spent months working on. Please download and tell your friends! It’s called:

Fantasy and the figure: ideological bodies in the Nordic Resistance Movement

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Congrats, Chris! 🎉

Sejt! Tillykke, Rune. Det ser vildt spændende ud!!

The end of economics hegemony? studying economic ideas in a post-neoliberal world Since the 1990s, a particular approach to analysing the political influence of economic ideas has emerged in International Political Economy (IPE)—often labelled ‘the ideational turn’. This approac...

New article out📑
"The end of economic hegemony? Studying economic ideas in a post-neoliberal world"

In the 20th century, debates on economic policy were closely tied to academic economics. From Keynesianism to neoliberalism, economic schools of thought have shaped historical epochs.

Opening the Black Box of ‘Convergence’ in the European Monetary Union: A Discursive Analysis ‘Convergence’ stands out as a prominent signifier in discourse about the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), recently also gaining prominence in debates within Comparative Political Economy (...

🚨Publication alert! 🚨

Happy to announce the publication of my first solo academic work! I critique how 'convergence' is deployed in debates about the Eurozone crisis and beyond, offering a constructivist edge to discussions about capitalist restructuring in the Eurozone.

doi.org/10.1111/jcms...

Property, nature, and the freedom to roam This paper explores if people should be able to enjoy a freedom to roam, understood as the right of every person to stay on landowners’ properties, regardless of the will of the landowners. I make ...

So, I recently had my first academic article published. It's called Property, Nature, and the Freedom to Roam, and it's open access. I argue for the freedom to roam and against the view that private property requires the right to exlude. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Thrilled to have the first article of my PhD published in @cpsjournal.bsky.social. Focusing on Denmark in the 1910s, the article shows how democratic politicians use foreign revolutions opportunistically to attract voters. (1/4)

The 2024 Elections: Votes cast for Trump over ‘the economy’ may be as much about race as inflation Many commentators have sought to explain Donald Trump’s 2024 election win through Americans’ concerns about inflation and the economy more broadly. Through her research which explores how Americans…

My first blog looking at race, 'the economy' and the 2024 election. This one is for American #PoliSci scholars, looks at the perennial polling of 'the economy' as the most important issue in US elections. Please let me know what you think. #PoliSky wp.me/p3I2YF-exK

A Second Twenty Years’ Crisis? - Progress in Political Economy (PPE) How is E.H. Carr representative of mid-twentieth century intellectuals who tried to understand not so much the political irruptions of their time, but rather deeper disruptions within the world’s poli...

Randall Germain asking “How is E.H. Carr representative of mid-C20th intellectuals who tried to understand disruptions within the world’s political economy?”
@seanmolloyir.bsky.social
@georgelawson.bsky.social

I put together a starter pack of people who work on political economy histories, and intersections between history and political economy. Let me know if you would like to be added or have suggestions on people to add.

Overcoming methodological statism: new avenues for hegemony research The course of contemporary international affairs has catapulted the scholarship on inter-state hegemony into an important period of progress and development. Forwarded as Hegemony Studies 3.0, a ne...

The full piece has been published with Open Access and can be found here:

doi.org/10.1080/0969...

(8/8)

I hope this piece encourages IPE scholars to rediscover hegemony studies and makes current hegemony scholars aware of recent developments within IPE. Doing so, I argue, will allow the scholarship’s current period of progress and development to continue for even longer.
(7/8)

However, by highlighting recent developments within IPE as ways forward, I show how hegemony scholarship has parted ways with IPE over the past ~20 years. While hegemony studies were once an integrated part of IPE, they now seem more aligned with IR and/or Security Studies.
(6/8)

To move beyond this, I point to the everyday turn in IPE and the broader (re)historicization of the field. These are just suggestions, and I am sure there are many other ways to overcome methodological statism.
(5/8)

I call this methodological statism in an attempt to highlight how important non-statist, domestic processes, practices, and actors are largely absent in the scholarship’s methodological and analytical strategies - despite their recognition in theory.
(4/8)

These are exciting developments! However, despite good intentions, I find that this new domestic focus is still characterized by a state-centered bias that treats the domestic sphere of the hegemon as if it were equal to the hegemonic state and its formal institutions.
(3/8)

A lot of fascinating studies on hegemony have been published recently. Expanding the boundaries of the scholarship, researchers are increasingly embracing intra-state dynamics and domestic non-state actors as part of hegemony studies.
(2/8)

Reposting on this platform:

🚨Publication alert! 🚨

Happy to see this paper has found its home in RIPE! I address Hegemony Studies 3.0 and argue that contemporary studies of inter-state hegemony suffer from widespread methodological statism.

What does that mean? I explain below. 🧵👇
(1/8)