Globalisation and Crisis
Public Lecture Series 2017
The Ghent Centre for Global Studies cordially invites you to its annual public lecture series, from February to May 2017. This year’s theme is Globalisation and Crisis. Crisis is omnipresent in our contemporary globalised world: from the financial crisis to the environmental crisis, from the refugee crisis to political crisis. The GCGS has invited international experts to offer critical and cutting-edge analyses of these different (discourses of) crisis from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Programme overview
Economic and financial crisis – February 28
The Competitiveness-Crisis Nexus in the EU Politics of Internal Devaluation, byAngela Wigger (Radboud University Nijmegen)
When? Tuesday 28 February, 13:00-14:00
Where? FacultaireRaadzaalRechten, Emile Braunschool, Volderstraat 3, 9000 Gent
Environmental crisis, energy and global justice – March 14
New approaches and frontiers in energy justice
by Benjamin Sovacool (University of Sussex)
When? Tuesday 14 March, 13:00-14:00
Where? FacultaireRaadzaalRechten, Emile Braunschool, Volderstraat 3, 9000 Gent
Migration and refugees: whose crisis? – March 28
Double session, co-organized by the Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees (CESSMIR) and the Migration Working Group (MWG) of Ghent University
Whatcrisis? Whose crisis? Drivers, journeys and responses to the Mediterranean boat migration, by NandoSigona (University of Birmingham)
Transitory Lives: Whose Crisis? Whose Responsibility?by Elisabeth Kirtsoglou (Durham University)
When? Tuesday 28 March, 13:00-15:00
Where? Filmzaal Plateau, Paddenhoek 3, 9000 Gent
Political crisis and the politics of crisis – May 2
A Geopolitics of Crisis in the European Union and beyond
by VirginieMamadouh (University of Amsterdam)
When? Tuesday 2 May, 13:00-14:00
Where? FacultaireRaadzaalRechten, Emile Braunschool, Volderstraat 3, 9000 Gent
Full programme
Economic and financial crisis – February 28
The Competitiveness-Crisis Nexus in the EU Politics of Internal Devaluation
by Angela Wigger (Radboud University Nijmegen)
In response to Chancellor Merkel’s call for a ‘Competitiveness Compact’ at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2013, the European Commission has launcheda package of new economic policies that are argued to bekey for realisinga "Genuine Monetary and Economic Union".Part and parcel of this package is the goal toreverse the longstanding structural trend of deindustrialization in Europe. In the Communication ‘For a European Industrial Renaissance’ (2014), the Commission's aim is to increase Europe’s manufacturing share from currently 15 percent to 20 percent of EU GDP by 2020, arguing that ‘a strong industrial base will be of key importance for Europe’s economic recovery and competitiveness’. Boosting the competitiveness of EU based manufacturing industries may sound politically appealing, particularly against the backdrop of a rising popular fatigue with further fiscal austerity and the concomitant call for an overall belt tightening. Reforms in the spirit of competitiveness are deceptive however. What may appear as a resurgence of an active Keynesian-type of industrial policy in fact seeks to calibrate neoliberal structural adjustment programmes. The suggested measures essentially boil down to nothing else than what is referred to as "internal devaluation", which lays the burden of adjustment on labour rather than capital. The presentation will outline the Commissions' new competitiveness crisis strategy against the backdrop of the overall crisis management, and show how and why the current policy course entails the prospect of a further deepening of structural imbalances and economic disintegration in the Eurozone.
Dr. Angela Wigger is Associate Professor Global Political Economy at the Department of Political Science of the Radboud University Nijmegen. Her research focuses on the global economic crisis, crisis responses and power configurations with respect to political resistance. She is specialised in the political economy of the EU, its competitiveness-fetish, the issue of debt and over-indebtedness, and how the crisis of debt is (de-)politicised in the EU constitutes. Her publications include The Politics of European Competition Regulation. A Critical Political Economy Perspective (with H. Buch-Hansen, Routledge, 2011).
Tuesday 28 February, 13:00-14:00
FacultaireRaadzaalRechten, Emile Braunschool, Volderstraat 3, 9000 Gent
Attendance is free. Registration:
Environmental crisis, energy and global justice – March 14
New approaches and frontiers in energy justice
by Benjamin Sovacool (University of Sussex)
This lecture explores how concepts from justice and ethics can inform energy decision-making and highlight the futurity, fairness, and equity dimensions of energy production and use. It defines "energy justice" as a global energy system that fairly distributes both the benefits and costs of energy services, and one that contributes to more representative and inclusive energy decision-making. Such an assessment brings together core understandings of distributional and procedural justice alongside cosmopolitan interpretations of equity and recognitional notions of fairness. The presentation then focuses on six new frontiers or fruitful areas of future research. First is making the case for the involvement of non-Western justice theorists. Second is expanding beyond humans to look at the Rights of Nature or non-anthropocentric notions of justice. Third is focusing on cross-scalar issues of justice such as embodied emissions. Fourth is identifying business models and the co-benefits of justice. Fifth is better understanding the trade-offs within energy justice principles. Sixth is confronting utopian or falsely constructed justice discourses. The lecture argues in favour of "justice-aware" energy planning and policymaking, and it hopes that its (reconsidered) energy justice conceptual framework offers a critical tool to inform decision-making.
Dr. Benjamin K. Sovacool is Professor of Energy Policy at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the School of Business, Management, and Economics of the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, where he serves as Director of the Sussex Energy Group. Professor Sovacool works on issues pertaining to energy policy, energy security, climate change mitigation, and climate change adaptation. His publications include Energy Poverty(Oxford University Press, 2014),Global Energy Justice(Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Tuesday 14 March, 13:00-14:00
FacultaireRaadzaalRechten, Emile Braunschool, Volderstraat 3, 9000 Gent
Attendance is free. Registration:
Migration and refugees: whose crisis? – March 28
Double session, co-organized by the Centre for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees (CESSMIR) and the Migration Working Group (MWG) of Ghent University
What crisis? Whose crisis? Drivers, journeys and responses to the Mediterranean boat migration
by NandoSigona (University of Birmingham)
This talk offers a critical perspective on the EU’s refugee crisis analysing drivers and dynamics of Mediterranean boat migration in 2015. Drawing on a unique dataset of 500 interviews with refugees and migrants who reached Italy, Greece and Malta in 2015, I will contrast their experiences, motivations and expectations to EU and national responses to the ‘crisis’ highlighting the fallacy of some of the assumptions that inform European responses to boat migration.
NandoSigonais Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director of the Institute of Research into Superdiversity at the University of Birmingham. His research interests include: statelessness, diasporas and the state; Romani politics and anti-Gypsyism; ‘illegality’ and the everyday experiences of undocumented migrant children and young people; and crisis, governance and governmentality of forced migration in the EU; Mediterranean boat migration; Brexit and intra-European migration; and unaccompanied youth migration.
He is author or editor of books and journal’s special issues includingThe Oxford Handbook on Refugee and Forced Migration Studies(with FiddianQasmiyeh, Loescher and Long, 2014),Sans Papiers. The social and economic lives of undocumented migrants(with Bloch and Zetter, 2014) andDiasporas Reimagined(with Gamlen, Liberatore and NeveuKringelbach, 2015).Nando is also Associate Editor of the journalMigration Studies.He has written for Newsweek, The Independent, Libération, OpenDemocracy and The Conversation.
Transitory Lives: Whose Crisis? Whose Responsibility?
by Elisabeth Kirtsoglou (Durham University)
On the basis of original data collected in Greece in 2015 and 2016I willdemonstrate that the current ‘migration crisis’ is not simply the result of large or unmanageable flows of refugees reaching Europe, but rather, a direct consequence of the failure of a wide array of agents to fulfil their political and institutional roles in international protection.War, conflict and poverty related displacement has thus far been negotiated through the intensely problematic dichotomy between ‘refugees’ and ‘migrants’. As a consequence, the rights of persons who directly fulfilled the criteria of the 1951 Convention were heavily violated, while the historical and political routes of economic violence that produces ‘migrants’ remained unchallenged.A close examination of high-level strategies of responding to the refugee arrivals reveals a motif consistent with dominant neoliberal paradigms of governance. The EU systematically attempted to ‘sub-contract’ the management of arrivals to individual governments and promoted Regional Protection Programmes in third countries. Governments outsourced responsibilities to international NGOs that proved less than ready to cover the growing demands for humanitarian assistance. Key national and supranational agencies avoided the responsibility and ownership of a scheme of international protection by largely ‘contracting out’ the obligation to facilitate refugee passage to the third sector, solidarity networks, volunteers and local communities, As a result, an unprecedented ‘crisis’ has been produced, which resulted, in its turn, to the creation of multiple sites of exception and human rights violations. A critical analysis of political decisions and indecision, humanitarian anti-politics and refugee narratives, demonstrates an emerging model of citizenship in Europe, which is exclusionist, neo-orientalist and morally incompatible with a long-standing tradition of European moral and political values.
Dr. Elisabeth Kirtsoglou is a political anthropologist of South Europe and has published extensivelyon gender, cosmopolitanism and globalisation. She is currentlyleading anESRC grant on the Mediterranean migration crisis in Greece and Italy. She is a senior lecturer in the department of anthropology at Durham University and the Deputy Director of the Durham Global Security Institute.
Tuesday 28 March, 13:00-15:00
Filmzaal Plateau, Paddenhoek 3, 9000 Gent
Attendance is free. Registration:
Political crisis and the politics of crisis – May 2
A Geopolitics of Crisis in the European Union and beyond
by VirginieMamadouh (University of Amsterdam)
Approaching the many narratives of crisis circulating in present day Europe through the lens of political geography and critical geopolitics, the lecture will discuss the commonalities and differences between these crises: financial, economic, social, cultural, civilizational, demographic, migratory, and foremost the political one, aggravated by the contested attempts to develop policies to tackle these diverse crises. More specifically the talk focuses on geographical aspects of the political crises – considering governance and politics at the EU, the national and the local level, as well as the multiscalar policy networks and political mobilizations connected them. At stake is the ongoing re-imagination and renegotiation of the nexus between state, nation, territory and language in Europe, its so-called neighourhood and the rest of the world, first under the conditions of an uneven globalization, and now in a period that we might tentatively call a post-globalization era.
Dr.VirginieMamadouh is Associate Professor of Political and Cultural Geography at the University of Amsterdam, member of the Geographies of Globalisation Programme Group of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. She is co-editor of the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography (2015) and an editor of the international academic journalGeopolitics.Her research interests include European geopolitics, urban geography, new media and multilingualism.
Tuesday 2 May, 13:00-14:00
FacultaireRaadzaalRechten, Emile Braunschool, Volderstraat 3, 9000 Gent
Attendance is free. Registration: