This chapter considers a range of internal and external restrictions (individual, institutional, national, and international) on the production of knowledge, which is situated in the dominant framing discourse of global neoliberalism. Recognising forms of restrictions on knowledge relates to how academic freedom itself is constructed, invoking the proposition that certain prerequisites are necessary for the practice of academic freedom. The chapter examines how university governance and funding mechanisms can constrain academic freedom. Within the university context, it extends its consideration to the role of ethics committees, bureaucratisation of university procedures, role of students, and university environment. The role of self-censorship at the individual level and the notion of scholars’ responsibility as well as freedom are critically examined. State-level restrictions are also considered. The chapter also situates these university-level and state-level restrictions within transnational restrictions, including international law and movement across borders.

The pervasive informal privatization of public institutions seen in urban secondary schooling is a key component of the lived citizenship of different social strata. Many of the arguments in the book depend on an appreciation of the implications of pervasive private tutoring for the everyday school and for articulations of citizenship and national belonging among students. Privatization-by-tutoring affects almost every aspect of school life in Egypt, from whether students and teachers come to school or enter classrooms to whether the morning assembly ritual is performed. It is, however, the different ways in which informal tutoring markets are established within and alongside formal institutions in the three types of school that reflect the functioning of state institutions and differentiated modes of lived and imagined citizenship. The chapter dissects the trajectories, functioning and implications of informal privatization in different tiers of schooling. It explains enrollment in tutoring, its costs, the related forms of coercion, cheating, truancy, narratives of conscientious teachers and tropes of neoliberal subjectivity.

In this chapter Sharae Deckard reminds us that far from being a “green” country, Ireland’s carbon emissions are currently among the highest per capita in the EU and continue to rise, so that the Irish state falls far short of the reductions required by the Paris Agreement.” The chapter traces the history of Ireland’s energy regimes that range from turf, coal, oil, and more recently, renewables. In a comprehensive survey of the energy regimes and their representation in Irish literature Deckard argues that literary and cultural representations play a crucially subversive role in the contemporary neoliberal environment by offering “alternative conceptions of value that repudiate capitalism’s devaluing of human and extra-human life.”

The everyday policing of common offences tells us a great deal about what kind of social order a states promote. Yet, this introductory chapter argues that while the ‘high-policing’ of behaviours deemed to threaten regime security in the Middle East has attracted scholarly attention, the ‘low-policing’ of more mundane, interpersonal disputes and citizens’ grievances has been largely overlooked. In a bid to address that deficit, this book studies the development of the state’s civil police agency, the Jordanian Public Security Directorate, since the formation of the modern state, and, drawing on legal anthropology as well as political science, focuses on how it manages certain kinds of common disputes in coordination and/or competition with other societal actors. The introduction emphasises the book’s key message, that rather than being primarily concerned with law enforcement, the police are preoccupied with order. In the Jordanian context, the type of order they promote is heavily influenced by tribal traditions, which have more recently been merged with conceptions of civic duty and neoliberal prerogatives. The chapter also affirms the importance of challenging binaries between ‘coercive’ and ‘consensual’ policing, by showing that in pursuit of hegemony, the police have recourse to varied strategies of power.

Chapter 1 introduces the study with a vignette of a critical case from Yungay, Santiago. There, a group of residents with no prior background in activism, in a city with unsympathetic political institutions and leadership, organized and achieved remarkable and sustained policy impact and stopped planned redevelopment in their neighborhood. The chapter then presents the key questions: How have citizens adapted resistance against urban redevelopment to profound political, social, and technological changes? And under what conditions do they reach their goals? The chapter justifies the focus on struggles against urban redevelopment: Urban redevelopment plays a critical role in contemporary capitalism and has important social and political implications. Investigating the struggles against redevelopment, in turn, can lead to broader insights about contentious politics. Finally, the chapter presents an overview of argument and a plan for the rest of the book.

Having defined the field, Chapter 3 critically analyses the surrounding contemporary formal legal framework for indigenous peoples’ land rights that speak to development projects. This chapter examines jurisprudential strands and structural gaps such as poor accountability of private actors and the fragmented due diligence in this field. Emerging from this analysis are identifiable themes that matter for rights in development project contexts. The point is to assess the existing coping strategies of formal law in this setting, to give hard law context to the private mechanisms explored and to appreciate judicial and non-judicial mechanisms as part of an ecosystem of remedies in this field. The chapter asks why, despite the array of indigenous rights cases and legal declarations, international and domestic norms rarely pierce the highly regulated veil of private mechanisms that secure a transnational development project – failing to work as a legal threat. Whilst later chapters illustrate other reasons such as power and short-term behaviour that contribute to law’s overshadowing, my aim here is to show how the law endogenously contributes to insecurity for indigenous communities in development contexts.

This chapter focuses on growth transition from the “Golden Age” (from 1950 to the early 1970s) of rapid growth, lower wealth inequality, and the absence of international financial crises during the stagflation in the 1970s (inflation, monetary instability, stagnation) and then to the neoliberal era (with volatile growth and frequent crises) in the core economies of North America and western Europe. The chapter identifies both economic and political economy factors surrounding the stagflation of the 1970s, in the context of challenges to US hegemony, and postauthoritarian transition in southern Europe. The chapter examines the frequency and intensity of recessive episodes and their impact on per capita GDP and investment from 1970 to 2015, affecting both core advanced countries and the European periphery.

This chapter explores the reinvention of the nation in black and Asian British writing since the late twentieth century. It situates this task in relation to two contrary influences that continue to influence the imagining of Britain at large: the comprehension of Britain as a multiracial country with a long history of migration and diversity, and those atavistic, illiberal, racially exclusive conceptions of the nation, also longstanding, which found their apotheosis in the ‘Brexit’ referendum result of 2016. It proceeds by considering how writers in the 1990s challenged Britain’s wilful ignorance of its dark imperial history by writing about the nation’s slaving past and its historical and cultural legacies. It considers, next, how writers at the beginning of the new millennium turned to Europe as a way of embedding a consciousness of postcolonial Britain’s in a strategically continental frame, not least to challenge Britain’s false sense of its splendid isolation from Europe. It closes by assessing how several writers portray the precarious condition of contemporary Britain as a neoliberal concern, but without fully giving up hope on the demotic, progressive potential of the idea of the nation as an instrument of inclusivity and democracy.