PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Ilias Alami is a postdoctoral researcher at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of the political economy of money and finance, development and international capital flows, the geographies of global finance and financialisation, state capitalism, and race/class/coloniality. He has published peer-reviewed research articles in Geoforum, New Political Economy, Review of Radical Political Economics, Review of African Political Economy, and Development and Change. Prior to joining Maastricht University, he was a Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Manchester. He also held visiting positions at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo and the University of Johannesburg.
An engaging book that makes a distinctive contribution to understanding the dynamics and contradictions of financial capital in emerging markets. Drawing upon research from the cases of South Africa and Brazil, the author asks important questions about the impact of the expansion of financial capital flows to states in the Global South. Alami challenges the assumption that state financial management practices are shaped by top-down processes of policy diffusion - rather, they are multidirectional circuits of policy design and practice that nonetheless serve to reinscribe the racialized, gendered and class based relations of subordination and domination that are embedded in contemporary global financial markets. An accomplished piece of work that will no doubt make an important theoretical and empirical contribution to the study of the politics of global finance. - Juanita Elias, Professor in International Political Economy, Warwick University, UK. This is a highly innovative, theoretically astute and timely intervention in debates concerning the place of emerging markets within the changing global financial order. By drawing on a range of literatures in a geographical political economy tradition, Alami clearly shows how and why geography matters in the production of cross border finance for emerging markets and the important implications of this for state policy making. By combining theoretical work from a range of disciplines with in-depth case studies of Brazil and South Africa, it is a must read analysis for researchers and practitioners concerned with understanding the changing political economy of global finance as it relates to emerging markets. - Sarah Hall, Professor of Economic Geography, University of Nottingham, UK. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork, this book offers a rich and original approach to cross-border financial management in 'emerging markets'. It focuses on the politics of money and its power to influence governments and the balance of social forces in favour of capital: this is the terrorism of money. The study examines in detail the financial development and cross-border financial policies and outcomes in Brazil and South Africa, especially after the Global Financial Crisis. This book is essential reading for students and scholars working in the field. - Alfredo Saad-Filho, Professor of International Development, King's College London, UK. Theoretically sophisticated, historically grounded and politically alive, Alami's study of the ongoing struggles of Brazil, South Africa and other Global South states to manage volatile cross-border flows of financial capital in the face of fractured local class relations is a razor-sharp contribution to the burgeoning critical literature on relations of money, power and space. - Brett Christophers, Professor of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University, Sweden.
