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The Spectre of State Capitalism

14 November 2024, 5:30 pm–7:00 pm

spectre-of-state-capitalism

Join UCL IIPP in conversation with Ilias Alami, Myriam Nobre and Cecilia Rikap

This event is free.

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All

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Yes

Cost

Free

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IIPP Comms

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Join this fascinating discussion on Thursday 14th November 2024 at 17:30-19:00 (BST) at University College London (UCL) and online on zoom.

About this talk:

The state is back, and it means business. Since the turn of the 21st century, state-owned enterprises, sovereign funds, and policy banks have vastly expanded their control over assets and markets. Concurrently, governments have experimented with increasingly assertive modalities of statism, from techno-industrial policies and spatial development strategies to economic nationalism and trade and investment restrictions.

This book argues that we are currently witnessing a historic arc in the trajectories of state intervention, characterized by a drastic reconfiguration of the state's role as promoter, supervisor, shareholder-investor, and direct owner of capital across the world economy. It offers a comprehensive analysis of this “new state capitalism”, as commentators increasingly refer to it, and maps out its key empirical manifestations across a range of geographies, cases, and issue areas. Alami and Dixon show that the new state capitalism is rooted in deep geopolitical economic and financial processes pertaining to the secular development of global capitalism, as much as it is the product of the geoeconomic agency of states and the global corporate strategies of leading firms. The book demonstrates that the proliferation of muscular modalities of statist interventionism and the increasing concentration of capital in the hands of states indicate foundational shifts in global capitalism. This includes a growing fusion of private and state capital, and the development of flexible and liquid forms of property that collapse the distinction between state and private ownership, control, and management. This has fundamental implications for the nature and operations of global capitalism and world politics.

Meet the panel:

  • Speaker: Dr Ilias Alami | Assistant Professor in the Political Economy of Development in the Centre of Development Studies (CDS) and the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the University of Cambridge
  • Discussant: Myriam Nobre | Ph.D. Student in Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais/UFMG, Brazil
  • Chair: Dr Cecilia Rikap | Head of Research and Associate Professor in Economics at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP).

Read more about IIPP Conversations 2024-25

Learn more about the IIPP MPA programme

 

About the Speakers

Ilias Alami

Assistant Professor in the Political Economy of Development in the Centre of Development Studies (CDS) and the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at University of Cambridge

Ilias Alami
Dr Ilias Alami is an Assistant Professor in the Political Economy of Development in the Centre of Development Studies and the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining Cambridge, he held research and teaching positions at Uppsala University, Maastricht University, and Manchester University. He also held visiting positions at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Sao Paulo, the University of Johannesburg, and Sciences Po Paris. He holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Manchester. He is the author of Money Power and Financial Capital in Emerging Markets: Facing the Liquidity Tsunami (Routledge, 2019) and (with Adam Dixon) The Spectre of State Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2024). More about Ilias Alami

Cecilia Rikap

Head of Research and Associate Professor in Economics at UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

Cecilia
Cecilia Rikap (PhD in economics from the Universidad de Buenos Aires) is associate professor in Economics and Head of Research at IIPP- UCL. Until joining UCL, she was a permanent Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy (IPE) at City, University of London and programme director of the BSc in IPE at the same university. She is a tenure researcher of the CONICET, Argentina’s national research council, and associate researcher at COSTECH lab, Université de Technologie de Compiègne.

Cecilia’s research is rooted in the international political economy of science and technology and the economics of innovation. She currently studies the rising concentration of intangible assets leading to the emergence of intellectual monopolies, among others from digital and pharma industries, the distribution of intellectual (including data) rents, resulting geopolitical tensions and the effects of knowledge assetization on the knowledge commons and development. She has published two books on these topics. 1) “Capitalism, Power and Innovation: Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism uncovered” (Routledge), recently won the EAEPE Joan Robinson Prize Competition. 2) “The Digital Innovation Race: Conceptualizing the Emerging New World Order” (Palgrave), co-authored with B.A.K. Lundvall, focuses on the artificial intelligence race and clashes of power between the US and Chinese Big Tech, the US state and the Chinese states. Her recent work includes corporate planning of global production and innovation systems driven by intellectual monopolization and how these leading corporations, in particular tech giants, are developing state-like features, thus reshaping core and peripheral states. More about Cecilia Rikap

Myriam Nobre

PhD student in technology innovation at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil

myriam
Myriam Nbre (PhD student in technology innovation from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil) is an intellectual property analyst at the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation. Until taking a leave for a doctorate, she was Head of Technology Transfer at Embrapa and held several positions in her career with science, technology, and innovation management. Under her leadership, she established various strategic public-private partnerships which culminated in impactful technology licensing agreements that are re-shaping and co-creating new markets in the agricultural sector in Brazil. 

She has professional experience supporting the creation and implementation of some agricultural public policies, highlighting the Low Carbon Agricultural Plan which was designed as a response by the Federal Government to the environmental goals of the Paris Agreement. As a result of this work, the book “Low Carbon Agriculture in Brazil: technologies and implementation strategies” ) was published.

Myriam’s research is based on the economics of science, technology and innovation from the perspective of peripheral countries. She currently studies the relation of public policies, dynamic capabilities and the generation of public value in the Brazilian bioeconomy market. She is also interested in investigating innovation systems driven by intellectual monopolization in the agricultural sector. 

Finally, she is carrying out a period of visit at IIPP from October 2024 to March 2025 with the aim of generating joint research between the institutions.

More about Myriam Nobre