Resisting water privatisation in Greece and Portugal

In response to the Eurozone crisis, austerity and restructuring has been imposed on the European Union’s (EU) peripheral member states in order to receive financial bailout loans. And yet, workers have not simply accepted these restructuring pressures. They have organised and fought back against austerity and enforced privatisation. In the article ‘Commodification and “the commons”: The politics of privatising public water in Greece and Portugal during the Eurozone Crisis’, published in the European Journal of International Relations (EJIR) and freely available at Nottingham eprints, Jamie Jordan and I comparatively assess the struggles against enforced water privatisation in Greece and Portugal set against the background of the structuring conditions surrounding the Eurozone crisis.

Norwegian elections 2017: Another right-wing victory - and a serious Labour defeat.

For many decades post-1945 Norway was governed by the social democratic Labour Party. It was credited with the establishment of the so-called Nordic model, characterised by an expansive welfare state, comparatively high living standards and low inequality within society. And yet, not only did an alliance led by the Labour Party lose general elections in 2013, now four years later it failed to defeat a right-wing government. The Norwegian Labour Party has to prepare itself for a prolonged period in opposition. In this guest post Asbjørn Wahl analyses the underlying dynamics of the recent elections and assesses the opportunities and problems for social democracy in Norway and beyond. 

Feed the world: Can trade liberalisation help to achieve global food security?

Photo by Jason Taellious

Free trade’s expansion into the realm of food and agriculture has given residents of the Global North access to a greater range of food at lower costs than ever before. As with most commodities since free trade was implemented globally during the 1980s and 1990s, food has been globalised. However since the 2008 global financial crisis critiques of this prevailing economic system have become more prominent. The wisdom of free trade economics is being questioned at an unprecedented level, with many seeing it as increasingly evident that the people of the Global South are being exploited for the benefit of those in rich nations. With the financial crisis came a food price crisis, which led to the number of people not receiving adequate nutrition reaching a level not seen in decades, with one in seven people going hungry worldwide.

Paradoxically, more food is being produced than ever, and the burden of hunger is tragically placed in developing countries. In this guest post, Angus Macleod analyses whether this crisis, and general malnourishment in the developing world, can be considered a result of the trade liberalisation policies which dominate global economics, and if so, how viable food sovereignty, the main alternative to this system, can be.