Predatory Economies

A study of the modes of predation used by and against the Sanema people of Venezuela. Predation is central to the cosmology and lifeways of the Sanema-speaking Indigenous people of Venezuelan Amazonia, but it also marks their experience of modernity under the socialist “Bolivarian” regime and its immense oil wealth. Yet predation is not simply violence and plunder. For Sanema people, it means a great deal more: enticement, seduction, persuasion. It suggests an imminent threat but also opportunity and even sanctuary. Amy Penfield spent two and a half years in the field, living with and learning from Sanema communities. She discovered that while predation is what we think it is—invading enemies, incursions by gold miners, and unscrupulous state interventions—Sanema are not merely prey. Predation, or appropriation without reciprocity, is essential to their own activities. They use predatory techniques of trickery in hunting and shamanism activities, while at the same time, they employ tactics of manipulation to obtain resources from neighbors and from the state. A richly detailed ethnography, Predatory Economies looks beyond well-worn tropes of activism and resistance to tell a new story of agency from an Indigenous perspective.

This book analyses conflict theory through one type of conflict in particular: manhunting, or predation.

A progressive economist challenges popular conservative-minded economic practices, in a scathing critique of Reagan-Bush policies that contends that the political right is misrepresenting the consequences of free-market and free-trade ideals. 50,000 first printing.

Russia's Market Economy is a seminal account of Russia's transition to the market, its tortuous development as a fledgling market economy through the 1990s, right through to its spectacular collapse in August 1998. Rather than beginning with the economic collapse, the book traces the historical mismanagement of Russian wealth through to the Soviet command economy, and on to Gorbachev. Stefan Hedlund finally discusses what lessons should be learned from the damage inflicted on the Russian economy, as well as its social, legal and political infrastructure, by the race of reform.

Predatory Value Extraction explains how an ideology of corporate resource allocation known as "maximizing shareholder value" (MSV) that emerged in the 1980s came to dominate strategic thinking in business schools and corporate boardrooms in the United States. Undermining the social foundationsof sustainable prosperity, it resulted in employment instability, income inequity, and slow productivity growth. In explaining what happened to sustainable prosperity, William Lazonick and Jang-Sup Shin focus on the growing imbalance between value creation and value extraction in the U.S. economy,and the corporate-governance institutions that determine this balance in the nation's major business corporations. The imbalance has become so extreme that predatory value extraction is now a central economic activity, to the point at which the U.S. economy as a whole can be aptly described as avalue-extracting economy.Balancing the contributions of economic actors to value creation with their power to extract value provides the foundation for stable and equitable economic growth. When certain economic actors are able to assert their power to extract far more value than they contribute to the value-creationprocess, an imbalance occurs which, when extreme, leads to dire economic, political, and social consequences. This book not only explores these consequences, but also sets out an agenda for restoring sustainable prosperity.

Examines predatory practices in mortgage markets to provide invaluable insight into the racial wealth gap between black and white Americans.

In some cases of insurgency, the combat frontier is contested and erratic, as rebels target cities as their economic prey. In other cases, it is tidy and stable, seemingly representing an equilibrium in which cities are effectively protected from violent non-state actors. What factors account for these differences in the interface between urban-based states and rural-based challengers? To explore this question, this volume examines two regions representing two dramatically different outcomes. In West Africa (Liberia and Sierra Leone), capital cities became economic targets for rebels, who posed dire threats to the survival of the state. In Maoist India, despite an insurgent ideology aiming to overthrow the state via a strategy of progressive city capture, the combat frontier effectively firewalls cities from Maoist violence. This book argues that trade networks underpinning the economic relationship between rural and urban areas - termed 'interstitial economies' - may differ dramatically in their impact on (and response to) the combat frontier. It explains rebel predatory tendencies towards cities as a function of transport networks allowing monopoly profits to be made by urban-based traders. It explains combat frontier delineation as a function of the social structure of the trade networks: hierarchical networks permit elite-elite bargains that cohere the frontier. These factors represent what might be termed respectively the 'hardware' and 'software' of the rural-urban economic relationship. Of interest to any student of political economy and violence, this book presents new arguments and insights about the relationships between violence and the economy, predation and production, core and periphery.