Economic Cycles, Economic Crises, Resource Grabs, and Expulsions

ABSTRACT

What are the causes of the current transnational migration “crisis”? What about the causes of the 2008 global economic crisis? Are these crises separate or interlinked? Previous research has pointed to civil war in refugee-sending countries and problematic financial practices in the United States as causal mechanisms of the refugee and economic crises based on methodologies that considered these crises separately. Publicly available data published, among others, by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), analysed using particular institutional political economy approach, however, shows that neither war nor financial speculation is a sufficient explanation. Instead, both crises arise from specific growth-based rentier capitalism aggressively pursued by an American-led West against a resistant Middle East, North Africa, and the Global South more generally.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• war
• urban
• economic crises
• institutionalism

Acknowledgements

I thank Professor Enfu Cheng, the editorial team, especially Zhen Wang, and the reviewers of International Critical Thought for helpful feedback, assistance, and encouragement. Thanks also to Dr. Estella Carpi of University College London for constructive feedback. The usual disclaimer applies.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Franklin Obeng-Odoom holds a PhD in Political Economy from the University of Sydney in Australia. He focuses on the political economy of cities, natural resources, and development at the University of Helsinki, where he is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science. He is also a Member of the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science, where he leads the Global South theme. A Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has made various contributions to political economy, including authoring the books such as Oiling the Urban Economy (2014), and Reconstructing Urban Economics (2016). He is Associate Editor of the Forum for Social Economics, Editor of African Review of Economics and Finance, and Series Editor of Edinburgh Studies in Urban Political Economy.

Notes

1. The idea of a transnational migration crisis is put in quotation marks; not because it is denied, but because the expression itself is used with caution and critical reflection. It is, indeed, telling that in public debates both in the West and the seemingly neutral United Nations agencies, this register of words started to be used more often only when significant number of refugees crossed borders of the Western countries, mainly in the European Union. Previously, the presence of refugees in the Global South had not been considered before a “global crisis.” This dynamic itself signals the different and differential values placed on problems in the various parts of the world system and the continuing burdens of “imperialism and unequal development” that Samir Amin (1977), leading Global South thinker, extensively demonstrated.