Ghana, like most other countries, is currently dealing with a new debt crisis that has been blamed on covid-induced spending and the fallout from the Russia-Ukraine war. Isaac Abotebuno Akolgo Spoke with Lev Moscow of the A Correction podcast, arguing that far from Covid and Russia-Ukraine, the unfolding debt storm is rooted in historical, systemic and structural problems.  

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Capital Claims: Power and Global Finance analyzes how global financialized capitalism operates and reproduces itself, exploring the remarkable ability of the financial sector to maintain its dominance through even the most severe economic crises.

The book defines international financialization as a process by which the number and value, the tradability, and the enforceability of cross-border financial claims increases and is successfully defended against competing social or political agendas. By focusing on financial claims, the volume develops a conceptual toolkit for the study of the political economy of global finance and the inequalities it sustains. The book brings together leading researchers whose work is geared towards opening the black box of cross-border finance. The authors suggest shifting the analytical focus from capital flows to capital claims – credit-debt relations between identifiable actors, embedded in social and political institutions, and infused with power and hierarchy. They show how financial actors wield leverage power, infrastructural power, and enforcement power, both vis-à-vis other private actors and vis-à-vis the state.

Braun, B., and K. Koddenbrock (Eds.), 2022, Capital Claims: Power and Global Finance (1st ed.), Routledge, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003218487

Despite a varied picture in terms of their relative economic strength, Developing and Emerging Economies (DEEs) remain in a subordinate position in the global monetary and financial system. While the IPE and economics literatures provide rich insights about the significance of this phenomenon, research efforts remain fragmented. To address this problem, we offer an umbrella concept—international financial subordination (IFS)—to channel research efforts towards cumulative theory-building. IFS is about unearthing why the structural power of finance takes a particularly violent form of expression in DEEs. To provide structure to IFS as a scholarly field, we first assess the contributions of IPE in analyzing various factors that reproduce IFS. To better ground these efforts in processes of accumulation and the histories of the relation between finance and (post)colonial development, we then offer a critical synthesis of three heterodox traditions—dependency theory, post-Keynesian economics, and Marxism. Next, we develop a pluridisciplinary research agenda organized around six analytical axes: the historical analysis of financial relations, the relations between financial and productive subordinations, the constitutive role of monetary relations as expressions of power, the role of the state, the actions and practices of non-state actors, and the spatial relations of financial subordination.

The discipline of international relations has undergone a focus on medium-range theories and analyses. This consensus followed decades of self-assurance in the postwar period and the highly politicized 1970s. In view of the obviously conflictive struggle for global power and global relations of dependence, macro-theoretical perspectives that attempt to grasp the interplay of inner-societal and world-societal processes in political-economic terms are gaining in relevance. Using two examples of German foreign and foreign economic policy and the history of relations between Europe and Senegal, the article illustrates how such a political-economic analysis can be made fruitful for study of IR.

This briefing explains Ghana’s recent banking sector failures and renewed debt crisis as consequences of its uneven and deleterious integration into the global capitalist financial system, a situation that critical scholars in international political economy call international financial subordination.

Over forty years after the formal end of colonialism, suffocating ties to Western financial systems continue to prevent African countries from achieving any meaningful monetary sovereignty. Economic and Monetary Sovereignty in 21st Century Africa traces the recent history of African monetary and financial dependencies, looking at the ways African nations are resisting colonial legacies. Using a comparative, multi-disciplinary approach, the book uncovers what went wrong after the Pan-African approaches that defined the early stages of independence, and how most African economies fell into the firm grip of the IMF, World Bank, and the EU’s strict neoliberal policies.

The collection is the first to offer a wide-ranging, comparative and historical look at how African societies have attempted to increase their policy influence and move beyond neoliberal orthodoxy and US-dollar dependency. Economic and Monetary Sovereignty in 21st Century Africa is essential reading for anyone interested in the African quest for self-determination in a turbulent world of recurring economic and financial crisis.

Ben Ghada, M., Kaboub, F., Koddenbrock, K., I. Mahmoud and N. S. Sylla, 2021, “African monetary and economic sovereignty in the 21^st century”, Pluto Books, London.

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