Figure 3 - uploaded by Heikki Patomaki
Content may be subject to copyright.
1 Ukraine's GDP per capita and growth rate Source: Data from World Bank 2017, World Development Indicators , at http://databank.worldbank.org/data/
Source publication
Whether we talk about human learning and unlearning, securitization, or political economy, the forces and mechanisms generating both globalization and disintegration are causally efficacious across the world. Thus, the processes that led to the victory of the ‘Leave’ campaign in the June 2016 referendum on UK European Union membership are not simpl...
Citations
... JM: These were also the themes of your next monograph in English, namely Disintegrative Tendencies in Global Political Economy (Patomäki 2018a). ...
In Part 1 of this interview, Professor Patomäki discussed his work and career up to the Global Financial Crisis. In Part 2 he turns to his later work. Questions and issues range over the use of retroduction and retrodiction, the degree of openness and closure of systems, and the role of iconic models, and scenario-building and counterfactuals in social scientific explanation and the exploration of possible and likely futures (distinguished from desirable futures). Patomäki suggests that a variant of his ‘scenario A’ captures significant features of an increasingly competitive and conflictual world. Among other matters, Patomäki also discusses his recent work on the war in Ukraine, his ‘field theory’ of global political economy, and the possibility of world statehood. The interview concludes with Patomäki’s views on the imperative of hope.
... Besides work in Finnish (most notably Patomäki 2005aPatomäki , 2007e, 2012c, Professor Patomäki is the author of seven single-authored books in English (Patomäki 2001a(Patomäki , 2002a(Patomäki , 2008a(Patomäki , 2013a(Patomäki , 2018a(Patomäki , 2022(Patomäki , 2023) and a number of joint and edited texts (e.g. Minkkinen and Patomäki 1997;Patomäki and James 2007;Patomäki and Teivainen 2004a;Morgan and Patomäki 2018;Forsberg and Patomäki 2022). ...
In Part 1 of this wide-ranging interview Heikki Patomäki discusses his early work and career up to the Global Financial Crisis. He provides comment on his role as a public intellectual and activist, his diverse academic interests and influences, and the many and varied ways he has contributed to critical realism and critical realism has influenced his work. In Part 2 he discusses his later work, the predicament of humanity and the role of futures studies.
... Other scholars provide multi-causal explanations, identifying a variety of mechanisms that together caused the result (e.g. Patomäki 2018). Patomäki's study, which brings into focus several mechanisms, including globalization, neoliberal policies, deindustrialization and inequality, resonates well with the critical realist perspective. ...
It can be challenging to introduce the philosophy of social science (PoS) to students in the social sciences. Noting the lack of literature providing guidance to the prospective PoS teacher, this paper outlines several pieces of advice on how to engage social science undergraduates in the subject. This advice centres on showing the relevance of the PoS in academia and beyond, reducing complexity and presenting only a few contending PoS perspectives. It is also proposed to use textbooks with caution or avoiding them altogether, illustrating how PoS assumptions are embedded in contemporary social research and showing the connection between the PoS on one hand and research questions, methods, and theory on the other. Finally, the importance of showing students how they can make use of the PoS in their own work and teaching the subject in a 'hands on' manner is emphasized.
... Economic liberalism contains seeds of its own destruction. Donald Trump epitomizes many of these developments, even if in an ambiguous and 'postmodern' way (Patomäki, 2018, Chapter 4; see also Gills, Morgan, & Patomäki, 2018). Nationalism can also be connected to free-market economic policies as the examples of Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil) and Boris Johnson (UK) demonstrate. ...
... The responses and processes specified in Figure 11 States and other actors participate in bringing about and steering global political economy processes in various, but often short-sighted, counterproductive and contradictory ways. The lack of effective demand is ultimately a global problem (for a fuller explanatory story and more geo-historical details, see Patomäki, 2008Patomäki, , 2018. ...
The theory of capitalist peace claims that contractual social relations, free trade and cross-border investments are conducive to peace. In discussing this theory, I first sketch some key paradoxes and contradictions of capitalist market economy. These paradoxes and contradictions have critical implications for the theory of liberal-capitalist peace. Free-market policies and re-regulations have released and strengthened various problematical mechanisms that are typical to capitalist market economy. Second, I explain Piketty's inequality r > g and its wider meaning to democracy and global integration under market globalism. Third, I describe briefly two mechanisms that can explain the move from uncertainty and inequalities to existential insecurity and securitization. Fourth, I summarize how these mechanisms can shape macro-history and why the anticipation of a global military catastrophe by futurologists such as Attali and Wagar is not only relevant but unfortunately also plausible. Finally, I discuss briefly how the contradictions of global political economy could be overcome by collective actions and by building better common institutions.
... Globalization in this sense is not a thing, an actor, or a mechanism that explains much else apart from the possibility that social relations can be maintained with increasing ease and intensity across time and space. Moreover, globalization in the generic sense is not the same thing as imperialism, colonialism or neoliberalism, although these ideologies have characterized different waves of globalization (the current disintegrative tendencies in global political economy are consequences of the long process of neoliberalization; Patomäki, 2018). Globalization enables and constrains actors, shapes social relations and can be a part of a wide variety of geo-historical dynamics. ...
Amin’s Leninist-Maoist vision is unlikely to be persuasive to twenty-first century citizens. Nonetheless, there is a rational kernel in Amin’s call for a new worldwide political organization. Some structures, mechanisms and tendencies of the capitalist world economy are relatively enduring and some patterns recurrent, although the world economy is also fluid, constantly changing and evolving. Although waves of globalization have radically transformed human societies and their economic activities during the past 500 years also in many positive ways, the expansion of the international society and world economy has often been characterized by violence, imperial subjection and colonial expropriation and exclusion. There is a rational kernel also within Amin’s analysis of the current world-political situation. Command over space and time by investors and megacorporations is power. Emancipation aims at freedom from domination. The decline of the World Social Forum indicates that progressive politics must move ‘beyond the concept of a discussion forum’. My argument is that emancipation from unnecessary, unneeded and unwanted sources of determination requires global transformative agency and planetary visions about alternatives.
... Perhaps the biggest immediate threat concerns the danger of a global military catastrophe and especially nuclear war (see Patomäki, 2008;2018b). The expansion of the conflict between Russia and the West, as well as the confrontations in the Chinese Sea, show that the issues of global political economy and security have still not been organized on a sustainable basis. ...
The purpose of the contemporary university has been redefined across the world in terms of success in global competition, usefulness for money-making, and efficiency, meaning application of New Public Management ideas. My aim is to sketch an alternative and future-oriented ethico-political conception of the university to serve counterhegemonic purposes. First I discuss briefly the Humboldtian myth and legacy. Second, I summarize Jürgen Habermas’s analysis of the historical and practical limits of the idea of the university. Third, in response to Habermas’s criticism, I outline a non-speculative, scientific realist way of understanding the unity of all sciences and humanities. Fourth, I locate the idea of the university in the twenty-first century global context, understood in part as world risk society. And finally, I argue that the autonomy of the university should be anchored in the rules, principles and institutional arrangements of multi-spatial metagovernance, rather than just those of territorial states. The future of the university calls for new cosmopolitan institutional solutions and world citizenship.
In complex societies, hegemonic struggles abound over constitutive including scientific mythologems, which shape stories about the past and future. I argue that the Big History story is ambiguous. Is the cosmos purposeless and evolutionary processes arbitrary? Or is there coherence, wholeness, and even purpose? By using some pragmatist and critical realist philosophical ideas, and by raising critical questions about theories of physics and cosmology, I analyse the ambiguities of Big History and argue in favour of a storyline that revolves around life and learning, inducing hopefulness. A central idea is that the rational tendential direction of world history is grounded in our collective human learning, making it possible to solve problems, absent ills, and overcome contradictions through collective actions and by building better common institutions.
In the immediate aftermath and decades following WWII, the world economy grew exponentially and thousands of new international agreements and organisations were established to coordinate and regulate the world economy and its underpinnings. In the subsequent era, the concepts of globalisation and global governance became established, providing the context for the rise of global civil society and the quest to democratise global governance. Here I discuss the problems of Held’s well-known model of cosmopolitan democracy, focussing on spatio-temporal assumptions and then laying out a processual alternative to it. The spatio-temporal assumptions of the model of cosmopolitan democracy have problematic implications concerning self-other relations and political organisation. The alternative is a vision of an open-ended process of global democratisation realised by context-bound and context-breaking relational actors.
