New Texts Out Now: Hannes Baumann, Citizen Hariri: Lebanon’s Neoliberal Reconstruction
▻http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/26860/new-texts-out-now_hannes-baumann-citizen-hariri_le
With Hariri we have liberal talk and illiberal walk. This contradiction is not unique to Hariri but goes to the heart of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is not a defined set of policies but a jumble of contradictory projects: An ideological project which says that markets allocate resources more efficiently than the government, and a political project which favors capital over labor. Neoliberalism requires the rollback of the state through privatization or welfare cuts, but it also requires strong state action to build markets and to ensure capital accumulation. Lebanese neoliberalism was first and foremost a project defined by the interests of Gulf contractor Rafiq Hariri and his business partners.