The Department for Social Science and Social Work & Bournemouth University’s Centre for Seldom Heard Voices present research by Dr Patrick Neveling.
Abstract
Special Economic Zones (SEZs) come in many guises; as export processing zones, tax havens or as free ports – Rishi Sunak’s recent policy “innovation” that will most definitely turn the UK into a Singapore of the 21st century. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s 2019 World Investment Report counted around 5,400 zones in more than 140 nations with over 100 million workers.
This presentation shows how, since they originated in 1940s Puerto Rico, SEZs have become a mandatory policy device in national economic development programmes across the first, second, and third world. This is despite the fact that the zones cost taxpayers and workers dearly as zone investors enjoy massive subsidies; tax and customs waivers, state-funded infrastructure, anti-union labour laws and more.
Based on long-term archival and ethnographic research, I develop a decolonial historical anthropology that identifies the zones as the successors of the global plantation complex, and its racialised capitalism, in the post-1945 system of postcolonial nation states. With reference to Sidney Mintz and Rolph-Michel Trouillot’s argument that plantations were “landmark experiments of modernity” – an “otherwise modern” – SEZs are “landmark experiments of neoliberal postmodernity”; an “otherwise neoliberal”.