Rethinking the Double Movement: Expanding the Frontiers of Polanyian Analysis in the Global South

Abstract

Over the last two decades a rich and diverse body of literature has emerged which uses the ‘double movement’ to analyse social, political and economic change in the global South. The main aims of this article are to expand the boundaries of this scholarship and improve our understanding of how to use the concept to analyse capitalist development in the region. It seeks to achieve this by explaining and extending the original formulation of the double movement, creating a dialogue between scholars who follow alternative readings of the concept, and proposing a revised formulation which builds on the existing literature while moving in new directions. The article concludes by signposting potentially fruitful areas of Polanyian analysis.

Peasant maize cultivation as an assemblage: an analysis of socio-cultural dynamics of maize cultivation in western Kenya

“…Chapter 5 "We sell our maize within the village to whoever likes to buy": (Gibson-Graham et al, 2013;Goodwin, 2018;Hinrichs, 2000), nested markets Polman et al, 2010;Schneider et al, 2016;Schneider et al, 2014;Van Der Ploeg, 2014;Van Der Ploeg et al, 2012), moral economy (Hyden, 1980b(Hyden, , 1983Scott, 1976) and informal markets (Hart, 1992;Vermaak, 2017). These forms of (market) exchanges have a significant role to play in maintaining the viability of mechanisms for food security (Eakin et al, 2014: 151).…”

On the Nature of the Countermovement: A Response to Stuart et al.’s ‘Climate Change and the Polanyian Countermovement: Carbon Markets or Degrowth?’

“…With hindsight we of course know that Polanyi was mistaken, and that the liberal ideology emerged from the War transformed but not diminished. While this hardly means that the supersession of market hegemony is impossible, it does, I believe, point to the need to take serious a more dialectical reading of the double movement (see Carton, 2014;Goodwin, 2018), in which movements of commodification and marketisation are co-constituted by a combination of both progressive and staunchly conservative countermovements. In other words, the ongoing hegemonic position of market relations underlines the significance of a second (b), more reformist conceptualisation of the countermovement.…”

Postneoliberalism as institutional recalibration: Reading Polanyi through Argentina’s soy boom

“…Munck (Ibid. ) and others (e.g., Goodwin, 2018), however, use the concept judiciously, cautioning, for instance, against reducing indigenous and peasant movements to resistance against the neoliberal marketization of land given the much longer colonial trajectory of such struggles.…”