PROCESSES AND EFFECTS OF POST-SOCIALIST NEOLIBERALIZATION
PROCESSES AND EFFECTS OF POST-SOCIALIST NEOLIBERALIZATION

Summary/Abstract: Editorial Our thematic block was initially announced by the journal Studia Europaea as a special issue regarding “the social effects of austerity”. This title could suggest that the guest editors would have liked addressing “austerity policies” as a technical matter with some sorts of consequences in what regards people's social conditions and/or their capacity to act as competitive actors within the “democratic capitalist regime”. In order to avoid such an interpretation from the very beginning, there is a need to at least briefly highlight that our perspective and aims are shaped by a political approach towards policies. Therefore, instead of a discussion about “the social effects of austerity”, in this journal issue we are actually expressing our will to have a contribution to the critical analysis of how is neoliberal politics envisioning, elaborating, implementing and evaluating the (austerity) policies that are (re)enforcing the power structures of capitalism. The papers of this thematic block are viewing the functioning of this large issue in different domains, such as: economic policies of liberalization and the pauperization of working class (Pantea); development policies in the context of the politics of dismantling the social state (Vincze); policies of forced evictions and housing politics (Vrăbiescu); social services and the role of NGOs in neoliberal state restructuring (Zamfir); human rights advocacy and the politics of obscuring structural issues of social and economic inequality (Safta-Zecheria); precarization of labour and neoliberal academic politics (Ivancheva); the politics of universal basic income and the possibility of the ideological consensus of liberalism and socialism (Butaru).

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