Western Elites Who Control Billions Of Lives Use Global Governance and Humanitarian Institutions As The New Form Of Imperialism. These Few Thousand Centered Around The IMF and World Bank Extract Profit From “aid” Countries In Exchange of Neoliberal Policies.

Power means control, by a person or an institution, over the minds, livelihoods and beliefs of others. Power accumulates into systems. With the term ‘geography of power’ I refer to the concentration of power in a few spaces that control a world of distant others. My argument is that a new kind of economic power system has arrived on the world scene. Power has increasingly been accumulated at the global level by governance institutions – the G7/G8, the European Union, the Bretton Woods Institutions and the United Nations. These institutions control the economies and livelihoods of people the world over through policy devices like structural adjustment, the ‘conditionalities’ accompanying loans or debt relief, annual inspections by teams of experts, and other similar strategies. This book looks at types of power accumulation – economic, ideological, political – and the forms taken by power in global space. And the book examines popular resistance to concentrated power by alternatives constructed by social movements and organic intellectuals. Let me begin by dissecting the term ‘global governance institution’. ‘Global’ implies that governance power transcends national commitment in favour of some kind of ‘universal interest’. On the surface, this interest is humanitarian concern about global poverty. Yet global institutions condition ‘aid to poor countries’ on their adopting a set of neoliberal policies. These insist on an exaggeratedly market-organized, export-oriented economy. Such an economy is said to produce the economic growth that creates jobs and reduces poverty. Yet these policies also favour free enterprise, private capital investment and the extraction of profit from poor countries. Global governance institutions therefore act, at least in part, in the interests of global capital. Humanitarian governance has a class bias. It favours private investment and global financial integration. And, while ‘global’ in their sphere of operations, governance institutions cluster their headquarters in relatively few places. The resulting centres of global power are exclusively cities in Western capitalist countries: either the capitals of leading national powers, overwhelmingly New York (for example, the United Nations) and Washington, DC (the International Monetary Fund and World Bank), or definitely Western, but officially neutral, political spaces, as with Geneva, Switzerland (the World Trade Organization and many UN agencies). So in terms of its geography, ‘global’ has come to mean the spatial expansion of the field of the exercise of power accompanied by the spatial concentration of control in a few Western cities. In the twin terms of class and space, a few thousand people, clustered in a small space, control the lives of billions of others, the world over. In this light too, ‘governance’ in the above phrase (‘global governance’) means regulation, management and control of national economic policy by institutions that are, at best, indirectly elected (i.e. through governments). In this undemocratic context, policy is legitimized as true and correct more by science and expert opinion than by electoral consent. This may sound fine – a kind of global Plato’s Republic, wisely directed by modern-scientific, rather than classicalphilosopher, kings. More critically, scientific, humanitarian governance may be read as a new, kindly faced version of Western imperialism. Global governance and expert-designed economic policy have a powergeography in two of main senses of this originally Foucauldian term. First, the world cities where governance institutions congregate, and experts co-mingle, display landscapes imbued with the trappings of Western power – locating the headquarters, and much of the bureaucracy, in such centres lends the policies they prescribe the aura of Western authority. Second, this ambient content is released as ‘power effects’ as policies extend over space, from power centres to dependent peripheries, and are adopted, under varying conditions of compulsion, in capital cities all over the world. The two power-geographies, place and space, reinforce each other in symbiotic embrace. As a result, the main international financial institutions (IFIs), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, have become powerful institutions indeed. This book describes the geography of the power system formed from the undemocratic concentration of power over others in a few small spaces. Understanding the sources, mechanisms and relations of power with any degree of adequacy requires a set of analytical concepts. My idea, in this book, is to resuscitate some existing concepts, reorient others and add new versions of still more. But as Marx may once almost have said, new theoretical approaches are sought not to further knowledge for ‘its own sake’, whatever that might be. Rather, the objective is to develop concepts whose logic, style and passion are so appealing, at least to people of conscience, that merely encountering them is an inspiration to resistance.