After the financial crisis and the great recession that started in the US in 2007 to become subsequently global and the Eurozone crisis, there emerged a debate as to the fate of neoliberal agenda and its ability to provide solutions to the crisis tendencies of capitalism. Governments were providing emergency bailouts to the banking sector and significant stimulus packages to others. Therefore, it was thought that the free market doctrine and its components of deregulation and austerity have approached to an end. Commentators such as Naomi Klein, Joseph Stiglitz and Eric Hobsbawn argued that there were similarities between the financial crash and the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, ensuing developments showed that rather than leading to the dismantling of the neoliberal structuring, the crises have provided another stimulus for a neoliberal re-structuring. Neoliberalism seems to be more resilient than it was thought to be.

Neoliberalism as a political rationality has a long history and its roots lie within the liberal art of government. Throughout the twentieth century, its two main variations crystallized as ordoliberalism in Germany in the 1930s and the Chicago School in the USA in the 1970s. Neoliberalism in its ordoliberal form converged with state power in Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War and the version produced by the Chicago School was first put to trial in Chili in the 1970s. However, following the global economic crisis of the 1970s, this rationality gradually acquired global dominance, shaped hegemonic discursive formations and turned into variegated political projects in numerous social formations as a result of domestic class struggles which ended in favor of the capital, especially its financial fraction. This process incorporated structural adjustment programs and shock therapies for some states under the coordination of the World Bank and IMF; others followed their desires to emulate the hegemonic centers of global capitalism such as the US and the UK and their needs for adjustment to global capitalism. 
 

Different social formations followed different neoliberalization paths producing variegated results that depended on the legacy of social relations established previously. This restructuring processes in different social formations displayed certain common features. They can be succinctly described as the extension of market-oriented rationality and commodification processes into previously insulated realms of social life. This also incorporated a conservative turn particularly based on a "law and order" rhetoric.  Consequently, ubiquitous results have emerged. Some of them can be listed as the following: the rights and the wages of the labor have been curtailed; flexibilization in work conditions has been imposed leading to pervasiveness of precarious jobs; social spending has been reduced along with efforts to maintain fiscal discipline; workfare rather than welfare has been promoted; the regime of poverty aid has replaced the social policy system based on rights; privatization in social services such as education, healthcare etc. has speeded up; penal apparatuses have been strengthened to repress social opposition, eliminate risks and govern poverty; new governmental technologies have been developed to construct prudential "free" subjects taking responsibility to control their own risks; urban transformation projects were put into practice in cities creating gentrified zones along with exclusionary zones... Yet these processes have also been marked by protests, resistance movements, occupations and riots such as the anti-globalization movements and occupy movements.  
 

This conference is about the latest phase of neoliberalism. After the roll-back phase of the 1980s and the roll-out phase of the 1990s, there seems to emerge another phase in the neoliberalization process. 
 

Therefore, the main questions can be formulated as the following:

a) Are new "systems of meaning" emerging under late neoliberalism to tackle with the problems caused by the economic crises and if so, what are their contents?

b) How have the accumulation regimes been recalibrated after the great recession?

c) How have neoliberal institutions, policies and ideologies been transformed in the last 10 years?

d) What are the new dynamics within state forms, regulatory frameworks and governmental techniques? What kind of new state forms have been emerging? Can we talk of a sweeping tendency towards new forms of authoritarianism? What are the effects of political crises on political regimes under late neoliberalism? What kind of new political rationalities and hegemonic projects have emerged in the 2000s?

e) What are the changing terms of global trade and financial regime? How do the role of global institutions change? Are there new policy instruments and agendas of global institutions? What are the dynamics of "fast policy" transfer under late neoliberalism?

f) What are new techniques in the government of poverty? What are new trends in the opposition between rights-based approach to social policy and the approach based on poverty aids? Are citizenship regimes under late neoliberalism becoming more exclusive or more inclusive?

g) What are the new dynamics in urban restructuring processes under late neoliberalism? What are new forms of class struggles fought over the urban space? What are new forms of urban marginality? What are the new dynamics in social resistance movements?

h) Are gender regimes going through changes under late neoliberalism? What are the new dynamics concerning the relations between gender, politics and space? How are the identities of women, LGBTs and men been re-constructed under late neoliberalism?

i) What are the new dynamics and new governmental technologies in the penal sphere under late neoliberalism? Do we experience the emergence of a repression-surveillance network? Can we name the new state form as the "security state"?  How does the legal sphere serve neoliberal states to repress social opposition under late neoliberalism?

Crises of Political Hegemony and New Political Rationalities in 2000s