This article analyses the margin of manoeuvre of Portuguese executives after the onset of the sovereign debt crisis in 2010–2015. To obtain a full understanding of what happened behind the closed doors of international meetings, different types of data are triangulated: face‐to‐face interviews; investigations by journalists; and International Monetary Fund and European Union official documents. The findings are compared to the public discourse of Prime Ministers José Sócrates and Pedro Passos‐Coelho. It is shown that while the sovereign debt crisis and the bail‐out limited the executive's autonomy, they also made them stronger in relation to other domestic actors. The perceived need for ‘credibility’ in order to avoid a ‘negative’ reaction from the markets – later associated with the conditions of the bail‐out – concurrently gave the executives a legitimate justification to concentrate power in their hands and a strong argument to counter the opponents of their proposed reforms. Consequently, when Portuguese ministers favoured policies that were in congruence with those supported by international actors, they were able to use the crisis to advance their own agenda. Disagreement with Troika representatives implied the start of a negotiation process between the ministers and international lenders, the final outcome of which depended on the actors’ bargaining powers. These strategies, it is argued, constitute a tactic of depoliticisation in which both the material constraints and the discourse used to frame them are employed to construct imperatives around a narrow selection of policy alternatives.

This paper calls attention to the problematic use of the concept of social innovation which remains undefined despite its proliferation throughout academic and policy discourses. Extant research has thus far failed to capture the socio-political contentions which surround social innovation. This paper therefore draws upon the work of Thomas Kuhn and conducts a paradigmatic analysis of the field of social innovation which identifies two emerging schools: one technocratic, the other democratic. The paper identifies some of the key thinkers in each paradigm and explains how the struggle between these two paradigms reveals itself to be part of a broader conflict between neoliberalism and it opponents and concludes by arguing that future research focused upon local contextualised struggles will reveal which paradigm is in the ascendancy.

This response gives me the opportunity to clarify, extend, and complement several aspects of my conceptual and historical argument in The Currency of Politics. I do so primarily by situating my account more explicitly within debates over European monetary politics, by expanding on my use of history, and by articulating what differentiates my concern with the political theory of money and the politics of depoliticisation from complementary accounts. In doing so I elaborate on the ways in which engagement with the thought of John Maynard Keynes helped to structure my approach. While there are important limits to the politics of money under contemporary capitalism, these limits are not fixed economic ones but are better seen as political limits of monetary politics that nonetheless leave considerable space for articulating alternative demands for more democratic forms of money. This framing allows me to extend my argument in order to address contemporary struggles over credit policy, monetary reform, and climate change in Europe. I thus end with a set of critical reflections on the constitutional status of money in the European project and beyond.

When viewed against its ostensibly successful management of the global economic crisis between 2008 and 2013, growing electoral disenchantment with the Australian Labor Party government during that time defied standard explanations and calls for further analysis. A major reason for the party’s electoral loss in 2013 was arguably popular disappointment with its eschewal of social democratic principles. Notwithstanding some progressive measures initiated between 2008 and 2013, successive Australian Labor Party governments were constrained by neoliberal strictures, even when they chose to implement progressive policies. Whatever other reasons exist for its decline in popularity between 2007 and 2013, the Australian Labor Party’s unwillingness or inability to mark out a clear alternative to neoliberalism was fundamental. In making this case, this article uses the conceptual framework of ‘depoliticisation’, defined as the displacement of policy decisions from the sphere of democratic accountability and public debate, making them matters for regulation by technocratic experts operating according to supposed edicts of the market.

This article brings together labour relations, sociological and political perspectives on precarious employment in Australia, identifying local contexts of insecurity and setting them within the economics of regional supply chains involving the use of migrant labour. In developing the concept of precarious work-societies, it argues that precarity is a source of individual and social vulnerability and distress, affecting family, housing and communal security. The concept of depoliticisation is used to describe the processes of displacement, whereby the social consequences of precarious work come to be seen as beyond the reach of agency. Using evidence from social attitudes surveys, we explore links between the resulting sense of political marginalisation and hostility to immigrants. Re-politicisation strategies will need to lay bare the common basis of shared experiences of insecurity and explore ways of integrating precarious workers into new community and global alliances.

Victims have become a topic of scholarly debate in conflict studies, especially regarding the impact of their activism on the evolution and termination of violence. Victims of terrorism are now enlisted within counter-terrorism, given their moral authority as spokespeople for counter-narratives and de-escalation. Our research explores how Spanish terrorism victims’ associations have evolved across eras of political violence and how they mediate the translation of international War on Terror discourses into Spanish counter-terrorism. We offer a topography of how the War on Terror has opened a ‘social front’ in Spanish counter-terrorism, with Spanish political elites prominently employing the victims’ associations to this end. Contemporary terrorism discourses are read back onto the memory of ETA, with victims’ associations assisting the equation of ETA with al-Qaeda and ISIS. Collective memory of the defeat of ETA has also contributed the veneer of ‘lessons learned’ to contemporary counter-terrorism measures. Our research explores the fluidity of terrorism-memory and the importation of global terrorism discourses into Spanish politics, relying upon interviews with key stakeholders in victims’ associations, local politics, and the research director of the new Victims of Terrorism Memorial Centre in Vitoria.

Created in 1972, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has a normative mandate to promote the protection of the environment at the international level. However, since 1999, the organisation has been conducting field assessments in postconflict situations and addressing the role of natural resources in conflict, framing the environment as a security issue. To do so, the programme insists on its neutrality as a technical and ‘apolitical’ actor within the UN system. Considering depoliticisation as a political act, this article unpacks the concrete practices by which international organisations (IOs) enact depoliticisation. It further argues that IOs can perform securitising moves through practices and techniques presented as outside of the political realm. It draws upon the recent work on depoliticisation at the international level and reinforces studies considering the links between (de)politicisation and securitisation.

This article unveils the continuous and productive relationship that developed between Chile and the IMF during Salvador Allende's presidency (1970–73). This counter-intuitive relationship was made possible by the systematic depoliticisation and technocratisation of the ties between them. By downplaying ideological discrepancies and keeping a high degree of autonomy, the IMF and Chilean technocrats blurred rigid Cold War divides and circumvented the US-imposed embargo against Allende's regime. The examination of this relationship sheds new light on Allende's positioning in the international arena and provides a unique prism to reconsider dichotomist perceptions of the Cold War in Latin America.

This paper examines how practices of leadership have been negotiated and have changed over time in the context of a grassroots health promotion project in Lima, Peru. Tracing these trajectories in the context of the evolution of women's organising in Peru informs a broader analysis of the changing role of grassroots women in development projects, feeding into debates around the professionalisation and depoliticisation of grassroots activism and providing new empirical material on gendered experiences of grassroots leadership. The paper recognises the increasing dominance of neoliberal management mechanisms but argues that the depoliticisation of grassroots women leaders is not simply a straightforward trickledown of neoliberal development practices but is produced through the interplay of local socio-political processes and personal biographies of activism with more macro-level development trends and discourses.