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Welcome to The Handbook of Neoliberalism, a volume that offers the most complete overview of the field to date. The compiled chapters explore the phenomenon of neoliberalism by examining the range of ways that it has been theorized, promoted, critiqued, and put into practice in a variety of geographical locations and institutional frameworks. Neoliberalism is easily one of the most powerful concepts to emerge within the social sciences in the last two decades, and the number of scholars who are now writing about this dynamic and unfolding process of sociospatial transformation is nothing short of astonishing. Even more surprising, though, is that there has, until now, not been an attempt to provide a wide-ranging volume that engages with the multiple registers in which neoliberalism has evolved. The Handbook of Neoliberalism was assembled with the specific goal of changing that, and accordingly it intends to serve as an essential guide to this vast intellectual landscape.

Violent Neoliberalism explores the relationship between neoliberalism and violence through a critical poststructuralist perspective. Springer exposes the supposed humanitarianism of what has become the world's most dominant political economic model as a process of transformation that is shot through with a significant degree of cruelty. Employing a series of theoretical dialogues informed by the empirical experiences of development, discourse, and dispossession in contemporary Cambodia, Violent Neoliberalism engages as a diagnostic rupturing of commonsense to reveal the manifold ways in which ongoing patterns of neoliberalization have become engrossed with violence.

Neoliberal economics have emerged in the post-Cold War era as the predominant ideological tenet applied to the development of countries in the global south. For much of the global south, however, the promise that markets will bring increased standards of living and emancipation from tyranny has been an empty one. Instead, neoliberalisation has increased the gap between rich and poor and unleashed a firestorm of social ills.

Security should mean freedom from the fear of direct and indirect physical harm, de¿ ned in military, criminal, political and economic terms. This chapter differs from these conventional interpretations in adding that it also means more than the preservation of the market, a position refl ected in the actions of Cambodia's donor community, in particular the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). While drawing on postmodernist concerns for governmentality, the theoretical edi¿ ce here is rooted in a Marxian political economy approach, 1 offering a skeptical perspective on calls for security from the international ¿nancial institutions and powerful bilateral donors. In examining the political economy of Cambodia's recent triple transition ¿ from war to peace, from command economy to free market economics, and from authoritarianism to democracy ¿ I argue that donor-promoted notions of security have been rhetorical in terms of concern for humanitarianism. Instead, Cambodia's donor community has focused on security as it relates to the preservation of market principles.

With the recent development of the Occupy Movement, public criticism of neoliberalism has climaxed since the onset of a global financial crisis in late 2008. The mobilization of protesters in cities throughout the world was preceded by much speculation in the media and blogosphere over the past few years, where commentators have been quick to suggest that the end of neoliberalism is upon us. The validity of postneoliberalism, however, remains tenuous, as its advocates continue to treat neoliberalism as a monolithic, static, and undifferentiated end-state. Despite the desire to move beyond neoliberal strictures, there is an undeniable continuity to neoliberalism that must be appreciated if we ever hope to leave this unforgiving version of capitalism truly in the past.

Responding to neoliberal decentralization, Marxists pair centralization with capitalism's abrogation. Such a view considers hierarchy to be necessary and horizontal organization as propitious to neoliberalism. Anarchism's coupling of decentralization with anti-capitalism is dismissed because Marxism cannot accommodate prefigurative politics, treating horizontality as a future objective. This temporality ignores the insurrectionary possibilities of the present and implies a politics of waiting. In terms of spatiality, Marxian centralized hierarchy deems horizontality inappropriate when 'jumping scales'. Yet by rejecting this vertical ontology we may immediately disengage capitalism through a rhizomic politics. Consequently, human geography without hierarchy gains traction when we embrace an anarchist flat ontology. © The Author(s) 2013.

There is increasing recognition among human geographers that conceptualising the spatiality of peace is a vital component of our collective disciplinary praxis. Within this emergent literature, this paper seeks to position anarchism as an ethical philosophy of nonviolence and the absolute rejection of war. Such an interpretation does not attempt to align nonviolence to any particular organised religious teaching, as has recently been advocated by some geographers. Instead, the paper argues that the current practices of religion undermine the geographies of peace by fragmenting our affinities into discrete pieces. Advancing a view of anarchism as nonviolence, the paper goes beyond religion to conceptualise peace as both the unqualified refusal of the manifold-cum-interlocking processes of domination, and a precognitive, pre-normative and presupposed category rooted in our inextricable entanglement with each other and all that exists. Yet far from proposing an essentialist view of humanity or engaging a naturalised argument that reconvenes the "noble savage", the paper contextualises the arguments within the processual frameworks of radical democracy and agonism in seeking to redress the ageographical and ahistorical notions of politics that comprise the contemporary post-political zeitgeist. © 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis.

For, if God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme, absolute master, and, if such a master exists, man is a slave; now, if he is a slave, neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity, nor prosperity are possible for him [sic]. In vain, flying in the face of good sense and all the teachings of history, do they represent their God as animated by the tenderest love of human liberty: a master, whoever he may be and however liberal he may desire to show himself, remains none the less always a master. His existence necessarily implies the slavery of all that is beneath him. Therefore, if God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty - by ceasing to exist. (Mikhail Bakunin, 1882/2008, pp. 27-28). © 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis.

Responding to the set of dialogues on my original article, 'Why a Radical Geography Must Be Anarchist?', I throw my hat back in the ring and offer a blow-by-blow commentary on the sucker punches and low blows that some Marxists continue to want to throw at anarchism. In particular, I go toe-to-toe with the fallacious idea that Marxism remains the only viable politics on the left and demonstrate why anarchism is not only up to scratch, but in a world that continues to be marked by domination, as far as emancipation is concerned, anarchism is a heavyweight contender. While I pull no punches with the two Marxist pugilists, the remaining commentators are in my corner, and I welcome their thoughtful critiques by taking it on the chin. Yet rather than throw in the towel, I attempt to set the record straight by repositioning anarchism as an ethos that merges rebellion with reciprocity, subversion with self-management, and dissent with direct action, where the potential combinations are infinite. Anarchism is to be thought of, quite simply, as an attitude. When we remember this quality, without attempting to pin anarchism down to a particular set of commitments or distinct group of activities, we begin to recognize that anarchism can both float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. The reason for this multifarious character is because anarchism is not an identity but is instead something you do. Anarchism consequently has knockout potential to unite diverse strategies and tactics under the black flag of this radical political slogan. Insofar as the future of radical geography is concerned, anarchism has got the guts, the spirit, and the heart to go the distance. Let's get ready to rumble!

Radical geographers have been preoccupied with Marxism for four decades, largely ignoring an earlier anarchist tradition that thrived a century before radical geography was claimed as Marxist in the 1970s. When anarchism is considered, it is misused as a synonym for violence or derided as a utopian project. Yet it is incorrect to assume anarchism as a project, which instead reflects Marxian thought. Anarchism is more appropriately considered a protean process that perpetually unfolds through the insurrectionary geographies of the everyday and the prefigurative politics of direct action, mutual aid, and voluntary association. Unlike Marxism's stages of history and revolutionary imperative, which imply an end state, anarchism appreciates the dynamism of the social world. In staking a renewed anarchist claim for radical geography, I attend to the divisions between Marxism and anarchism as two alternative socialisms, wherein the former positions equality alongside an ongoing flirtation with authoritarianism, while the latter maximizes egalitarianism and individual liberty by considering them as mutually reinforcing. Radical geographers would do well to reengage anarchism as there is a vitality to this philosophy that is missing from Marxian analyses that continue to rehash ideas¿such as vanguardism and a proletarian dictatorship¿that are long past their expiration date.

In responding to Weller and O'Neill's 'Argument with Neoliberalism', I question the novelty of their approach and the problematics of denying the critical power and associated violence that neoliberalism continues to wield in our world. While they do raise an important epistemic challenge, a closer reading of the geographical literature on neoliberalism reveals that Weller and O'Neill tend to paint with the broad strokes of caricature. Notions of neoliberalism as inevitable or as a paradigmatic construct have long been debunked by human geographers replaced by protean notions of variegation, hybridity, and articulation with existing political economic circumstances. A discursive understanding of neoliberalism further reveals it as an assemblage and thus to hold neoliberalism to a sense of purity is little more than a straw man argument. Despite the positive desire to allow space for alternatives, Weller and O'Neill unfortunately construct their argument in such a way that positions it as part of an emerging genre of 'neoliberalism in denial'. © The Author(s) 2014.

Employing a poststructuralist-meets-anarchist stance that advances conceptual insight into the nature of sovereign power, this article examines the dialectics of a triadic system: capital/primitive accumulation, law/violence, and civilization/savagery, which are argued to exist in a mutually reinforcing "trilateral of logics." This is a radical (re)appraisal of capitalism, its legal processes, and its civilizing effects that together serve to mask the originary and ongoing violences of primitive accumulation and the property system. Such obfuscation suggests that wherever the trilateral of logics is enacted, so too is the state of exception called into being, exposing us all as potential homo sacer (life that does not count). Using the empirical frame of Cambodia's contemporary neoliberalization, I offer a window on how sovereign power configures itself around the three discursive-institutional constellations (i.e., capitalism, civilization, and law) that form the trilateral of logics. Rather than formulating prescriptive solutions, the intention here is critique and to argue that the preoccupation with strengthening Cambodia's legal system should not be read as a panacea for contemporary social ills but as an imposition that serves to legitimize the violences of property. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

The unfolding of a juridico-cadastral system in present-day Cambodia is at odds with local understandings of landholding, which are entrenched in notions of community consensus and existing occupation. The discrepancy between such orally recognized antecedents and the written word of law have been at the heart of the recent wave of dispossessions that has swept across the country. Contra the standard critique that corruption has set the tone, this paper argues that evictions in Cambodia are often literally underwritten by the articles of law. Whereas 'possession' is a well-understood and accepted concept in Cambodia, a cultural basis rooted in what James C. Scott refers to as 'orality', coupled with a long history of subsistence agriculture, semi-nomadic lifestyles, barter economies and - until recently - widespread land availability have all ensured that notions of 'property' are vague among the country's majority rural poor. In drawing a firm distinction between possessions and property, where the former is premised upon actual use and the latter is embedded in exploitation, this paper examines how proprietorship is inextricably bound to the violence of law. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Anarchism and geography have a long and disjointed history, characterized by towering peaks of intensive intellectual engagement and low troughs of ambivalence and disregard. This paper traces a genealogy of anarchist geographies back to the modern development of anarchism into a distinct political philosophy following the Enlightenment. The initial rise of geographers' engagement with anarchism occurred at the end of the 19th-century, owing to Élisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin, who developed an emancipatory vision for geography in spite of the discipline's enchantment with imperialism at that time. The realpolitik of the war years in the first half of the 20th-century and the subsequent quantitative revolution in geography represent a nadir for anarchist geographies. Yet anarchism was never entirely abandoned by geographical thought and the counterculture movement of the 1970s gave rise to radical geography, which included significant interest in anarchist ideas. Unfortunately another low occurred during the surge of neoliberal politics in the 1980s and early 1990s, but hope springs eternal, and from the late 1990s onward the anti-globalization movement and DIY culture have pushed anarchist geographies into more widespread currency. In reviewing the literature, I hope to alert readers to the ongoing and manifold potential for anarchist geographies to inform both geographical theory and importantly, to give rise to more practice-based imperatives where building solidarities, embracing reciprocity, and engaging in mutual aid with actors and communities beyond the academy speaks to the 'freedom of geography' and its latent capacity to shatter its own disciplinary circumscriptions. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

This paper sets out to develop two related ideas. First, it seeks to identify how both violence and neoliberalism can be considered as moments. From this shared conceptualisation of process and fluidity, I argue that it becomes easier to recognise how these two phenomena actually converge. Building upon this conceived coalescence of neoliberalism and violence, the second aim is to recognise how the hegemony of neoliberalism positions it as an abuser, which facilitates the abandonment of those 'Others' who fall outside of neoliberal normativity. I argue that the widespread banishment of 'Others' under neoliberalism produces a 'state of exception', wherein because of its inherently dialectic nature, exceptional violence is transformed into exemplary violence. This metamorphosis occurs as aversion for alterity intensifies under neoliberalism and its associated violence against 'Others' comes to form the rule. © 2012 The Author. Area © 2012 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).

This article is a manifesto for anarchist geographies, which are understood as kaleidoscopic spatialities that allow for multiple, non-hierarchical, and protean connections between autonomous entities, wherein solidarities, bonds, and affinities are voluntarily assembled in opposition to and free from the presence of sovereign violence, predetermined norms, and assigned categories of belonging. In its rejection of such multivariate apparatuses of domination, this article is a proverbial call to non-violent arms for those geographers and non-geographers alike who seek to put an end to the seemingly endless series of tragedies, misfortunes, and catastrophes that characterize the miasma and malevolence of the current neoliberal moment. But this is not simply a demand for the end of neoliberalism and its replacement with a more moderate and humane version of capitalism, nor does it merely insist upon a more egalitarian version of the state. It is instead the resurrection of a prosecution within geography that dates back to the discipline's earliest days: anarchism!. © 2012 The Author. Antipode © 2012 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

Contemporary theorizations of neoliberalism are framed by a false dichotomy between, on the one hand, studies influenced by Foucault in emphasizing neoliberalism as a form of governmentality, and on the other hand, inquiries influenced by Marx in foregrounding neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology. This article seeks to shine some light on this division in an effort to open up new debates and recast existing ones in such a way that might lead to more flexible understandings of neoliberalism as a discourse. A discourse approach moves theorizations forward by recognizing neoliberalism is neither a 'top-down' nor 'bottom-up' phenomena, but rather a circuitous process of socio-spatial transformation. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

In establishing an anarchic framework for understanding public space as a vision for radical democracy, this article proceeds as a theoretical inquiry into how an agonistic public space might become the basis of emancipation. Public space is presented as an opportunity to move beyond the technocratic elitism that often characterizes both civil societies and the neoliberal approach to development, and is further recognized as the battlefield on which the conflicting interests of the world's rich and poor are set. Contributing to the growing recognition that geographies of resistance are relational, where the "global" and the "local" are understood as co-constitutive, a radical democratic ideal grounded in material public space is presented as paramount to repealing archic power in general, and neoliberalism's exclusionary logic in particular. © 2010 The Author Journal compilation © 2010 Editorial Board of Antipode.

An exclusive focus on external forces risks the production of an overgeneralized account of a ubiquitous neoliberalism, which insufficiently accounts for the profusion of local variations that currently comprise the neoliberal project as a series of articulations with existing political economic circumstances. Although the international financial institutions initially promoted neoliberal economics in the global South, powerful elites were happy to oblige. Neoliberalism frequently reveals opportunities for well-connected officials to informally control market and material rewards, allowing them to line their own pockets. It is in this sense of the local appropriation of neoliberal ideas that scholars must go beyond conceiving of 'neoliberalism in general' as a singular and fully realized policy regime, ideological form, or regulatory framework, and work towards conceiving a plurality of 'actually existing neoliberalisms' with particular characteristics arising from mutable geohistorical outcomes embedded within national, regional, and local process of market-driven sociospatial transformation. What constitutes 'actually existing' neoliberalism in Cambodia as distinctly Cambodian is the ways in which the patronage system has allowed local elites to co-opt, transform, and (re)articulate neoliberal reforms through a framework which asset strips public resources, thereby increasing people's exposure to corruption, coercion, and violence. It is to such an 'articulation agenda' that I attend to here as, in seeking to provide a more nuanced reading to recent work on neoliberalism in Cambodia by outlining some of its salient characteristics, a more empirical basis to theorizations of 'articulated neoliberalism' is revealed. © 2011 Pion Ltd and its Licensors.

Through imaginative geographies that erase the interconnectedness of the places where violence occurs, the notion that violence is 'irrational' marks particular cultures as 'Other'. Neoliberalism exploits such imaginative geographies in constructing itself as the sole providence of nonviolence and the lone bearer of reason. Proceeding as a 'civilizing' project, neoliberalism positions the market as salvationary to ostensibly 'irrational' and 'violent' peoples. This theology of neoliberalism produces a discourse that binds violence in place. But while violence sits in places in terms of the way in which we perceive its manifestation as a localized and embodied experience, this very idea is challenged when place is reconsidered as a relational assemblage. What this re-theorization does is open up the supposed fixity, separation, and immutability of place to instead recognize it as always co-constituted by, mediated through, and integrated within the wider experiences of space. Such a radical rethinking of place fundamentally transforms the way we understand violence. No longer confined to its material expression as an isolated and localized event, violence can more appropriately be understood as an unfolding process, derived from the broader geographical phenomena and temporal patterns of the social world. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.

Neoliberal subject formation in posttransitional Cambodia has been facilitated through the 'commonsense' rhetoric of good governance, which is conceived here as a primary discursive formation in the creation of consent for neoliberalism. Neoliberal subjectivation is the process whereby one memorizes the truth claims that one has heard and converts them into rules of conduct, thereby effectively locking in the rights of capital. As disciplinary rationalities, strategies, technologies, and techniques coagulate under neoliberal subjectivation in contemporary Cambodian society through the proliferation of particular discursive formations like good governance, the structural inequalities of capital are increasingly misrecognized. This constitutes symbolic violence, which is wielded precisely inasmuch as one does not perceive it as such. How we interpret the fluidity between those who produce and those constrained by neoliberal discursive formations is paramount if we are to counter problematic notions of neoliberalism as inevitable or monolithic and begin to recognize the systemic violent geographies that neoliberalism (re)produces both in posttransitional Cambodia and beyond. © 2010 Pion Ltd and its Licensors.

In the wake of the Asian Crisis, cases studies from Southeast Asia often reinforced the perception that neoliberalism is thriving in authoritarian states. Processes of intensive neoliberalisation in the region have now been ongoing for over a decade, yet attempts at democratic consolidation have been tenuous, fragile and incomplete at best, calling into question the supposed nexus between democracy and neoliberal reform. Accordingly, there is need for a moment of pause, to take stock of the neoliberalising process in the region, and importantly, to reframe the question and reflect on how and why authoritarianism is continuing to thrive in the neoliberalising Southeast Asian state. © 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Victoria University of Wellington.

This paper steps into recent debates concerning the (f)utility of neoliberalism as an 'actually existing' concept by reminding the reader that without a Marxian political economy approach, one that specifically includes neoliberalisation as part of its theoretical edifice, we run the risk of obfuscating the reality of capitalism's festering poverty, rising inequality, and ongoing geographies of violence as something unknowable and 'out there'. By failing to acknowledge such nonillusory effects of neoliberalisation and refusing the explanatory power neoliberalism holds in relating similar constellations of experiences across space as a potential basis for emancipation, we precipitously ensure the prospect of a violent future. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.