Trading on the Shadow Commodity Chain: Brazilian Feminists and International Aid Regimes

• In Event: 264 - Regular Session. Economic Globalization

Abstract

My fieldwork with feminist and women's movements in Northeast Brazil in the late 1990s encountered troubling traces of the capitalist market in movement relationships--calculative behavior among allies, resurgent class divisions, corporate style organizational structures, and a dominant emphasis on quantitative results, among others. Drawing on fieldwork with two women’s organizations in Northeast Brazil and their funders in the Netherlands, this paper explores the origins and mechanisms by which neoliberal discourses invaded spaces often explicitly antagonistic to them.

I argue that the incursions of market-based practices into social movements must be situated in the shifting architecture of international aid regimes that span the space between Latin American movements and their financial sponsors in the global North. The decade of the 1990s was a key moment in which the links between market and movement were established, taking the form of segmented transnational relationships, analogous to Wallerstein and Hopkins’ understanding of the commodity chains that sutured together the world system. What I call "shadow commodity chains" linked grassroots activists, Southern NGOs, international funding agencies, Northern states, and civil societies in relations of discursive production, consumption and exchange. While world systems theory viewed commodity chains as tools to understand North-South inequalities, I find that the discursive dimension of their shadow counterparts offered surprising leverage to economically disadvantaged actors, including both NGOs and their grassroots allies.

Today, the shadow commodity chain is being reconfigured into multiple linkages through which, nevertheless, the market orientations first established in the 1990s continued to be transmitted, negotiated, and contested.

Author

• Millie Thayer, University of Massachusetts-Amherst