Policy World: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power, Cris Shore,

While debate still rages over whether neoliberalism is the best epithet for the contemporary political moment (for a recent contribution to this debate, see Peck and Tickell, 2012), the transformations that have occurred within and across states over the last few decades have long been recognised as putting serious strain on conventional and methodologically nationalist explanatory frameworks. Themes like transnationalism, state rescaling and, more recently, policy mobility have emerged in geography to try to take account of the changing socio-spatial constitution of political processes and to offer a language for its description and analysis. But there is a lot of potential for inter-disciplinary conversation here as well. Emerging research programmes in both anthropology and political science/studies show considerable conceptual and methodological overlap with this recent work in geography, and it is likely all three disciplines would benefit from further engagement with one another. It perhaps comes as something of a surprise to suggest that geographers might be able to talk to political scientists at all, given the latter’s well established and ongoing predilection for empiricist and positivist frameworks and standards of evidence tha