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Argues that we are witnessing the development of a new norm of military intervention for humanitarian purposes in contemporary international society. Since the end of the Cold War, the United Nations Security Council has been more active in the realm of intervention, extending its Chapter VII powers into matters that had previously belonged to the domestic jurisdiction of states. Without the material power of Western states, this activism would not have been possible. However, a purely materialist explanation for this development fails to consider the changed normative context within Western states that permitted, and in some cases encouraged, intervention. While normative evolution has occurred, it is also limited in its scope, specifically over the question of whether military intervention must have Security Council authorization.

This chapter showcases an essay written in honor of William Arthur Lewis, whose ideas on economics were in counterpoint to Hirschman's. Lewis was a champion of more balanced growth; Hirschman favored disequilibrium. Lewis' winning the Nobel Prize for economics, among other things, had only exacerbated Hirschman's concerns that the field was growing stale. Thus, this chapter takes stock of the field of development economics and advocates an approach premised on the idea that peoples of the Third World can chart their own futures, and did, despite the long-standing convictions of development economics that only outside forces and expertise could shake them from their lot.

Structuralist transformation approaches were first developed by neo-Marxist critics dissatisfied with classic modernization theory. Rather than assuming a universal path to democracy that all countries eventually follow, structuralist explanations view democratization as merely one possible outcome of more fundamental changes in a society’s class and power relations. After discussing Barrington Moore’s early attempt to identify the social origins of dictatorship and democracy, this chapter turns to the role of the state and international power relations. World-system and dependency theory link the emergence of bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes in newly industrialized countries to their late integration into the capitalist world economy. Dependent development changes the nature of class relations and the outlook of the bourgeoisie thereby hampering democracy. Yet the chapter continues to show that the final push for democratic inclusion has typically been by the working class. Finally, a synthesis of different structuralist arguments and Vanhanen’s Index of Power Resources are presented.

Following a neo-Weberian theoretical perspective, with reference to neo-Marxist analyses, this chapter considers the position of health support workers in the market in neo-liberal societies – with a particular focus empirically on a cross-country comparison between the United Kingdom and Canada. It discusses the role of health support workers holistically in the context of the wider range of health professionals with whom they work. Health professions themselves have been claimed in recent years to have been deprofessionalised or proletarianised. However, it is argued here that such trends are overstated and there is still typically a large gulf between the working conditions of this group of health professional occupations and those of health support workers. The latter are critically considered in terms of the recent interest in depicting such groups as the new precariat. It is argued that there is little doubt that in the United Kingdom and Canada most health support workers can be described as operating in precarious conditions. Nonetheless, doubts are raised as to whether this group will become the self-conscious and cohesive class as envisaged in neo-Marxist theory. The conclusion to the chapter highlights the policy implications of the analysis in light of current debates.

Political economy has thus far failed to define politics clearly and heuristically. This chapter presents how four dominant theories instead unhelpfully conflate politics with other terms: liberal, neo-classical economics, and International Relations Theory reduce politics to politicians and governments; neo-Marxists confuse it with power; historical and sociological institutionalists use politics as a synonym for conflict; whilst interactionists using Actor Network Theory or a Global Value Chain framework envisage it as networking. Because the chapter sets out each of these theories and their other useful contributions to political economy, it can be read as a short literature review of the field. However, its principal focus consists of arguing why, ultimately, all these theories end up obstructing analysis of the politics of the economic, rather than facilitating and guiding this object of study.