[...] while for some European states internal and external conflicts were a laboratory for new and more productive forms of debt financing, African leaders tended to raise the capital needed to finance authority by selling the means of production, both human and ecological. Historians have located the origins of this strategy in Africa’s relative labour shortage: unable to control subordinates who could easily disappear into the vast tracts of unoccupied land when things got tough, rulers saw forms of ‘outsourced exploitation’, notably the transatlantic slave trade, as an attractive alternative. [...]

[...] while the powerful cultivated their image as a fruitful bough, the gifts made to underlings in these performances were in reality a tiny fraction of the whole, obscuring the fact that most wealth was being funnelled offshore. [...] the African trajectory differs in an important respect from the classic capitalist one. Here the alienation of public debt incurred from foreign loans involved re-shipping it offshore—and thus undermining capital formation. Though it is ignored or pushed to the margins by conventional Africanist accounts, capital flight provides a far more elegant and empirically robust explanation for the failure of accumulation in Sub-Saharan Africa than ‘neo-patrimonialism’ or ‘the politics of the belly’. [...]

[...] scholarship cannot isolate Congo from the dynamics of global capitalism. This is not just a matter of resource privatization and giveaway mineral rents, oiled by multi-million-dollar kickbacks. The channels for funnelling value away from on-shore jurisdictions into a netherworld of ‘treasure islands’ benefit from a state-of-the-art grid that Western elites have a big stake in leaving safely buried. The various tax havens are ‘spider’s webs’ with, at their centre, northern financial hubs like Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland or the USA. The British Virgin Islands, which seem to be the major destination for much of the DRC’s recent capital flight, have a very strong connection to the Square Mile. The flows that have helped sap capital formation in Africa’s giant involve a considerable shift of economic surplus from the many to the few, and from South to North.

[...] You could see the same kind of reaction for our three-person hunger strike in the park by the Government Offices. The same cry went up: ‘Protect the students!’ The belief is that adults should protect young people. Actually, it was we who were protecting them, not the other way around.

[...] Our aim is to make society more equal, after we have made it more liberal.

[...] The Chief Executive system has not worked well up to now: if one accepts the CE’s two-fold accountability, to the Central People’s Government and to the Hong Kong population, only one of these—loyalty to Beijing—has an enforcement mechanism, and thus tends to override the other. [...]

Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement brought together disparate themes in an original way: it combined Occupy Wall Street’s critique of economic hegemony with a form of legal-constitutionalist resistance against an authoritarian state; a call for democracy with an aspiration to a post-modern, post-national identity, going beyond a politics of recognition. It could be argued that these features mirror China’s own contradictions, as a nominally socialist country practicing unbridled crony capitalism, and as a cultural empire dressed up as a jingoistic nation-state. Hong Kong’s simultaneous embrace of democracy and post-national identity and its critique of crony capitalism stand in opposition to China on all counts. [...]

Issues, players, concern, efforts, platforms, dialogue, ground . . . ‘The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness’, wrote Orwell in ‘Politics and the English Language’, and his words are as true today as they were in 1946. The Bank stresses the importance of what it’s saying—key, global, innovative, enlightened—but its words are hopelessly opaque. What is it really trying to say—or to hide?

[...] you don’t support countries which are cooperating with each other; you support ‘South–South cooperation’. An abstraction, where temporality is abolished. ‘The provision of social services and country assessments and action plans which assist in the formulation of poverty reduction policies’, writes the Report for 1990—and the five nominalizations create a sort of simultaneity among a series of actions that are in fact quite distinct from each other. Providing social services (action one) which will assist (two) in formulating policies (three) to reduce poverty (four): doing this will take a very long time. But in the language of the Report, all these steps have contracted into a single policy, which seems to come into being all at once. It’s magic.

And then—the authors of Corpus Linguistics continue—in nominalizations, actions and processes are ‘separated from human participants’: cooperation, not states which cooperate with each other. ‘Pollution, soil erosion, land degradation, deforestation and deterioration of the urban environment’, mourns another recent Report, and the absence of social actors is striking. All these ominous trends—and no one is responsible? ‘Prioritization’ enters the Reports as debt crisis looms; meaning, quite simply, that not all creditors would be treated equally: some would be reimbursed right away, others later; some in full, and others not. Of course, the criteria according to which X would be treated differently from Y had been decided by someone. But prioritization concealed that. Why X and not Y? Because of prioritization. In front of the word, one can no longer see—one can no longer even imagine—a concrete subject engaged in a decision. ‘Rendition’: an American secret agency kidnaps foreign citizens to hand them over to another secret service, in another country, that will torture them. In ‘rendition’, it’s all gone. It’s magic.

[...] Nominalizations remained unusually frequent because they ‘worked’ in so many interconnected ways: they hid the subject of decisions, eliminated alternatives, endowed the chosen policy with a halo of high principle and prompt realization. Their abstraction was the perfect echo of a capital that was itself becoming more and more deterritorialized; their impossible ugliness—‘prioritization’: come on!—lent them a certain pedantic reliability; their ambiguity allowed for the endless small adjustments that keep the peace in the world order. And so, this mass of Latin words became a key ingredient of ‘how one talks about policy’. Specific semantic fields rise and fall with their referents [...]