Our article focuses on a question that is at the core of comparative capitalisms (CC) scholarship and historical materialist state theory: What is an appropriate theory of institutions in capitalism? How can we conceptualise institutions in relation to the fundamental contradictions and power relations of capitalism? Starting from the social foundations of institutions, the aim of this article is to show how institutional complementarity and institutional change can be explained through analysing shifting relationships of social forces. With our newly developed method of a ‘historical materialist policy analysis’, in which we have integrated insights of CC approaches, we seek to show how an empirical investigation of relationships of forces can be operationalised. This is briefly illustrated in an analysis of the constellation of forces in the current Euro crisis.
Today, the analysis of migration and migration policy from a perspective of critical political economy is necessary, because of the dramatic conflicts surrounding the so-called “refugee crisis” of 2015/2016, but also because explicitly materialist analyses of these issues have been marginalized for years, with problematic effects. Thus, the article sketches a theoretical and methodological outline of a materialist border regime analysis. It first criticizes problematic aspects of the influential “ethnographic border regime analysis” approach and then, by relying on regulation theory, develops a materialist understanding of migration and border regimes. Starting from a discussion of the social and political conflicts around German migration policy in 2015/2016, the article then goes on to identify three migration-related structural contradictions that are regulated within migration and border regimes: accumulation by dispossession and the autonomy of migration;labour conflicts; and the structural chauvinism of national welfare states.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.