A new book by Kent legal scholar Dr Donatella Alessandrini examines the contemporary production of economic value in today’s financial economies.
In Value Making in International Economic Law and Regulation (Routledge, 2016) Dr Alessandrini reflects on the regulatory response to the global financial crisis. She argues that much of the response has been based on the assumption that speculative ‘excesses’ in the financial sphere need to be curbed in order to restore a healthy economic system endowed with real values. Dr Alessandrini goes on to explore how the ‘intrinsic’ value of goods and services produced in the sphere of the real economy can be disentangled from the ‘artificial’ values produced by financial markets.
Dr Alessandrini said: ‘This book is about value. Its idea emerges from a series of reflections concerning shifting public and regulatory debates about the US subprime mortgage, turned financial, turned (world) economic crisis, and the place of value making within these debates.’
As well as examining current international legal regulation and questioning the regulation of the financial sphere, the book also considers the limits of our current conceptualization of value production and measurement, with specific reference to arrangements in the areas of finance, trade and labour.
Drawing on a range of innovative work in the social sciences, and attentive to the spatial and temporal connections that make the global economy, as well as the racial, gender and class articulations of the social reproductive field within it, the book further asks: what alternative arrangements might be able to affect, and indeed alter, the value-making processes that underlie our current international regulatory framework?
Dr Alessandrini is Reader in Law at Kent Law School. Her research interests lie in the areas of critical development studies, trade theory and practice, and feminist political economy. Her previous book Developing Countries and the Multilateral Trade Regime: The Failure and Promise of the WTO’s Development Mission (Hart, 2010) explores the way in which ‘development’ has functioned within the multilateral trade regime since de-colonisation. More recently she contributed a book chapter ‘Financial Derivatives and the Challenge of Performation: Where Contingency Meets Contestability’ to Knowledge, Technology and Law: at the Intersection of Socio-Legal and Science and Technology Studies (Routledge, 2014).
Working with Dr Suhraiya Jivraj, Dr Alessandrini is also currently engaged in a research project which interrogates the importance that Well Being and Happiness (WBH) initiatives have acquired in intern/national policy making, especially since the 2008 economic crisis. Called ‘Exploring wellbeing and gross national happiness in sustainable development policy making‘, the project is funded by a grant from the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust.
Dr Alessandrini is a Co-Director of Graduate Studies (Research) at Kent Law School and is Co-Director of the Social Critiques of Law (SoCRiL) research group. A former Editorial Board member of Feminist Legal Studies (2005-2011), and Law and Critique (2011-2013), she is currently on the Editorial Board of feminists@law.