Franklin Obeng-Odoom

ABSTRACT

What are the causes of the current transnational migration “crisis”? What about the causes of the 2008 global economic crisis? Are these crises separate or interlinked? Previous research has pointed to civil war in refugee-sending countries and problematic financial practices in the United States as causal mechanisms of the refugee and economic crises based on methodologies that considered these crises separately. Publicly available data published, among others, by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), analysed using particular institutional political economy approach, however, shows that neither war nor financial speculation is a sufficient explanation. Instead, both crises arise from specific growth-based rentier capitalism aggressively pursued by an American-led West against a resistant Middle East, North Africa, and the Global South more generally.

KEYWORDS

Refugees, war, urban, economic crises, institutionalism

From: International Critical Thought 2019 9 (1)

Editor: Wang Yi