~I am especially grateful to Graham Harrison and James G. Carrier for their years-long cooperation and contribution to this work, especially while it was in early stage, and to Ray Bush and Mette Wigan for their support since I moved to Leeds in 2012. I am thankful to my research team in...

AGOA

~Economic trickery, fraud and crime are widespread in today’s global economy. Affected are not only the markets for arms, drugs and human beings but also everyday economies for legal goods and services in sectors such as agro-business, manufacturing, food, health, banking, accounting, emissions...

~The historical context of the emergence and consolidation of neoliberalism since the 1980s has been widely discussed in the literature. Neoliberalism understood as a particular ideology, policy, discursive formation, class project, governmentality and social engineering project has also been studied widely. I do not revisit these debates here...

~This chapter introduces Uganda and greater Bugisu and gives an overview of neoliberal reforms, especially regarding the economy. The Republic of Uganda is a multiethnic country. The vast majority of the population of the about 35 million people resides in the rural area (82%), though urbanisation is rising. The country’s population growth is...

~In the following chapters, I offer an account of some of the moral-economic changes that the reforms brought about, including those that fuelled the contemporary ME of fraud. In this chapter I highlight dynamics in the early reform years that set in motion the making of the neoliberal ME. The...

~This chapter presents an overview of key changes that people identified with the liberalisation of the economy, especially with regard to organisation and practice in agricultural trade. It makes introductory points concerning the ME of agricultural trade in general and fraud in particular and explains why fraud was so high in the neoliberal...

~The ME of a sector in a particular locality consists of a large network of actors, in narrow sense they include the very local actors, say from farmers, middlemen, large buyers to local state officials, in an extensive sense they further include Kampala-based actors, such as powerful state, donors and NGO officials there (and even further afield,...

~In the next two chapters I look at the traders’ views regarding the NVOPs that underpinned their trade with farmers. In chapter 6 I centre on what traders in Bugisu perceived to be the key moral-economic characteristics of the world of business in...

~In the previous chapter I presented traders’ views about changes in the ME that they lived and worked in. The core thematic pillars of these accounts included commercialisation, competition, individualisation, insecurity and poverty and a related emerging normative structure of increasingly hardened and self-interested orientations and...

~Throughout the last chapters, there were a few hints already about how people perceived state actors. In this chapter I expand this analysis. I discuss what traders, farmers and others saw to be characteristic of the NVOPs of state actors that affected market and community affairs. A point that was made by almost everyone was that many state...

~In this chapter I present an analysis of the normative pillars of the efforts of farmers and traders to establish alternative, non-neoliberal MEs. Given that, as various interviews with state and donor officials showed, the powerful were regularly rather unconcerned, dismissive or pretended to be not conversant with the existence, magnitude and...

~At the beginning of this book I argued that understanding the prevalence of fraud in contemporary capitalist societies requires an exploration of the moral-economic transformation that has been produced by the major reform programme around the globe in the last three decades: neoliberalism. I have thus made a two-fold argument: that neoliberalism...

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~accumulation:

~Jörg Wiegratz is Lecturer in Political Economy of Global Development at the University of Leeds. He researches the political economy and moral economy of neoliberalism in Africa and elsewhere. In the past he has researched global value chains and...