School of Social & Political Sciences

This paper by Matt Barlow (Glasgow and IBEI), co-authored with Jean Grugel argues that Regional Organisations' responses to COVID-19 in Latin America and Africa failed to sufficently incorporate gender norms into policy during COVID-19. When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, it was unclear whether regional institutions would serve to promote and protect the rights of women and girls during the pandemic or whether, on the contrary, those rights would be sacrificed in favour of gender-conservative, patriarchal policy making. Using the examples of Latin America and Africa, we show that the answer to our question is complex. On the one hand, institutions used regional gender equality norms to flag the importance of gender for COVID-19 policy making. But we also show that these norms were deprioritized in policy at the regional and the member state level and, consequently, that women and girls were exposed to additional gender-based harm. Published in Globalizations. READ

This paper by Matt Barlow (Glasgow and IBEI) argues that ideas about tax matter as much as interests and institutions for understanding social attitudes and responses to attempts by the state to raise revenues for development agendas. Tax is a profoundly political problem, reflecting different and sometimes opposing ideas about the role of the state, the market and business–state relationships, and tax rises in developing countries can become linked to wider conflicts of development. Using the case of Argentina, the paper examines, empirically, the attempts by the government of Cristina Kirchner to finance state expenditure and social welfare via raising taxes on commodity exports after 2008. It argues that ideas of tax became embedded with deeply contested ideas of what the state’s role in development should be. Published in Economy and Society. READ