Introduction – Risk Management in Global Capitalism

This paper serves as an introduction toRisking Capitalism. To this end, I discuss the key questions, aims, and themes driving this collective project. Although the contributions differ in their use of political economy and political ecological with regard to housing, poverty, and climate change, they share a similar concern of interrogating the material, institutional, and discursive features of the production, representation, and governance of risk – a phenomenon that the World Bank views as lossandopportunity. In particular, they chart the relationship between risk, contemporary capitalism and its neoliberal modes of governance. After establishing the objectives ofRisking Capitalism, I provide a general context from which to understand the significance and meaning of global risk management (GRM) with reference to the shared policy experiments of the World Economic Forum and World Bank. Mirroring the contributions in this volume, I start from the premise that risk is a social relation. This allows me to argue that GRM represents a new mode of neoliberal governance emergent from the structural violence produced by the expansion of credit-led capitalism. In the final section, I lay out the structure of the volume.