Markus Sattler

As transformative visions for more just and sustainable societies multiply around the globe, the Diverse and Community Economies approach presents one of the most influential strategies to advance postcapitalist visions. In this paper, we contribute to this project based on our research and activism in the Global East, intended here as Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. We argue that engaging with the Global East is not only a matter of epistemic inclusivity but also a (too‐often‐neglected) opportunity to learn from a region with a history of dramatic economic transformation and diversity. We highlight examples of community economies already contributing to more‐than‐human wellbeing, and we present emerging theoretical insights concerning temporality, the multi‐sitedness of the enterprise, and diverse economic subjectivities. With that, we articulate our ongoing research agenda and advance conversations with postcapitalist scholarship and politics.

While degrowth as a plural and decolonial movement actively invites the Global South to be part of its transformative project, the current North-South dichotomy threatens to miss the variety of semi-peripheral contexts. Against this backdrop, we aim to contribute to dialogues on degrowth from the often-overlooked ‘East’ – specifically post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Instead of being viewed as a site for transformative examples and inspiration for degrowth-oriented socio-ecological transformation, CEE is often portrayed as ‘lagging behind’. Problematising such reductionist narratives, this essay explores CEE as a lively and rich site of postcapitalist alternatives. Based on two special sessions organised at the 2023 International Degrowth Conference in Zagreb, we ref lect upon insights gathered on various degrowth-aligned traditions and practices in CEE with a goal to 1) advance an equitable dialogue between the global degrowth scholarship and the East, and 2) strengthen a context-sensitive degrowth agenda in CEE.

Why is there little discussion around positionalities and desires in enterprise research within economic geography and beyond? This paper advocates an ethico-political methodology by drawing on research praxes that articulate a need for situated knowledges. This article develops the case for enterprise research in which our positioned desires matter. Positioned desires acknowledge the role of desires as a critical aspect to appreciate the ethico-political aspects of knowledge production in enterprise research. These desires are positioned in a concrete historical and material-institutional context and should be open to interrogation in the research process. In order to arrive at this idea, I first review dominant forms of critical realism in economic geography, according to which the researcher analyzes an external ontological reality. I show how this misses to specify the ethico-political stakes of knowledge production. I exemplify this claim through an analysis of the ‘missing researchers’ in the Global Production Network literature and the performative exclusions that this positioned desire-free lacuna entails. Subsequently, I illustrate the implications of a ‘postcolonial ethico-onto-epistemology’, by examining the importance of positioned desires for doing enterprise research in Armenia and Georgia, showing the need for creativity in navigating ethically through a difficult terrain of manifold power differentials.

In this multiple book review, we depart from an interest in the pluriverse. Therefore, we consider Escobar’s Designs for the Pluriverse as an introduction to the wider concept. In line with the jou...

(2020). Alternative globalizations. Eastern Europe and the postcolonial world. Eurasian Geography and Economics. Ahead of Print.

In a structuralist reading, the hegemonies of the global economy are perceived as threateningly fixed. We suggest understanding the global knowledge economy as an always unfinished project of ordering socio-spatial relations. To better communicate the struggles of peripherally located places/companies associated with this process of spatial ordering, we provide a simplified visualization of the global knowledge economy.