Regimes of Human Security, Intellectual Property and Social Reproduction: Ideas, Institutions and Material Capabilities from the 19th Century Liberal Capitalism to the 21st Century New Constitutional Architecture

Abstract

This dissertation develops a historically grounded understanding of human security by examining the contested trajectory of the relationship between intellectual property regimes and human security concerns institutionally and ideationally in the different eras of capitalism, and the unprecedented emergence of patent protection as the ‘common sense’ of subsistence in neoliberalism. Developing a novel synthesis that integrates Robert Cox’s framework of historical structures of ideas, institutions, and material capabilities, and the forms of power arising from their interaction, feminist social reproduction theories, ‘new constitutionalism’, and Fernand Braudel’s analysis of long-term patterns of historical continuity and change, it examines subtle and often obscured ways in which patent regimes have shaped the global governance of human security, particularly of food security and hunger, and the social reproductive contradictions of capitalism across different accumulation regimes.

The dissertation explores significant shifts and continuities in the dominant ideas and institutions related to the commodification of knowledge and hunger, and puts forth three primary claims. First, the ideational and institutional origins of the relationships between patents and the global governance of subsistence lie in the normative framework of the ‘liberal utopia’ of nineteenth-century economic liberalism, colonial rule and the invention of the corporation as a legal subject. Secondly, the neoliberal patent regime is a new constitutionalist mechanism that locks in a financialized and deeply depoliticized human security regime that institutionalizes the precarity of subsistence as a permanent condition, particularly for the impoverished populations in the Global South. The neoliberal institutionalization of patents on seed and, more broadly, the ‘technological fix’ of what I frame as “the plants of market civilization” suggests a neoliberal human security regime that is difficult to transform and systematically insulated from democratic accountability and popular contestation from below. Third, the enduring legacy of the new constitutionalist logic of depoliticization has been reinforced in the different eras of capitalism by hegemonic ideas and institutions that relegate hunger and food security to the ‘economy’, to international institutions and corporate philanthropy/charity.