Scholars often point to the 1990s as the ideological high-tide of neoliberal globalization. More recently, however, populism has brought back into politics – on both the left and right - a consideration that the economy should be a moral realm, that is, a realm wherein purely transactional relationships of the neoliberal kind must give way to broader social obligations and reciprocities. If there is any economy that deserves the label “popular” – in terms of its widespread and global use and its association with the masses as opposed to the elites – it is surely the Cannabis economy. In contrast to the principles of neoliberal economy, Cannabis culture comprises a dense weave of collective norms, reciprocities, and obligations that govern not only how the plant is cultivated but how it is used and even sold. Rastafari are the exemplars of this culture, promoting a transnational moral economy of black self-determination. But the Rastafari use of Cannabis has been criminalized as part of a war on drugs with racist predicates. This presentation historically tracks the war across Caribbean and North American spaces, and via spiritual, cultural, economic and political dimensions, in order to examine a moral economy that might help us think differently about alternatives to neo-liberalism in a populist era.

Professor Robbie Shilliam is Professor and Chair of the Political Science Department at Johns Hopkins University, He is a leading scholar of postcolonial politics and racial politics in the field of International Relations. He has authored numerous books including Race and the Undeserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit (2018); Decolonizing Politics (2021), The Black Pacific: Anticolonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections (2015), and German Thought and International Relations (2009) and co-edited multiple volumes including Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (2014). He is co-editor of the Manchester University Press book series Postcolonial International Studies. Professor Shilliam is a long-standing active member of the Global Development section of the International Studies Association, having served as the association's Vice President. Professor Shilliam works with community and academic intellectuals and elders of the Rastafari movement to examine its impact on global affairs. Based on original, primary research, he helped to co-curate a history of the Rastafari movement in Britain, which was exhibited in Ethiopia, Jamaica and Britain.

Location: Athenaeum