An in-progress senior project by Nathan Kim, exploring the racial logic embedded in the International Monetary Fund's Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) through textual and digital means.
Contact me at nathan.kim@yale.edu for any questions.
Since its founding in 1944, the International Monetary Funds has amassed a total of 705 billion Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) in spending capacity, or about $1 trillion. As opposed to the World Bank's extensive general lending system, IMF loans have played a pivotal role specifically during times of crisis. The relatively small organization (of only ~2,300 staff members) with no subsidiary organizations is able to move the global economy through these loans, millions of people at a time, and its focus on low-to-middle-income countries during crises means that the most vulnerable of the global population are affected by its work.
The IMF's loans are not without caveats. Under the stated purpose of ensuring loan repayment and financial stability, or "conditionality," the IMF requires that loan-receiving countries also implement a set of macroeconomic policy reforms known as Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). These include "purely" economic measures like currency devaluation, austerity measures, and restructuring or refinancing foreign debts, but also include liberalization of markets broadly, privatization of state-owned companies in particular, opening the country to foreign investment, and most relevantly to this project, a stipulation for the country to move towards resource extraction and export. Although the majority of IMF loans do come with market-rate interest rates and often require collateral, both of which can be a significant burden for countries requesting aid, SAPs are far more powerful in terms of creating long-term subjugating economic relations. SAPs push countries in the Global South to cheaply produce and export goods to the Global North, where only then they are realized as profit. SAPs push countries to denationalize basic necessities and turn them over to multinational corporations in order to qualify for loans.
This project seeks to explore the racial logic embedded in the SAPs, beginning with Paula Chakravartty and Denise da Silva's collection Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime. They note that while Marxist geographer David Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession turns towards the social processes of dispossession that are at capitalism's core, Harvey takes race for granted in his writing because he notes simply the disproportionate burden of these acts of dispossession on people of color without discussing the racial logic that would allow such a burden to appear. Race and racism are taken as "primitive" concepts over which modern capitalist forces take hold. They argue that race continues to order accumulation in and of itself, and specifically in the subprime mortgage crisis that Black recipients of loans are continually configured to be outside of the relationship of an economic transaction and the capacity to pay one side of the trade.
But their discussion, while framed as a study of global capitalism and arguing that "race as the naturalized ways U.S. Americans deploy the term cannot be the privileged and sole critical descriptor" of the various manifestations of the logics of dispossession on the "others of Europe," still stops short of studying dispossession across the globe. Their collection does not touch on relationships between or across nations, institutions that drive these processes forth, or how the crises they discuss manifest elsewhere.
This will hopefully fulfill a complement to their discussion by discussing debt and raciality as global concepts. While they focus on U.S. banking institutions and the subprime mortgage loan, I will focus on the IMF's crisis loans; while they critique the dispossession of the "others of Europe" by focusing on Black and Latino/a homeowners, I will focus on the (mis)handling of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. More than just being a difference in topic or scope, I hope that this positioning will enable my project to tie in their analysis of the racial logic of debt into postcolonial theory and theories of globalization.
If you'd like to contribute to or explore the project and the steps below are absolutely uninterpretable to you, please send me an email to me at nathan.kim@yale.edu and I'll be happy to talk through it. So sorry for any obtuseness here!
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Install git and node if you do not have them on your computer.
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Download this repository by running the command below in a command line where you would like to download the project.
git clone https://github.com/18kimn/imf_loans
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Open a terminal inside the repository and run
yarnto install all of the packages required in this project. -
Run
yarn startoryarn devin that terminal, then navigate to https://localhost:3000/ on a browser to see a demo of the project on your own computer. -
Make edits to the project by modifying the files in the
srcdirectory. If you'd like to try out edits to the text, modify the markdown files in thecontent/textdirectory and then runyarn renderon the command line. -
If you'd like the change you've made to be permanent, check out a new Git branch, commit your changes, and open a pull request to send the change for my review.
The "body" of the project is created through the Vue 3.x framework, scaffolded by the Vite toolchain. It's written in Typescript, using the Material Design library as implemented by the Vuetify package. Animations, cartography, and data viz parts in general are handled by the d3 ecosystem. Tooling through yarn is also used for fast installs and a nice developer experience.
Click any of the below links to learn more.
Some background: I started learning JavaScript in December of 2020, so I've been learning it for about a year. I've done some projects in d3, React, vanilla JS, and have background in data handling from work in R.
I consider this project a learning experience for me because it's my first project with Vue and Typescript. It's also my first project where a considerable amount of text will be embedded in the website itself (instead of hosted on a different medium), and required me to think of a strategy to write and output academic text efficiently.
All of that to say, I'm grateful to have the opportunity to work on this project for my thesis in the Ethnicity, Race, & Migration program at Yale, and am definitely open to helping others if any similar hurdles are presented to you.