Neoliberalism, Dead Again? On the Many Lives, Half-Lives, and After-Lives of an Unloved Idea

Tuesday, March 24, 2026 from 11:30 am to 1:00 pm

• In-person event
• Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS) , Ottawa , ON , K1N 9A7

Location: FSS 4006, 120 University Private, University of Ottawa

Presented by CIPS and the International Political Economy Network (IPEN)

The free-market ideological project known, mostly by critics, as “neoliberalism” has been declared dead before. But once again, prominent commentators are reading the last rites. There is no shortage of indications: Trump’s tariffs and the return of protectionism, repudiations of globalism, “the China model,” resurgent nationalisms, so-called state capitalism, and a host of other morbid symptoms. Did late neoliberalism just pass into post-neoliberalism? Maybe it is finally time to consign this generally unloved idea, and the associated bundle of policies, projects, and governing principles, to the dustbin of history? Some continue to say that it is still too early to tell. But with neoliberalism once again at death’s door, maybe we are now in a position to make sense of how it lived—as a hegemonic project and strong discourse, as a program never willing to speak its own name, and as one of the most divisive concepts in the social sciences.

Speaker

Jamie Peck, FRSC, FBA, FAcSS is University Killam Professor, Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. With long-term research interests in economic geography, urban and regional studies, and institutional political economy, he is the author most recently of Variegated economies (2023, Oxford).