Postneoliberalism and its malcontents

The onset of the global financial crisis in 2008 has been widely interpreted as a fundamental challenge to, if not crisis of, neoliberal governance. Here, we explore some of the near-term and longer-run consequences of the economic crisis for processes of neoliberalization, asking whether we have been witnessing the terminal unraveling of neoliberalism as a form of social, political, and economic regulation. In many ways a creature of crisis, could neoliberalism now be falling to a crisis of its own making? Answering this question is impossible, we argue, without an adequate understanding of the nature of neoliberalization and its evolving sociospatial manifestations. These are more than definitional niceties. The prospects and potential of efforts to move genuinely beyond neoliberalism must also be considered in this light.