Securitised Neoliberal-Developmentalist Regimes

• Securitised neoliberal-developmentalist regimes are political-economic systems that integrate free-market reforms, selective developmental interventions, and securitisation to control societal dynamics.
• They employ adaptive, network-based resource allocation and policy prioritisation methods that mitigate risks like corruption while managing spillover effects across sectors.
• Influenced by colonial legacies and global treaty networks, these regimes illustrate tensions between maintaining short-term stability and underinvesting in long-term sustainable development.

Securitised neoliberal-developmentalist regimes are contemporary political-economic configurations in which market-oriented reform agendas (neoliberalism) are pursued and maintained through mechanisms of state power, regulation, and securitisation, often in tandem with authoritarian practices and selective developmental interventions. These regimes display an intricate interplay between market liberalisation, efforts at fostering or guiding development, and the mobilisation of security discourses and instruments to discipline social, political, and economic actors.

1. Definition and Core Concepts

Securitised neoliberal-developmentalist regimes are characterised by three intersecting logics:

• Neoliberalisation: The prioritisation of free-market principles, deregulation, privatisation, and the retrenchment of the welfare state, often under the auspices of efficiency and global competitiveness.
• Developmentalism: The selective intervention of the state in guiding, supporting, or accelerating specific aspects of economic and social development—frequently using technocratic or “target-driven” policy mechanisms.
• Securitisation: The framing of policy challenges as threats to national, economic, or political security, justifying extraordinary interventions, social control, and the suspension of normal democratic or legal procedures.

The synthesis of these logics produces a regime in which market imperatives dominate but are implemented and policed through powerful state apparatuses invoking the language and legitimacy of “security” to discipline opposition (including labour), allocate resources, and normalise emergency powers.

2. Policy Prioritisation, Resource Allocation, and Spillover Networks

An important institutional characteristic of these regimes is the method by which the state determines policy priorities in a context of multidimensional objectives and interdependent policy domains. As detailed by frameworks modelling development as a political economy game on a network (Guerrero et al., 2019), governments allocate resources across policy issues using adaptive rules that respond not only to development gaps but also to observed spillover effects and signals of inefficiency or corruption.

Key features:

• Agent-based allocation: The government allocates a budget $B$ across $N$ policy issues, each with a development indicator $I_i$ evolving towards a target $T_i$ under the combined influence of direct contributions and positive spillovers from other policy domains. The core dynamic is given by:

$$I_{i,t} = I_{i,t-1} + \gamma (T_i - I_{i,t-1}) \Big[C_{i,t} + \sum_j C_{j,t} \mathbb{A}_{ji}\Big],$$

where $\mathbb{A}$ is the adjacency matrix encoding spillover intensities.

• Adaptive heuristics: Governments and public servants adapt their behaviours based on current performance, network position (out-degree $K_i$), and signals such as observed corruption.
• Country-specific context: Calibrated networks and clustered patterns reveal that the structure and centrality of policy domains (e.g., governance, business climate, infrastructure) are highly contingent on the country, shaping the specific paths and mechanisms of development intervention.
• Corruption and securitisation: Funds diverted from intended uses, emergent from adaptive agent learning, are interpreted as corruption:

$$\bar{D} = \frac{1}{NB} \sum_{i=1}^N \sum_{t=0}^l (P_{i,t} - C_{i,t}).$$

The securitisation logic is evident in state mobilisation to monitor and enforce integrity, leveraging judicial and administrative power to secure developmental objectives.

This approach provides an analytic tool for generating development strategies that are sensitive to context and capable of supporting the dual imperatives of market reforms and social control.

3. International Architecture, Fiscal Havens, and Colonial Legacies

At the global scale, the institutional architecture underpinning these regimes is strongly conditioned by historical legacies and the networked interactions of treaties, alliances, and financial flows. Research applying multilayer network science reveals (Sacco et al., 2022):

• Colonial legacies: The structure of today’s international order reflects the enduring influence of colonial-era power configurations. Many micro- and medium-small states—often former colonies functioning as fiscal havens—serve as critical nodes in political and economic treaty networks.
• Fiscal havens: These territories act as structural “glue” in global governance, facilitating tax avoidance and the preservation of private capital. Their systemic importance stems not from scale but from strategic network position; removal of such nodes can cause disproportionate fragmentation of treaty architecture.
• Damage index quantification: The stability and fragility of these regimes can be modelled using a damage index,

$$\delta_i^\ell = \frac{c_i^\ell \times q_i^\ell}{g_i^\ell},$$

where $c_i^\ell$ is the community ratio, $q_i^\ell$ the number of connected components, and $g_i^\ell$ the size of the largest component after node or treaty removal.

• Nonlinear systemic fragility: Contrary to conventional power-based paradigms, regime resilience and points of vulnerability are distributed, with medium-small and micro-states (especially fiscal havens) able to generate cascading network disruption.

These findings situate neoliberal-developmentalist regimes within an international order in which global inequality and fiscal injustice are maintained by structural features rooted in networked relationships and colonial history.

4. Regime Change, Internal Factors, and Economic Performance

Within developing and emerging economies, regime transitions away from or within neoliberal-developmentalist paradigms have empirically significant economic consequences. The Chilean experience post-2014 demonstrates (Toni et al., 2 Jul 2024):

• Abrupt policy shift: A multidimensional reform package involving fiscal, educational, labour, and constitutional change marked a clear departure from established pro-market norms, constituting a regime change rather than incremental adjustment.
• Causal inference: Using a combination of synthetic control (SCM) and Bayesian structural time series (BSTS), the impact of the reforms is quantified:
  • Approximately two-thirds of Chile’s post-2014 growth slowdown is attributable to internal policy changes, with real GDP per capita falling by nearly 10% versus counterfactual and growth declining 1.8 percentage points over five years.
• Implications: These results underscore that regime stability and predictability are essential for sustained growth in neoliberal-developmentalist systems; abrupt or poorly signalled departures may generate uncertainty, delay capital accumulation, and depress performance.

A plausible implication is that the combination of market-oriented reforms with robust mechanisms of state coordination and security facilitates more stable growth trajectories than do rapid and poorly sequenced policy shocks.

5. Varieties of Capitalism, FOI Indices, and Green Growth Dynamics

Quantitative typologies of capitalism document the emergence of various regime types within the OECD, with implications for securitised neoliberal-developmentalist strategies (Bartha, 23 Sep 2025):

• The FOI model: Countries are evaluated on three indices:
  • F (Future): Long-term competitiveness, education, R&D, and green growth ($F = \frac{1}{n_F} \sum_{i=1}^{n_F} F_i$).
  • O (Outside): External economic integration and readiness ($O = \frac{1}{n_O} \sum_{j=1}^{n_O} O_j$).
  • I (Inside): Domestic social and governance quality ($I = \frac{1}{n_I} \sum_{k=1}^{n_I} I_k$).
• Open market-based regimes: Exhibit high $O$ and $I$ but low $F$, particularly in green growth, reflecting a prioritisation of present stability through market openness and securitisation, often at the expense of future potential.
• Green growth curtain: There is a marked divergence, with coordinated market economies (typically European) outperforming others on green growth and future readiness. This sharply delineates different developmentalist strategies and highlights the trade-off undertaken in open market-oriented, securitised neoliberal regimes.
• Transition pathways: Case studies (Israel, Estonia) illustrate that enhancements in governance quality and policy coordination enable transitions out of the middle-income trap, demonstrating the role of targeted state intervention within these regimes.

This empirical typology shows that the blending of neoliberal and securitisation logics yields regimes that are highly adaptive in securing immediate economic and social stability but may be systematically prone to underinvestment in long-term sustainability.

6. Labour, Authoritarianism, and Democratic Constraints

A central domain for the articulation of securitised neoliberal-developmentalist regimes is the restructuring of labour markets under conditions of authoritarianism, as illustrated by the cases of Turkey and Egypt (Erol et al., 29 Sep 2025):

• Labour market restructuring: Deregulation, precarisation, and privatisation of labour are implemented alongside legal and coercive measures to marginalise or co-opt independent organised labour.
• Mechanisms of control: States deploy a mix of legislation (e.g., restrictive bargaining rules), direct repression (banning unions), and the co-optation or nurturing of state-aligned unions. The invocation of national security legitimises the suppression of labour dissent.
• Continuity and difference: While both Turkey and Egypt demonstrate the reinforcement of class power via flexible and disciplined labour, Turkey's trajectory features episodic democratic mobilisation and subsequent crackdowns, whereas Egypt’s experience comprises gradual decline and reassertion of authoritarian corporatism after short-lived democratic openings.
• Theoretical expression: The systematic weakening of unions $U$ as a function of neoliberal policy $N$ and authoritarian control $A$ can be represented as

$U = k \cdot N^\alpha \cdot A^\beta,$

for constants $k, \alpha, \beta > 0$, reflecting the compounding effects of economic and political repressive strategies.

Empirically, these dynamics indicate that economic liberalisation does not necessarily foster political democratisation; rather, in these contexts, it frequently becomes structurally dependent on and mutually reinforcing of authoritarian state practices.

7. Synthesis and Implications

The empirical and theoretical corpus demonstrates that securitised neoliberal-developmentalist regimes are defined by:

• The joint pursuit of market efficiency, selective developmentalist intervention, and securitised social and political control
• Adaptive, network-informed policy routines, often deployed through new analytic tools that integrate spillover dynamics and country-specific idiosyncrasies
• Embeddedness in international architectures shaped by colonial legacy and the structurally significant roles of fiscal havens, making the global order both robust and systemically fragile at critical nodes
• An inherent tension between present-oriented stability and future-oriented investment, with underinvestment in long-term drivers (such as green growth) frequently mapped to open-market, securitised regimes
• Systematic weakening of independent labour and civic inputs as a structural feature, aligning accumulation strategies with authoritarian modalities

These findings collectively challenge teleological assumptions about the convergence of neoliberalisation and democratisation, and highlight the necessity of network- and context-sensitive analyses for understanding the trajectories, vulnerabilities, and political-economic outcomes of contemporary development.