Autorentext

Lillie Ferriol Prat is the Director of Ontological Strategy and Marketing at the BRICS Research Institute, Durban University of Technology, South Africa.

Klappentext

Neutrality and the International Monetary System develops a new research programme for understanding neutrality, asymmetry, and institutional design in the twenty-first century. Bridging Critical Realism and International Political Economy, it introduces a reformulated Ontological Realism through Ontological Containment Theory, a unified analytical architecture for examining how asymmetries emerge, stabilise, reproduce themselves, and may be better contained within monetary and governance systems.

The book reconceptualises neutrality and demonstrates that contemporary monetary tensions within both BRICS and the United States can be understood as differentiated responses to a shared structural condition. Rather than treating these developments as evidence of competing civilisational projects, the analysis explores how they may contribute to the conditions under which greater system-level neutrality becomes possible. The book investigates how structural asymmetry has historically developed, culminating in fiat monetary mechanics, and redefines the "Deep State" as the long-term institutional reproduction of Monetary Ontological Asymmetry, Institutional Egoism, Sovereign Misalignment and Epistemic Closure.

The book concludes that concentration need not necessarily produce domination. By rendering the architecture of asymmetry visible, OCT demonstrates how concentration can function procedurally as a mechanism of coordination, benefitting the common good rather than as a vehicle for a few to profit at the expense of the majority.

The book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in international political economy, global governance, international relations, monetary history, decolonisation studies, international law, and contemporary history. It will also be relevant to policy analysts and practitioners engaged in global financial governance and monetary system reform.

Inhalt

Part I: Foundations: Reframing Neutrality in International Political Economy (IPE) Overview 1. The Crisis of Economic Neutrality 2. Conceptualising Neutrality 3. Operationalising Ontological Containment Theory through the Ontological Realism Score (ORS) Part II: Genealogical Foundations of Monetary Abstraction (Selective) 4. The Emergence of Administrative Abstraction 5. Genealogy of Manufactured Scarcity through the OCT Architecture 6. Institutionalised Abstraction and Governance Insulation 7. Globalisation of Monetary Ontological Asymmetry 8. Manufacturing Consent: Epistemic Stabilisation in Fiat Monetary Systems Part III: Historical Diagnosis of Non-Neutrality 9. Structural Entanglement in Historical Benchmark Cases: Sweden, Switzerland, and the Limits of Epistemic Neutrality 10. Bretton Woods and the Institutionalisation of Fiat Hierarchy Part IV: Focused Applications: BRICS as Primary Test Case 11. BRICS as Bounded Empirical Illustration 12. Assessing Structural Neutrality: A BRICS System-Level Assessment Part V: So What? Implications and Selective Applications 13. Conditions for Structural Transformation and Ontological Coherence 14. Cross-Domain Diagnostics of System-Level Neutrality (OCT-ORS Applications) 15. Conclusion