About
Professor Matthew B Sparke is a scholar whose work extensively explores the intersections of globalization, geopolitics, geoeconomics, and global health. His research critically examines the shifting dynamics of global hegemony, neoliberalism, and the political economy, with a particular focus on the implications of these forces for health, disease, and social inequalities. Sparke's scholarship addresses the complex relationships between market, state, and society, especially in the context of pharmaceutical industries and global health governance. He has contributed to understanding the political economy of COVID-19, including the co-pathogenesis of the disease and the global inequalities in vaccine access, highlighting the roles of philanthro-capitalism and patent monopolies in shaping health outcomes. His work also engages with the geographies of philanthropy, neoliberal disease, and the socio-political dimensions of global health crises. Sparke's interdisciplinary approach integrates cultural geography, political economy, and critical geopolitics, contributing to debates on neoliberalism, global capitalism, and the spatialities of health and disease. Through his numerous publications, he has addressed topics such as the remaking of global health under neoliberal regimes, the geopolitics of migration and refugee sub-citizenship, and the socio-spatial impacts of austerity and environmental crises. His scholarship is characterized by a critical engagement with the ways global economic and political processes shape health, social justice, and governance at multiple scales.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Sociology
- Medicine
- Computer Science
- Virology
- Computer Security
- Law
- Economics
- Development economics
- Economic growth
- Geography
- Engineering
- Political economy
- Public relations
- Media studies
- Psychology
- Social psychology
Selected publications
Geoforum · 2025-06-15 · 8 citations
articleOpen access• Explores the multifaceted development of China’s Greater Bay Area. • Positions the Greater Bay Area as a globalized frontier of party-state capitalism. • Problematizes the geopolitical within a geographical political economy approach. • Operationalizes a geographical variant of conjunctural analysis. • Offers a heuristic framework for analyzing geopolitical and geoeconomic dynamics. Developing and operationalizing a heuristic framework for analyzing China’s Greater Bay Area (GBA) as a conjunctural formation, the paper documents the mutual constitution and complex interweaving of geopolitical and geoeconomic relations in this cross-border regional space. Straddling an unstable fault line in the world system, the GBA is a fast-evolving and potentially volatile frontier zone of party-state capitalism. An ambitious region-building project with few, if any, precedents or templates, the GBA is a novel experiment in the production of new and recombinant spatial forms, discourses, and logics, the long-run outcomes of which are diverse and unpredictable, even as they are sure to be consequential. Thinking about the GBA requires simultaneous attention to the geoeconomic and the geopolitical, not least at the nexus of party-statecraft, multi-actor and multi-scalar governance, “security,” and new conceptions of national development. Moreover, thinking with the GBA can be taken as a (constructive, if challenging) prompt to explore new styles of methodological practice in geographical political economy, where the geopolitical has an endogenous but disruptive presence.
International Encyclopedia of Geography · 2024-03-25 · 7 citations
other1st authorCorrespondingThe term neoliberalism is widely used to name efforts to make market competition the basis of economic coordination, social distribution, and personal motivation. Over time the “neo” in the term has come to index the many ways in which neoliberalism keeps evolving into new hybrids of market rule. Their names now are as radically revisionist as they are varied: including “authoritarian neoliberalism,” “progressive neoliberalism,” “neocolonial neoliberalism,” “nationalist neoliberalism,” “zombie neoliberalism,” “nihilistic neoliberalism,” and “neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics.” While they share family resemblances as real‐world examples of actually existing neoliberalism, they are all also departures from the “one‐size fits all” market‐fundamentalism of famous neoliberal thinkers. Increasingly they are therefore seen as “mutant neoliberalisms” that have evolved situationally as remixes of free market ideology, with sometimes countervailing policy commitments and populist pronouncements provoked by socioeconomic crises caused by preceding periods of market rule. Studying such mutations therefore reveals how the successful failures of neoliberalism have led to repeated rounds of reform that are as provisional as they are relentlessly pro‐market. As a result, neoliberalism keeps coming back socially and politically as well as in scholarly debate, and for the same reasons it is in turn necessary to keep revisiting the questions of how and with what consequences.
COVID and structural cartelisation: market-state-society ties and the political economy of Pharma
New Political Economy · 2024-01-19 · 8 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingThe big profits and influence of pharmaceutical firms that again rose to prominence during the COVID pandemic illustrate far more than just the global reach and market power of Big Pharma. Here we instead explain the power of these firms as a consequence of structural cartelisation that is networked and nested across hybrid state and market relations. Global inequalities in access to COVID vaccines exposed the inequity outcomes of the cartelisation of the pharmaceutical sector in dramatic new ways. To come to critical terms with this cartelisation, we describe how it is comprised of three kinds of nested and networked layers of structural collusion: namely, (i) firm-firm collusion, (ii) firm-state collusion; and (iii) firm-state-philanthropy collusion. By suggesting that these kinds of collusional relations are nested, overlapping and deeply networked, we explain how they have come to work together structurally. And, in doing so, we argue, they serve to capture value from biomedical innovation in ways that limit global access to medicines while simultaneously entrenching the dominance of high-income countries, lead firms and the interests of investors.
Alternative archives: Researching politics with chunks of reality
Politics · 2024-11-16 · 5 citations
articleOpen accessCorrespondingThe challenges and opportunities of accessing empirical material present a puzzle insofar as they index simultaneously the politics of research archives and the positionality of researchers. Today, amid increasing authoritarianism, disinformation, and the obstacles created by the securitisation and privatisation of data, access to reliable information is frequently blocked or complicated by the interests of political management, corporate monopoly, and surveillance capitalism, as well as by institutional and personal constraints on researchers. At the same time, digital archives, social media, blogs, diverse global communications, and even the information management tools of authoritarian and corporate control, create innumerable alternative access points for research. In this article, we describe all of these other access points as ‘alternative archives’, and, in doing so, we also seek to highlight three overlapping definitions of their alternative status in terms of (1) empirical, (2) counter-hegemonic, and (3) epistemic meanings. We next provide five state-of-the-art examples of overcoming research obstacles due to state-of-the-world developments in surveillance capitalism, securitisation, authoritarianism, information control, and human insecurity, suggesting that we can learn from obstacles to research as well as the alternatives.
Environment and Planning A Economy and Space · 2024-07-25 · 17 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingRecent shifts in global hegemony make the need for critical geographical accounts of geoeconomics and geopolitics that much more critical. They underline that we need to come to terms with their dialectical relationships and tensions, doing so in relation to both underlying struggles over international hegemony and uneven capitalist development as well as in relation to all sorts of complex overlying socio-cultural formations. Critical geographers can combine their diverse approaches more effectively to do this analytical work by adapting recent forms of conjunctural analysis in urban, economic and regional geography.
Acta Horticulturae · 2023-10-01
articleISHS XXXI International Horticultural Congress (IHC2022): International Symposium on Innovative Technologies and Production Strategies for Sustainable Controlled Environment Horticulture Use of air-based mechanical stimulation for height control in plant production of Ocimum basilicum
2023-01-09 · 10 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingFounded in 2020 at the start of the COVID pandemic, the Geneva-based public–private–philanthropic partnership known as COVAX was supposed “to accelerate the development, production, and equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines” globally. This chapter seeks to describe how the core COVAX facility has contributed to few failures despite securing considerable charitable support from donor governments and individuals, as well as programmatic support from the WHO and other global agencies. It reviews the inequalities in vaccine access themselves, their ties to patent-protected IP monopolies, and the demands they have therefore prompted for a World Trade Organization Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights waiver and other more radical reforms of the current parameters of the global pharmaceutical market. Good reporting on the problems with COVAX has already appeared in leading biomedical journals such as the Lancet, including one widely cited piece quoting global health experts on how the promises of COVAX were thwarted by vaccine hoarding and vaccine nationalism.
International Encyclopedia of Geography · 2023-09-27
other1st authorCorrespondingGeographies of philanthropy matter because of the uneven economic distributions of wealth and poverty dictating where philanthropic funds flow from and to, and how these flows of funding across space are tied to diverse historical, developmental, legal, political, cultural, and digital geographies of philanthropy. Philanthropy ostensibly involves an inclusive impulse to care for others in general, manifesting in distinctly localized practices of gift‐giving, territorial outreach, and targeted intervention. Problems with philanthropy have always been geographical, related to who gets to envision the appropriate arenas of beneficence, what people and places merit concern, and where else is excluded. Economic geographies of philanthropy outline the macro‐economic spatial patterns of these divided philanthropic spaces. Microscale analyses reveal complex component “philanthroscapes” that further fragment the geographies of philanthropy in ways that both deterritorialize and reterritorialize contemporary arenas of philanthropic care.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers · 2023-11-30 · 9 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Introducing a special commentary section focused on geoeconomics, this paper reviews why such commentary is especially timely given current world events and the break‐down in neoliberal globalisation. It thereby points to the geo‐historical importance of the call for critical geoeconomics made by Mallin and Sidaway (2023a), and also introduces the backgrounds of the five commentators on their article's key contributions.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers · 2023-01-12 · 9 citations
articleOpen accessSenior authorCorrespondingAbstract In this editorial we ask key questions about what it means to publish ‘a journal’ in a world of publishing which is driven by individual article metrics and online access. Seeing the value of journals as venues for intellectual debate, we therefore set out a renewed vision as to how the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers can provide space for more collective and collaborative approaches to geographical debate. This approach revolves around the idea of ‘transactions’ itself and creating spaces in the journal for more commentary, debate and dialogue, alongside continuing to publish landmark papers.
Frequent coauthors
- 4 shared
Noel Castree
- 4 shared
James D. Sidaway
National University of Singapore
- 4 shared
Daniel Bessner
University of Washington
- 3 shared
Melissa W. Wright
- 3 shared
Tim Bunnell
National University of Singapore
- 3 shared
Carl Grundy‐Warr
National University of Singapore
- 3 shared
Katharyne Mitchell
University of California, Santa Cruz
- 2 shared
Jessica McLean
Macquarie University
Awards & honors
- Spencer Foundation Vision Grant (2024)
- Agricultural Experiment Station (AES) Faculty Collaborative…
- National Institute of Food and Agriculture research award fr…
- Climate Action Award granted from UC Office of the President…
- Community-Engaged S/Hero Award from UC Office of the Preside…
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