Coaxing capital, re-inventing the nation: Promoting foreign investment in neoliberal Nicaragua

This dissertation examines the social and cultural practices deployed to encourage, to promote, and to facilitate the movement of capital to Nicaragua by representatives of the country. Nicaragua is the second-poorest country in the Americas, with few natural resources and a tottering economy. Between 2002 and 2006, Nicaraguan leaders placed hopes for the country's recovery on the mobility of global capital, employing various strategies to persuade foreign investors to consider Nicaragua as a lucrative investment opportunity.;I argue that promoting investment is less about actual foreign investment, and more about introducing a neoliberal capitalist imaginary that produces the nation-state in new ways. The project of this capitalist imaginary is to re-conceptualize the nation-state and its citizens as raw materials to be re-shaped and re-packaged in ways that complement the expectations of potential investors. Yet, this imaginary confronts the present of capitalism in Nicaragua, haunted by a non-capitalist past, and not easily made investment-friendly. In this dissertation, I examine the multiple ways in which this capitalist imaginary operates through the work of those who attempt to attract investment to Nicaragua, a marginal place in the global economy.;My research examines the practices of subjects who have absorbed business management expert knowledge and are working to integrate these practices with the unruly object of Nicaragua, for the purpose of creating economic development. I examine their practices and how they seek to deploy them to transform Nicaragua. Through an ethnographic analysis of the work of Nicaragua's investment promotion agency, I examine the work of trying to re-make Nicaragua as compliant with the perceived needs of foreign investors and to create new imaginaries of Nicaragua. I argue that attention to the capitalist imaginaries in marginal places on the global stage shows the particular inversions, social practices, beliefs and practices that challenge monolithic representations of global capitalism.