Abstract
This thesis investigates the relationship between the state and the capitalist market in the process of neoliberalization in the Norwegian context. This relation will be investigated through a case study of the neoliberalization of the Norwegian development strategy and how it has related to the process of internationalization of Norwegian capital. A tendency prevails in contemporary development thinking to assume that neoliberalism entails a decentering of the state in an inverse quantitative relation between less state and more market. This thesis will turn to the Marxist tradition to assess neoliberalization as a process of change in the qualitative balance of social forces condensed within the state. An assessment of this process requires both a conceptual and methodological clarification regarding the constitution of state power in relation to the dynamics of capitalist development and an empirical investigation of how this relation has been forged in a concrete historical-geographical process. The concrete historical analysis of the neoliberalization of the Norwegian development strategy undertaken in this thesis provides a vantage point from which neoliberalism in the Norwegian context can be understood as a class project that is mediated and embedded within the institutional materiality of the state.