June 5, 2025
AnalysisArgentina’s Debt Trap
Milei’s return to the IMF
After publicly endorsing Javier Milei’s economic achievements since coming to power in December 2023, the IMF has approved a new Argentine bailout package of $20 billion. This comes seven years after former President Mauricio Macri negotiated a $45 billion loan in 2018, of which not a single dollar has yet been repaid. Milei’s reforms, in…
Longform
June 5, 2025
AnalysisOffshoring the Planet
A battle for jurisdictional control lies at the heart of the global green transition
The rise of green offshore finance threatens to encase biodiversity and climate policymaking within global South states and across the multilateral system, locking in a standardized set of biodiversity and climate financing, governance, and policy measures for decades to come.
May 29, 2025
AnalysisAmerica’s Braudelian Autumn
Factions of capital in the second Trump administration
In its efforts to revive the American Empire, the Trump administration will have to delicately balance the interests of both manufacturing-oriented nativists and capital factions whose interests span the globe. Navigating these competing agendas will pose an enormous challenge to…
May 29, 2025
AnalysisCapturing Production
The USMCA and the automotive industry in North America
The implementation of the USMCA in July 2020 heralded major changes for the North American automotive industry, with increased regional content and fundamental labor rights becoming requirements to gain entry into the North American market. While Mexico’s wage objectives remain…
May 23, 2025
AnalysisThe Tariff Threat
Mexico’s fragile supply chains and North American trade policy
Mexico’s current model of integration is vulnerable to external shocks. In order to protect its industrial base and establish sovereignty over its economic development, and to sustain its position in international trade, the state will have to scale up high-value…
May 16, 2025
AnalysisOPEC Plus
Economics and politics in an expanding exporters organization
While OPEC’s economic stratagem has always trumped the political orientation of some of its members, wide geopolitical shifts have diminished the role of some nations while allowing for new partnerships unimaginable in the twentieth century. As an expanded organization, OPEC+…
May 15, 2025
AnalysisA Class Coup
Workers, unions, and dictatorship in Brazil (1964–85)
The struggle for rights of Brazilian workers, and its fierce public presence since the end of the Second World War, reached its apogee early in the 1960s. In a climate shaped by the Cold War, many in Brazil’s middle and…
May 8, 2025
AnalysisUnbankable Transitions
How investability determines climate financing
It is only by looking at the whole picture of climate financing flows—and the other sectors and material demands of the green transition—that we can begin to reckon with the fundamental limitations of our existing climate governance regime.
May 8, 2025
AnalysisGreen Indicative Planning
Market economies need planning to survive climate breakdown
With derisking regimes falling short of meeting governments’ pledges to reach net zero carbon emissions, what lessons can we learn from governance through indicative planning? Historically strong coordination between states and corporate elites in Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Japan…
May 8, 2025
AnalysisNodes for Socialization
The UK’s Contracts for Difference scheme and the future of derisking energy
While fully socializing the clean manufacturing and infrastructure apparatus is politically unfeasible, public development of renewable capacity can impose rationality on the clean power transition, helping to clear distributional conflicts. In this article, Melanie Brusseler and Chris Hayes argue for…
May 1, 2025
InterviewsJungles in Dispute
An interview with Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s former Minister of Environment
Reducing deforestation in the Colombian Amazon is a arduous task, involving negotiations with guerrillas, economic incentives for farmers and cattle ranchers, and extensive international coordination and aid. For Susana Muhamad, Colombia‘s former Minister of the Environment, the strategy for tackling…
Shortform
May 23, 2025
AnalysisAfter Impeachment
Economic stagnation and political crisis in South Korea
Ahead of a presidential election in June, Korea remains engulfed in political turmoil following the declaration of martial law and subsequent presidential impeachment back in December. A poster child of late twentieth century democratic transitions, hailed for its export-oriented growth…
May 8, 2025
AnalysisCoordination in Chaos
Green industrial policy in a fragmenting world
The first 100 days of the second Trump administration have indicated that the next months, and perhaps years, will be marked by more uncertainty and increasing political and economic fragmentation. Despite this uncertainty, “green” industrial policies are likely here to…
April is the Cruelest Month
Diversification and dedollarization in the world economy
Investing in the US has been a good bet for well over a decade. America’s tech industry, its indefatigable consumers, highly profitable firms, and pro-growth fiscal policy has made the country a highly attractive option and contributed to the narrative…
April 24, 2025
InterviewsWho Will the Green Transition Save?
An interview with Alfredo Santos of CUT-Bahia on Brazil’s Camaçari Industrial Complex
The Camaçari Industrial Complex in Bahia attracted worldwide attention following BYD’s announcement in 2023 that it would be home to the electric vehicle company’s largest factory outside China. What will the wave of Chinese investment mean for Brazil’s workers?
April 3, 2025
InterviewsNever Again?
An interview with Frei Betto on Brazil’s 1964 military coup and the authoritarian advance in everyday life
With the attempted coup of 2022, and the consolidation of the nation’s right behind Bolsonarism, memories of Brazil’s horrific military dictatorship are more prominent than they’ve been in decades. To explore the meaning of these experiences in light of current…
Molecules of Freedom
The hydra-headed global market for liquified natural gas
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, European, and especially German, industry was left in the lurch. Much of the 150 billion cubic meters of natural gas piped from Russia each year had to be quickly replaced with energy from…
Europe Enters Its Metal Era
What kind of Europe survives a fractured transatlantic military alliance?
This month, Trump entered into formal talks with Russia—without Kyiv’s consent—to settle the war in Ukraine, largely on Putin’s terms. And on Friday, speaking with Zelensky in the Oval Office, he and his Vice President JD Vance performed as imperial…
February 22, 2025
AnalysisHow to DOGE USAID
The Wall Street Consensus under Trump
We often hear that the new Trump administration inaugurates the age of technofeudalism. But the gutting of USAID represents a continuity from the Biden years. DOGE is turbo-charging the lesser known but increasingly dominant agenda within development finance: “mobilizing private…
February 13, 2025
AnalysisOil in the Imperial Periphery
Brunei’s unlikely path to independence
The majority of the nearly two hundred sovereign states that exist today were born through decolonization following the end of the Second World War. With the colonial metropole fearing the emergence of unstable and unviable states, smaller territories were often…
February 6, 2025
AnalysisSlashing the State
Argentina under Milei’s chainsaw
Unlike on economic issues, where Milei’s agenda made swift concessions to macrismo, his cultural and ideological crusade only escalated once in power.
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The Trump administration’s drastic shift on the US’s approach to the war in Ukraine has unleashed a reckoning about European power—its internal fissures and path dependencies, its security guarantee from the United States, and its freedom of movement on the world diplomatic stage. Three pieces from the archive mine enduring political fractures regarding Europe and its place in the twenty-first century.
An interview with Marta Castilho on the EU–Mercosur trade agreement
Editor’s Note: Amidst talk of a new protectionism, trade volumes and their regulation continue to expand and shape new political configurations. In December 2024, the EU and Mercosur concluded a decades-long negotiation process on a bi-regional trade agreement. In an interview, Marta Castilho discusses the agreement’s potential consequences for European markets and South American industry.
On Fritz Bartel’s The Triumph of Broken Promises
Editor’s Note: Historian Fritz Bartel argues that the success of the North Atlantic capitalist world in the ending of the Cold War was contingent on their superior ability to break democratic promises and rewrite their social contracts. Reviewing Bartel’s book, Max Krahe asks: what kind of politics will emerge as the era of broken promises enters its own period of disintegration?
What’s at stake in the fiscal rules debate?
Editor’s Note: Any shift in Europe’s coordination and military expenditures would mark a sea change from the unequal and austere status quo of the continent’s fiscal politics. Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay explain the persistent paralysis from the point of view of climate coordination.
Series
Series are collections of works published by Phenomenal World on a single subject or area of research. Series are commissioned to analyze particular issues or historical moments, and are either ongoing projects or collected as one-time volumes.
The Polycrisis is a newsletter and a series of essays and panels exploring intersecting crises with a particular emphasis on the political economy of climate change and global North/South dynamics. It is edited by Tim Sahay and Kate Mackenzie. Follow The Polycrisis on Twitter here.
April is the Cruelest Month
Diversification and dedollarization in the world economy
Investing in the US has been a good bet for well over a decade. America’s tech industry, its indefatigable consumers, highly profitable firms, and pro-growth fiscal policy has made the country a highly attractive option and contributed to the narrative…
Molecules of Freedom
The hydra-headed global market for liquified natural gas
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, European, and especially German, industry was left in the lurch. Much of the 150 billion cubic meters of natural gas piped from Russia each year had to be quickly replaced with energy from…