World
July 10, 2025
AnalysisRearming Europe
Political legitimacy through war
The main justification for the EU’s recent dramatic reorientation toward defense is the proliferation of threats to European security emerging from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But rather than defense or growth, ReArm Europe aims to enhance Europe’s geopolitical power and prestige within a volatile international order.
Longform
July 8, 2025
AnalysisTechnolatinas
Big tech and the global technological oligopoly
The past decade has seen the proliferation of new consumer-oriented technology companies across Latin America. Yet despite their significant market growth, these “technolatinas” remain largely dependent on the digital infrastructures owned and operated by companies like Google, Amazon, and Alibaba.…
July 5, 2025
AnalysisMonetizing Primacy
Trumponomics, dollar diplomacy, and multipolarity
On the question of the dollar, Trump administration policy can be characterized as confused. It wants a weak dollar to spur reindustrialization in the US and a strong dollar to offset any inflationary pass-through from tariffs. But it is also…
June 28, 2025
AnalysisDispatch from Seville
Fracturing multilateralism at the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development
Multilateralism might be broken, but it is not dead yet. Or so we should conclude from the multilateral negotiations ahead of the fourth edition of the UN Financing for Development conference, about to begin in Seville. A once in a…
June 26, 2025
AnalysisDismantling an Energy Giant
The cost of privatizing the energy sector in Costa Rica
Since assuming office in May 2022, Costa Rican president Rodrigo Chaves has announced his intentions to revamp the country’s electricity sector. By October, his government had given private companies a more prominent role in the currently state-dominated energy sector, both…
June 20, 2025
InterviewsEnergy and the One Big Beautiful Bill
An interview with Ted Fertik
“The budget,” Austrian sociologist Rudolf Goldscheid wrote in 1917, “is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies.” Currently, Trump’s coalition is fracturing over contradictory fiscal policy incentives in the One Big Beautiful Bill, where a hard commitment…
June 14, 2025
AnalysisIndustrial Policy and Imperial Realignment
Growing asymmetries in global development
More than 2500 industrial policies were recorded in 2023, but they are being deployed asymmetrically across the global economy. The pace at which advanced economies and less-developed countries are adopting industrial policies is diverging, with the former better positioned to…
June 13, 2025
InterviewsClosing the Extractive Frontier
An interview with Andrés Camacho, Colombia’s former Minister of Mines and Energy
With more than half of Colombia’s export revenues coming from coal and fossil fuels, Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s plan to end domestic fossil fuel production is profoundly ambitious. Former Minister of Mines and Energy, Andrés Camacho, reflects on the challenges…
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…
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…
Shortform
July 10, 2025
InterviewsCommon Characteristics
An interview with Xiaoyang Tang on China and the global South
As Sino-African economic cooperation reached global attention at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Xiaoyang Tang was among the first to do field work in the region. In an interview with PW’s Maria Sikorski, he talks about China’s approach to…
BRICS in 2025
Two energy systems and development models compete for primacy within the group
Subscribe to get The Polycrisis in your inbox. A global technological revolution is under way, with China at the helm. China’s leaders call it the mobilization of “new quality productive forces,” referring to “great changes unseen in a century.” In…
July 3, 2025
AnalysisThe Private Sector at Seville
Investment alliances at FfD4
Ten years after the 2015 Addis Ababa Conference on Financing for Development, the finance development doctrine of “Billions to Trillions,” popularized by the World Bank, is alive and kicking. At the Fourth Conference on Financing for Development, taking place in…
July 2, 2025
AnalysisThe Welfare State and Its Discontents
The Seville model of investible development
Ajay Banga, the World Bank Group’s president, has a favorite line: “Poverty is a state of mind.” It was in his speech at the IMF/World Bank Annual meeting last October, and he repeated it at the opening ceremony of the…
July 1, 2025
AnalysisWho’s Afraid of a Fair Debt Architecture?
Sovereign debt at FfD4 in Seville
The fourth Financing for Development Conference officially kicked off in Seville this Monday, as world leaders gathered with broad smiles to congratulate one another for the good work already achieved. That work was the FfD4 outcome document, which had been…
June 25, 2025
AnalysisPay Equity at Kroger
Wage inequality through occupational segregation
After the Southern California supermarket strike of 2003–2004, Kroger Co. and the UFCW compromised on a two-tier provision preserving current employee benefits and pay, but reducing both for new hires. Since then UFCW locals have struggled to reverse the effects…
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?
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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 monthly newsletter on geopolitics and climate, by Tim Sahay and Kate Mackenzie. Follow us on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
BRICS in 2025
Two energy systems and development models compete for primacy within the group
Subscribe to get The Polycrisis in your inbox. A global technological revolution is under way, with China at the helm. China’s leaders call it the mobilization of “new quality productive forces,” referring to “great changes unseen in a century.” In…
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…