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 upper classes supported military dictatorship as alternative to the growing power of the country’s labor…
Longform
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…
May 1, 2025
ReviewsHuawei the Hydra
A review of Eva Dou’s House of Huawei
Ren Zhengfei founded Huawei in 1987 as a small supplier of telephone switches. Today, the company has grown into a global giant and a leader in China’s chip industry. A new book by technology reporter Eva Dou explores the remarkable…
April 24, 2025
InterviewsThe Runaway Shop
An interview with Jeffrey Hermanson on labor unionism and manufacturing under NAFTA and USMCA
In the early years of NAFTA, the maquiladora system undermined national manufacturing and unions in Mexico across industrial sectors, drawing workers around the country into poorer working conditions along the US-Mexico border. Since then, alongside modern production and cross-border trade,…
April 24, 2025
AnalysisGlobal BYD
The international expansion of Chinese electric vehicles
Amid the intensifying retreat of American hegemony, an alternative geo-economic and geopolitical arrangement is coming into view: a battery-powered globalization with Chinese characteristics. Chinese EV manufacturer has recently raced ahead of Tesla in global EV sales. How will China’s EV…
April 19, 2025
AnalysisRestoring Multilaterism
A reformed global agenda built on public foundations
In the face of increasing protectionism and the threat of tariffs, defenders of the international order have called for a “return to normalcy.” But the emergence of a more hostile international economic environment pre-dates Trump, beginning with the global financial…
April 17, 2025
AnalysisGreen Gold
Palm oil and Indonesia’s plantation economy
Indonesia is the world’s largest palm oil producer, contributing to 60 percent of global market. But is the country’s cash crop a developmental dead end?
April 10, 2025
AnalysisWages of Citizenship
The undocumented worker represents the future of labor relations in the US, not its past
What will the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown mean for the undocumented workplace? For decades, the US immigration system has run not on the enforcement of immigration laws, but on their selective nonenforcement. Employers have relied on the state to ignore…
Shortform
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.
Polycrisis 2025
Diplomacy, finance, and extraction in the year ahead
The United States will be a source of chaos and volatility for the next several years. The first month of 2025 has set the scene. Events so far have included imperial gangsterism against both a poor Latin American country (Colombia)…
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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…