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…

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…

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,…

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…

As anti-incumbent sentiment toppled governments around the world in 2024, Mexico’s Morena won in a landslide, and the presidency was passed from Andrés Manuel López Obrador to Claudia Sheinbaum. Their electoral resiliency is rooted in Morena’s long-term reform project.

The construction of a post-neoliberal order is underway. As with the rise of liberalism and neoliberalism, the solidification of a post-neoliberal international order will not unfold homogeneously across the globe. Scholarship exploring neo-extractivism has elaborated on the persistence of dependency…

Under López Obrador, the Mexican state granted the military a primary role in business—in civilian functions such as constructing public infrastructure and transportation. As a result, Mexico’s executive branch has become more dependent on the military than ever before. Will…

Defense spending is projected to increase in 2026, reaching almost $1 trillion. This vast US defense apparatus operates through labyrinthine budgetary procedures, policies, and logics that extend far beyond a single administration. Amid a broader push towards austerity, what explains the…

February 28, 2025

Analysis

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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…

Central banks are back in the spotlight. After more than three decades of low inflation in rich countries, the rise in prices observed between 2021 and 2023 forced academic discussions into the public sphere. Such debates are not restricted to…

Electricity, it has become widely recognized, is the key to surviving the twenty-first century. Not only is it required for air-conditioning during worsening heatwaves, it also is one of the only ways we already know to produce large amounts of…

While the world’s attention was focused on the United States presidential election that would deliver Donald Trump a decisive victory and a second Presidency, Brazil’s municipal elections in October were signalling the political balance for the coming years within the…

Unlike on economic issues, where Milei’s agenda made swift concessions to macrismo, his cultural and ideological crusade only escalated once in power.

For over 150 years, mining has constituted a core feature of the South African economy. The seemingly inexhaustible bounty of the earth made the country the wealthiest in the continent and financed one of the most all-encompassing systems of racial…

January 31, 2025

Analysis

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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)…

The world economy has seen a resurgence of industrial policy in recent decades. National development programs are at the center of a variety of polarizing geopolitical axes: carbon emissions, world manufacturing shares, and integration into rival trade and investment blocs.…

Recent years have seen an astonishing resurgence of industrial policy as a legislative agenda and topic for lively debate. Thanks in large part to the waning political fortunes of neoliberalism, deliberate efforts by governments to shape the economic trajectories of…

The 2017 reform of Brazil’s labor law is part of a broader movement that arose over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, especially after the 2008 financial crisis, with the purpose of eroding labor rights on an international…

A comparison of the New Deal power program and the IRA exposes key design questions regarding the financing of power systems.

Over the past years of escalating trade disputes between China and the US, the latter has repeatedly highlighted a practice it considers anathema: technology transfers that US companies need to offer to their Chinese collaborators if they want to do…

December 18, 2024

Analysis

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The reelection of Donald Trump to the presidency has sent shockwaves around the world. And just hours after results came in, the ruling three-party German coalition government, which had been teetering for months, collapsed. The survival of dominant political coalitions in…

Before October 7, 2023, the pursuit of diplomatic and economic normalization between Israel and Arab states appeared to be the central trajectory for regional politics in the Middle East. With the prospect of an Iran deal buried, this path represented…

As the nation prepares for a second Trump administration, the mood among many Democratic Party officials has been one of bafflement and astonishment. How could voters have failed to rise to the defense of the democracy and “institutions” that Democrats…

Within the American business lobby, it seems there is no classwide consensus about the direction of the country’s future. The large blocs of organized money that found Trump a threat to democratic institutions in 2021 evidently no longer do—proposals once…

The threat of a return to the 1970s has long been a rhetorical feature of the British establishment. From the New Labour government’s Third Way reforms, to Jeremy Corbyn’s ambitious manifestos, and through to the current Labour Government’s rather modest…

“At the election we promised there would be no return to austerity,” Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves explained to the British Parliament on October 30. “Today we deliver on that promise.” The remark came halfway through the newly elected…

On October 28, the Israeli Knesset voted to shut down the operations of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and to designate it as a terrorist organization. While this drastic attack…

In the evolving lexicon of the 2024 US Presidential election, Florida has stood for the ultimate “weird” of American politics—a place where legislation and executive action revolve around book banning; state protection of embryonic heartbeats, rather than Medicaid expansion; the…

The IMF claims that the debt crisis is one of liquidity, requiring money thrown at the problem, rather than one of solvency, compelling debt forgiveness that should be absorbed by losses to the financiers. In Sri Lanka, this political fix…

October 11, 2024

Analysis

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At September’s UN General Assembly in New York, Brazil’s President Lula described the international financial system as a “Marshall Plan in reverse” in which the poorest countries finance the richest. Driving the point home, Lula thundered, “African countries borrow at…

Lopezobradorismo is without a doubt the most significant political movement to have emerged in Mexico over the past three decades. Since 2018, it has reconstituted the country’s post-authoritarian political system. The movement’s new leader, Claudia Sheinbaum won the Presidency with…

New accounts of the 1990s locate the origins of today’s politics not in the accommodations and defeats faced by labor and liberals in the 1970s and 1980s, but in the unfinished struggle that defined federal policy in the Clinton years…

The Biden administration first embraced the slogan of “modern supply-side economics” six months before anyone uttered the phrase “Inflation Reduction Act.” Speaking before the World Economic Forum in January 2022, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen explained that what distinguished the Biden…

The need to reorganize global governance so as to make space for a growing  China has long been apparent. With the financial crisis of 2008, another demand emerged: the reshaping of capitalism itself. The Covid-19 pandemic represented a strategic moment…

Central banking has been described as a “quest for stability” and with good reason. Nearly every major central bank today is charged with securing price stability. The Fed sees itself as responsible for securing price stability and maximum sustainable employment.…

In his bid to transform Colombia into a global leader of the green transition, President Gustavo Petro announced in 2023 that the country would stop signing new contracts for oil and gas exploration. Though celebrated by environmental advocates, the announcement…

On August 28, Israel launched its largest military assault on the West Bank since the Second Intifada more than two decades ago. Targeting Jenin, Tulkarem, and Tubas—three cities in the north of the territory—“Operation Summer Camps” has killed thirty-nine Palestinians.…

Despite their numerical minority as individual voters, in electoral democracies the economic elite wield significant political power. Through their investment decisions, those who control a nation’s wealth and credit have significant influence over its pace of economic growth, the value…

In 2023, a “banner year” for labor in many regards, only 115,551 workers voted in National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) representation elections, out of roughly 160 million workers in the United States labor force. In FY 2018, that number was…

August 30, 2024

Analysis

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Last month, young people in Bangladesh revolted against their government over a jobs quota bill that would have reserved 30 percent of public-sector jobs for family members of veterans of the 1971 war with Pakistan. Protestors did manage to drive…

In South Africa’s watershed election last May, the African National Congress (ANC) failed to secure an outright majority for the first time in the country’s democratic history, sinking 17 percentage points from five years prior, obtaining just 40.18 percent of…

India’s Lok Sabha elections in June ended a decade of single-party majority-rule for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). With the BJP winning 240 seats, down from the 303 they won in 2019 and short of the 273…

Sanctions against Iran amount to some of the harshest and longest-running restrictions in the world. Dating back to the 1979 revolution that overthrew one of America’s closest allies in the region, early sanctions imposed primarily by the US froze Iranian…

Martin Luther King once called the United States government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” That formulation may be controversial, but no one denies that the US is by far the world’s biggest arms dealer, with a 42…

Over the past two decades, Brazil has seen two great swings in its distribution of real national income. In the years between 2004 and 2014, the wage share increased progressively. This phenomenon faced severe political resistance. The momentous events of…

Much ink has been spilled on the erosion of democracy in India, but the country’s most recent elections demonstrate such erosion has not gone unchecked. During the last decade, Indians across sectors of society have repeatedly stood up to a…

Since Hamas launched its attack on southern Israel on October 7, the question of deterrence has loomed over the region: who holds it, what does it consist of, and how will the balance of forces tilt or not tilt towards…

In 2017, the town of Mansfield pointed the way for the Conservative Party. The Conservative candidate defeated a longstanding Labour incumbent who had tried, among other things, to sue the Mansfield Town FC supporters’ association. Amid the density of local…

July 4, 2024

Analysis

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On June 25, crowning a dramatic, nationwide tax revolt, demonstrators in Nairobi stormed Kenya’s parliament buildings. President William Ruto’s new finance bill, introduced in Parliament in May, sought to increase levies on everything from bread and money transfers to sanitary…

May 17, 2024

Analysis

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Biden’s announcement this week to sharply raise tariffs on Chinese imports is an escalation in the yearslong tariff war on China. The new tariffs specifically target green goods, most notably electric vehicles, duties on which have now quadrupled to 100…

The success of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over the last decade of Indian politics, and its frontrunner status in this year’s parliamentary elections, has often been attributed to its welfare policies. The rise of Direct Benefit Transfers (DBT)—whereby beneficiaries…

In 2019, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law that deregulated new hospital construction and unleashed a “hospital-building boom.” Some 65 new hospitals were planned in the three years after DeSantis signed the bill ending decades-old regulations on…

Agriculture directly accounts for 10 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions. These emissions, which do not include onsite fossil-fuel use, come from soil and manure management and the digestive processes of ruminants, mostly cattle. Worse, there is a substantial “carbon…

The election of Prabowo Subianto to the Indonesian presidency two months ago has been warmly welcomed by business and political elites in the country. The day following the result, the Jakarta composite index rose by 1.3 percent, a tacit sign…

In 2022, Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first left-wing president of the twenty-first century, emerged victorious alongside a coalition of liberal ministers experienced in the public sector and academia. One key figure in this coalition was José Antonio Ocampo, an academic with…

April 17, 2024

Analysis

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We live in a dysfunctional system in which money flows out of the countries that need it most and into the coffers of the wealthiest. In 2023, the private sector collected $68 billion more in interest and principal repayments than…

On January 24, 2024, Argentina’s General Confederation of Labor (CGT) called for a twelve-hour general strike—the first in almost five years—just forty-five days into President Javier Milei’s term. This action was a direct response to the first measures proposed by…

The National Industrial Recovery Act is commonly counterposed to antitrust. But at the time, the antitrust camp had little truck with the self-coordinating market ideal. Resistance to public price coordination experiments, meanwhile, particularly among conservative jurists, was also not based…

Since the discovery of some of the world’s largest oil reserves in 2015, Guyana has entered a period of economic and geostrategic reconfiguration. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), Guyana holds the sixth-largest oil reserves in the Americas and…

Javier Milei’s election to the Argentine presidency in November sent shockwaves throughout the country. While the media personality was not altogether an outsider, his party La Libertad Avanza (LLA), formed in 2021, fundamentally lacked political experience. Until Milei’s inauguration in…

March 14, 2024

Analysis

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Protests led by farmers have been roiling Europe for months. In Belgium, Germany, Romania, the Netherlands, Poland, and France, farmers—armed with grievances ranging from subsidized Ukrainian grain imports to the EU-Mercosur trade deal and falling prices—have been taking to the…

Gustavo Petro’s presidency marks a turning point in Colombia’s democratic history. Not only is Petro the first leftist in government, but he has also made achieving peace a central objective of his progressive agenda. The Colombian armed conflict has been…

In December 2023, Brazil began presiding over the G20. The one-year presidency, which will culminate in the annual summit being hosted in Rio de Janeiro in November 2024, is the third of four terms from the global South—following Indonesia in…

Every few years, a crisis in the Red Sea makes global headlines. In 2014, the Yemeni Civil War spilled into the Red Sea after the Houthis captured the capital Sana‘a and dissolved the parliament. As a warning, the Houthis allegedly…

It didn’t take long for the new President of Argentina, Javier Milei, to don gloves in the international arena and showcase his libertarian approach to foreign policy. Some political gestures have already stirred conflicts with Brazil and China—the country’s two…

January 25, 2024

Interviews

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With India headed to elections this April, the ruling BJP is rolling out enormous publicity campaigns to promote its record on economic growth and Hindu nationalism. Central to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s third bid for reelection is the narrative that…

The South Korean economy has widely been recognized as the paragon of the East Asian miracle, with rapid economic growth and a fairly equal income distribution. The country continued its upward growth trajectory even in the aftermath of the 1997…

In the aftermath of 2008, the pace at which capitalist states moved from bailouts and stimulus policies to fiscal belt tightening was jarring. No less striking was the shift in the intellectual framework deployed to make sense of it. While …

December 21, 2023

Analysis

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When we launched The Polycrisis a year ago, we set out to examine the intersecting crises in the economy, energy system, commodities markets, geopolitics, and climate. Our aim was to break intellectual and political silos to give a fuller picture…

On September 11, 1980—seven years after Augusto Pinochet seized power from democratically elected Salvador Allende in a brutal American-backed military coup—the dictatorship passed a constitution that laid the groundwork for one of the world’s earliest and most enduring neoliberal experiments.…

On December 10, the fortieth anniversary of Argentina’s redemocratization, Javier Milei was sworn in as the country’s new president. Milei—a far-right economist who calls himself an “anarcho-capitalist,” denies the existence of the military dictatorship, and claims to be a fan…

The majority of countries in the world have some sort of fiscal rule: an institutional constraint on fiscal policies to discourage government overspending and reduce political influence on state expenditure. But these rules have their own politics. As Clara Zanon…

November 9, 2023

Analysis

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It is now over a month since Hamas launched its attack on Israel, killing an estimated 1,400 Israelis and taking more than 200 people hostage. Israel’s response has, in Netanyahu’s words, sought to “crush and destroy” Hamas, but the main…

The results of Argentina’s first-round elections on October 22 were not to be expected. Conservative former security minister and election favorite Patricia Bullrich came in third place, knocking her out of the running for the presidency, which will be decided…

E.H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939), has a well-deserved reputation as a classic text that helped launch the academic discipline of International Relations (IR). Not only did Carr identify and dissect what would emerge as the two leading schools…

Poland’s parliamentary elections last Sunday have led to victory for Donald Tusk and his party, Koalicja Obywatelska (Civic Coalition). Although the ruling Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Right and Justice, or PiS) Party received the largest share of the vote, 35.4 percent,…

The abrupt quadrupling of the oil price in the final months of 1973 is widely held to have marshalled the end of “a golden age of world capitalism.” Eric Hobsbawm’s standard-setting interpretation defines 1973 as the turning point when the…

In developed economies around the world, housing has been transformed into a major asset. It is no coincidence that rates of homeownership have precipitously increased at the same time as governments in formerly social-democratic countries have reduced basic social safety nets.…

October 12, 2023

Analysis

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The energy transition is underway and the global North is putting up the cash. In our series, we have investigated questions about the international hierarchy of money, the distribution of economic power, and trade wars. Today, we turn to labor,…

The adoption of fiscal rules has emerged as a global trend over the past four decades. While institutional constraints to fiscal policy were uncommon before the 1990s, recent data indicates that they have since been put in force in more…

Sudan’s ongoing war between two military formations—the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces—has killed thousands and displaced millions. The current crisis follows years of political upheaval across the country. In late 2018, mass protests calling for democratic rule…

Global investment in solar energy has skyrocketed in recent decades: from 1 TWh of solar power in 2000 to 1,284 TWh in 2022. The trend is likely to be magnified in the United States by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA),…

Public school buildings in the United States are crumbling. National school infrastructure received a D+ rating from the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2021, and in serious cases, learning environments have become toxic. Given the segregated and unequal nature…

August 31, 2023

Analysis

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The precursor of 2022’s energy crisis was 2020–2021’s vaccine apartheid. These shortages were in no way natural but reflected financial and geopolitical hierarchies: those with more power and resources bid up prices and developing countries lost out in the process.…

“Plumbing” is an oft-used metaphor for understanding how sanctions work. Sanctions are intended to stop the flow of money to the targeted government; reserves are frozen, trade is blocked, export revenues dry up, and government budgets are drained. Even the…

August 17, 2023

Analysis

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Images that define the globalization debate

In April 2021, private investors gathered at B3, Brazil’s stock exchange, to bid for water concessions in Rio de Janeiro. The former capital city and its surrounding municipalities had been divided into four “concession blocks,” all of which were up…

Accounts on the rise of neoliberalism commonly emphasize the exhaustion of post-war systems of embedded liberalism during the economic crises of the 1970s and the parallel internationalization of economic activity. In Europe, this latter process is especially, and controversially, associated…

July 20, 2023

Analysis

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On June 22, three leaders of developing countries made expeditions to three different Western capitals to plead their case for greater support from the rich world. Viewed jointly, these demands—largely successful—provide a neat panorama of the escalating global crises of…

In Spain’s forthcoming snap elections, the energy transition is high on the agenda, and solar power at the forefront. Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has often expressed ambitions to make Spain the lead producer of solar electricity on the continent, positioning…

The latest US experiment with industrial policy—exemplified by the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act—has sparked outright opposition and pleas for restraint, but also calls for a far more ambitious action.

May 20, 2023

Analysis

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The Inflation Reduction Act is the most significant piece of climate legislation in US history. Alongside its three other major legislative achievements, the Biden administration has passed between $500 billion and $1.2 trillion worth of new climate spending, depending on…

April 19, 2023

Analysis

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Pain and resolve: have we reached the beginning of the end of sanctions?

April 6, 2023

Analysis

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This is the twelfth edition of The Polycrisis newsletter, written by Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox. The maiden flight of a new cargo route between Shenzhen and São Paulo took off on…

The Triumph of Broken Promises by Fritz Bartel is a new history of the end of the Cold War. Challenging conventional narratives that focus on Reagan’s military-ideological assertiveness or Gorbachev's openness to reform, the book gives a material and structural…

March 23, 2023

Analysis

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This is the eleventh edition of The Polycrisis newsletter, written by Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox. The US routinely flouts its international climate financing commitments, rarely delivering on its promises. Last year, for example,…

Massive demonstrations that swept Sri Lanka last year exposed the serious challenges at the heart of the global economy. In July 2022, former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was forced to flee the country, only a few months after announcing a hasty…

Charles De Gaulle declared in 1961, “A great state which does not possess [nuclear weapons]… does not command its own destiny.” France became the world’s fourth nuclear power in 1960 following the Gerboise Bleue nuclear test. Yet the command of…

February 11, 2023

Analysis

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China has ended zero-Covid. The resultant viral tsunami is crashing through China’s cities and countryside, causing hundreds of millions of infections and untold numbers of deaths. The reversal followed widespread protests against lockdown measures. But the protests were not the…

January 25, 2023

Analysis

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This essay first appeared in GREEN, a journal from Groupe d’études géopolitiques. When NATO held its two-day summit in Madrid in June 2022, the Spanish government deployed ten thousand police officers to cordon off entire parts of the city, including…

In an effort to stymie “indigenous” chip development in China, the US Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) introduced new controls on semiconductor technology exported to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) last October. Targeting high-performance and advanced memory chips,…

December 15, 2022

Analysis

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This is the fifth edition of The Polycrisis newsletter, written by Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox. In 2020, as demand for liquefied natural gas boomed in Asia, the shippable fuel was an afterthought in…

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva may have won last month’s presidential elections, but the strength of Bolsonarismo has been confirmed. In both houses of the National Congress, Bolsonarismo and its allies made gains, overcoming the traditional right wing. In the…

The recent victories of left parties across Latin America—most recently the election of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil—have prompted comparisons with the Pink Tide of the early 2000s. But with narrow margins of victory against far-right opponents,…

November 18, 2022

Analysis

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This is the third edition of The Polycrisis newsletter, written by Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox. At UN climate summits, the items that appear on the agenda are usually those that advocates have fought…

In September 2022, 62 percent of Chilean voters rejected the country's proposed new constitution. The defeat took many by surprise—the demands to rewrite the existing charter had been loud and seemingly unanimous. For followers of Chile’s extractive industries, however, the…

November 3, 2022

Analysis

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Will a Lula victory be better for the climate than anything that happens at COP27?

Earlier this month, Brazilians went to the polls in an election billed as the most momentous since democratization in 1985. Far-right president Jair Bolsonaro faced off against former two-term president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. Though Lula did win the…

October 20, 2022

Analysis

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This is the first edition of The Polycrisis newsletter, written by Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox. What crisis? A year ago, one might be forgiven for thinking there was a moment of relative calm…

China’s high-speed railway network is one of the largest infrastructure programs in human history. Though today international headlines emphasize the decline in China’s growth—lagging behind the rest of Asia for the first time since 1990—for more than two decades, the…

On September 25, Italians will be called to elect a new Parliament. The snap election follows on the heels of the forced resignation of the government in late July, led by former European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi. That…

Explanations for the rise of neoliberal policymaking in the United States commonly take one of two forms: a political history or an intellectual history. The first focuses on the overlapping crises of the 1970s and the rebalancing political coalitions competing…

The past few months have seen record-breaking heat waves across the globe. In India, a deadly heat wave in May renewed questions around the nation's health, safety, and economy.

The Politics of the Price Level

August 5, 2022

Analysis

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European and American traditions of economic theorizing on price control are intimately connected with war—practices and debates over price control peaked amid the two world wars. The experience of the First World War had been one of inflation and limited…

This week, Russia’s state-run energy company Gazprom drastically cut gas supplies— delivered via the Russia-Germany Nord Stream 1 pipeline—to Europe. The move amplified longstanding concerns around European dependence on Russian energy.

Across Latin America, a recent wave of left electoral victories has drawn comparisons to “Pink Tide” of the early 2000s. The current moment, however, coincides with a global push towards decarbonization, and much of the world’s supply of commodities essential…

Since coming to power in 2014, India’s right-wing government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has introduced sweeping reforms aimed at strengthening the union government at the expense of the states, and catering to large corporations over smaller establishments and…

Though it failed to resolve a number of contentious issues, the COP26 meeting in Glasgow solidified a consensus around the need for a global transition towards clean energy. Implicated in this transition is the widescale adoption of renewables—we must build…

The Politics of the Price Level

May 19, 2022

Analysis

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In 1959, the leaders of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC, now the OECD) appointed a Group of Independent Experts “to study the experience of rising prices” in the recent history of the advanced capitalist countries. Between the end…

As the arrival of the pandemic forced schools shut, the Public Schools of Robeson County in North Carolina scrambled to save the rural district’s closed and crumbling buildings. At the same time, they faced the major task of providing education…

Restarting our economies after the pandemic continues to expose the fragility of our supply chains. The Russia-Ukraine conflict serves as a stark reminder that oil and gas can still dictate our anxieties. Commodity prices and our collective sense of vulnerability…

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has flung the international order into crisis. Understanding the causes of such cataclysms requires understanding not only the interests of states, but also the shape of society—its internal tensions, as well as its material and cultural…

Exxon recently announced three oil discoveries off the coast of Guyana, increasing the company's recoverable oil potential in the country to 11 billion barrels. These discoveries have added to the high likelihood of Guyana becoming a major global oil producer in the…

In recent years, an intense debate has unfolded over the policy and politics of the green transition. Politically, the tide appears to be receding: As the Biden agenda has lost momentum and rising inflation moves center stage, the near-term prospects…

The centerpiece of shock and awe of the West’s economic response to Russia’s invasion and bombardment of Ukraine was the freezing of Russia’s central bank assets. In the March 7 edition of his Global Money Dispatch newsletter, the Credit Suisse…

In the early weeks following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a conversation between journalist Javier Blas and historian Nicholas Mulder on the collision of their areas of expertise—commodity markets and sanctions—in the fallout of the war. Under discussion, the reconfiguration of…

Few scholars have had the theoretical, methodological, and empirical influence of William Sewell. His work has persistently scrutinized and challenged disciplinary barriers, placing historical and social scientific methods in dialogue and thereby illuminating their strengths and shortcomings. This effort is…

For the global hegemon, pulling the trigger on crisis management seems to consist primarily of posting PDFs to government websites. During the March 2020 financial panic, as the coronavirus first spread throughout the Global North, the Federal Reserve feverishly published…

The Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach processed respectively 10.7 and 9.3 million twenty-foot equivalent units of cargo volume in 2021, with the former setting a record high of shipping volume in the Western Hemisphere. Continuing…

Earlier this month, a wave of protests spread across Kazakhstan. Though prompted by rising gas prices, the demonstrations soon came to target the country's decades long trajectory of corruption and resource privatization. A 2001 article by ERIKA WEINTHAL and PAULINE JONES LUONG…

The uptick in organized and unorganized labor militancy registered throughout the pandemic, and in particular in strike and unionization campaigns in recent months, comes at a relative nadir for the US labor movement. The work of Kim Voss, Professor of…

The new coalition government in Germany, led by Social Democrat Olaf Scholz, is the first time that the SDP, the Greens, and the Liberals have joined together in a single government. The cooperation agreement, published on November 24, was the…

In October 2019, a proposed thirty peso hike in public transport fares triggered protests in Santiago that spread to other major cities across the country, denouncing the country’s economic infrastructure with the slogan, “It’s not thirty pesos, it’s thirty years.” Chileans…

In October, over 10,000 John Deere workers went on strike, 1,400 Kellogg's workers followed suit, and observers anticipated thousands more IATSE members and Kaiser Permanente workers to walk out. (After voting down two contracts, workers at Deere reached an agreement last week ending…

In mid October 2021, when BlackRock revealed its third quarter results, the asset management behemoth announced it was just shy of $10 trillion in assets under management. It’s a vast sum, “roughly equivalent to the entire global hedge fund, private…

The new German government will be called upon, at a highly critical time for the global and European economy, to draw up a new economic and political strategy not only for Germany but also for the EU/Eurozone. The outcome will…

This week, millions in California voted in support of Governor Gavin Newsom in a recall election. California is one of 19 states that grants power to voters to recall a sitting governor, a law which was passed in 1911 as…

Observers in the past decades have commented on increased urbanization in India, which has led to new challenges for development, housing, and labor. But the majority of India's population, and thus electoral power, remains in rural regions.

This week, the Mexican government sued eleven major US arms manufacturers, alleging that they facilitated the illegal flow of guns into the country. The proliferation of US-manufactured guns in Mexico during recent years has been well-documented, but their presence precedes…

As New Yorkers grapple with an uncertain future, the fiscal crisis of the 1970s and its aftermath are often invoked by the press and politicians. Today, “New York in the 1970s” is shorthand for a city facing poverty and crime,…

Haiti's President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated on Wednesday, plunging the country into greater political unrest following months of protests around Moïse's controversial decision to rule by decree.

The impending retreat of US troops from Afghanistan has brought renewed discussion on Pakistan amidst both US and Chinese alliances. Much of the scholarship on Pakistan centers around its military and foreign policy, but less attention has been given to…

Since the 2000 World Water Forum in The Hague, governance over water resources has gained salience in international development discourse. The allocation of rights (to technology and decisionmaking) and resources (both financial and natural) has shaped local economies in the…

Earlier this week, global leaders at the G7 summit signed a "green belt and road initiative," which offers funds to low income countries for sustainable investment.

Why did the Ever Given capture our collective imaginations? At the end of its week in the spotlight, the poet Kamran Javadizadeh wrote: “I too am ‘partially refloated,’ I too remain stuck in the Suez Canal.” Two fluorescent yellow-vested construction…

Like the world system as a whole, segregated cities in the United States have their own finance driven core-periphery dynamics.

The US government spends upwards of $20 billion annually on domestic agricultural support programs, but with over 20 percent of farm products exported, these programs interact with trade policies that have fluctuated in the last century between protectionism and liberalization.

Social Democracy

February 20, 2021

Analysis

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The problem of democratic representation has always turned on the question of the “have-nots”—that is, not only those without wealth and property, but also those marginalized on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, origin, religion and education. Even in a…

Social Democracy

February 20, 2021

Analysis

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Some time in 1991 I was invited to give a talk to the Andalusian Confederation of the Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party (PSOE). Afterwards, the secretary of the confederation walked me back to my hotel. I asked him why there was…

Social Democracy

February 20, 2021

Analysis

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The history of French socialism is filled with famous and heroic dates: 1789; 1848; 1871 1936; 1968. But less well remembered is another date of great significance: 1981. It was in May of that year that the French left achieved…

Social Democracy

February 20, 2021

Interviews

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Felipe González was Prime Minister of Spain from 1982-1996.

Social Democracy

February 20, 2021

Analysis

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It’s been some time since the term “transition” was fully incorporated into day-to-day usage in contemporary Spanish. It refers to the process of political change that began during the second half of the 1970s, a process which transformed Spain from…

Social Democracy

February 18, 2021

Interviews

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François Morin was technical adviser to Jean le Garrec at the State Secretary for Public Sector Expansion from 1981–1982 and an adviser to Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy.

While the neoliberal era appears to be in crisis, we took on a project to investigate its historical foundations. The tensions of the current political moment are commonly traced to the financial deregulation and economic liberalization of the 1980s and…

Social Democracy

February 5, 2021

Analysis

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In 1977, Eric Hobsbawm published a book of interviews with Giorgio Napolitano, a leading figure in the Italian Communist Party (PCI)’s gradualist wing, the miglioristi. Hobsbawm proclaimed himself a “spiritual member” of the PCI and intended this book to depict…

Social Democracy

February 4, 2021

Interviews

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Emanuele Macaluso was an Italian trade unionist and politician with the Italian Communist Party (PCI).

Social Democracy

February 4, 2021

Interviews

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Claudio Petruccioli is an Italian politician who was president of the Italian national broadcast network RAI from 2005–2009.

Outside of Brazil, the Bolsa Familia is known as the hallmark social policy of the former President Lula and remains the world's largest conditional cash transfer program. Less well known is the history of Brazil's social policy in the early…

Concerns over a generalized “inflation” loom in the recovery. Yet the prices that most heavily factor into the cost of living for US workers—housing, health, and education—have already been rising for decades. The question we should be asking is whether…

The simultaneous integration of global markets and decentralization of government within nation states has been a hallmark of the age of globalization. In a 2004 article, NEIL BRENNER looks to Europe to argue that through processes of decentralization and localization,…

Since the proliferation of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, critics of widely used internet communications services have warned of the misuse of personal data. Alongside familiar concerns regarding user privacy and state surveillance, a now-decades-long thread connects a…

Recent weeks have seen proliferating analyses of the constitutional infrastructure of the US, and speculation over its ability to hinder the behaviors of a disruptive incumbent. New concerns reflect longstanding apprehension over the stability of presidential regimes.

Since Lehman collapsed in 2008, central banks have broken free of historical norms, channelling trillions into the banking system to prop up global finance and the savings of depositors from Germany to Hong Kong. The corona crash has only accelerated…

A 2018 National Academy of Sciences report on American policing begins its section on racial bias by noting the abundance of scholarship that records disparities in the criminal justice system. But shortly thereafter, the authors make a strange clarification: “In…

Will the current crisis transform America’s politics and economic institutions? With unemployment higher than at any point since the Great Depression, rising food insecurity, and an increasingly muscular role for government—are we witnessing the beginning of the end of the…

Covid is changing popular attitudes towards the public sector, prompting many commentators to anticipate a new period of welfare expansion. Others are more skeptical, noting that public opinion undergoes rapid fluctuations, which rarely resolve into a new equilibrium.

The global dollar system has few national winners. The typical frame for understanding the US dollar is that of “exorbitant privilege.”

The transition to a post-carbon energy economy will require extraction.

The need to formulate a unified COVID response has placed pressure on European integration in recent days, with Germany and the Netherlands resisting Southern European calls for the issuing of "coronabonds." A 2018 paper by John Ryan and John Loughlin…

Black America has had less wealth, less income, less education, and poorer health than white America for as long as records have been kept.

Researchers of policy history have long deliberated over explanatory frameworks: institutionalist accounts tend to focus on inherited conditions and path dependency in political development, while others stress the importance of social movements in shaping policy. Among the more dynamic analytical…

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez is a political scientist who studies the mechanisms of influence. Focusing on the strategies of organized interests, including both business and labor, Hertel-Fernandez's helps illuminate crucial and poorly understood levers of American political economy.

This year, we once again shattered the record for atmospheric carbon concentration, and witnessed a series of devastating setbacks in US climate policy—from attempts to waive state protections against pipelines to wholesale attacks on climate science.

Leah Stokes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Santa Barbara. Her research spans representation and public opinion, voting behavior, and environmental and energy politics. ways forward in the climate crisis. Below, her…

Tax reform is at the forefront of contemporary policy debate. US citizens pay taxes at lower rates than their European counterparts, and a growing number of researchers agree that progressive taxes on wealth and income have the potential to rectify…

Two weeks ago today marked the passing of the great Immanual Wallerstein. His work has had resounding influence across fields: from literature, to legal theory, education, development studies, and international relations. Among his foremost contributions is the four volume Modern…

Throughout the 20th century, radical social movements were plagued by their relationship to existing state institutions. Across Western Europe, labor movements found political expression in parties like the Swedish Social Democrats, the German SPD, and the French Socialist Party.

U.S. politics is beset by increasing polarization. Ideological clustering is common; partisan antipathy is increasing; extremity is becoming the norm (Dimock et al. 2014). This poses a serious collective problem. Why is it happening?

GREEN INFLUENCE A discussion of different approaches to climate policy Last week, the U.S. government released the Fourth National Climate Assessmentwhich outlined the dire economic and environmental consequences of climate change. Instead of highlighting key findings of the report—two good…