March 27, 2025

Analysis

Anatomy of a Defense Budget

Tracing the growth of US military spending

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 persistent growth in the defense budget?

Longform

March 27, 2025

Analysis

Militarized Capitalism

War and economy in Mexico

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…

March 13, 2025

Analysis

Mercenary State

The apartheid-era roots of South Africa’s powerful military and security complex

One of the greatest remnants of South Africa’s apartheid state is a vast securitization complex. South African militarization is now “exported” through a privatized network of military services and weapons sales for a host of different clients, including states, multinational…

March 11, 2025

Analysis

The Real Economy

Methodological imperialism and the science of wealth

No discipline in the humanities or social sciences today has a convincing theory of the economy. Long preoccupied with honing methods, the core of the discipline of economics has abandoned investigation into what the economy really is. Preoccupied with either…

March 7, 2025

Analysis

Concentration Spiral

The growing power of Colombia’s banks

In Colombia, economic and political power is concentrated in the hands of a few major economic players. From 2000 to 2022, thirteen conglomerates have risen to dominate the sector, shaping profitability, access to credit, and pricing. These conglomerates not only contain…

February 27, 2025

Interviews

Inflation in the World-System

An interview with Margarita Fajardo on CEPAL

Across the world, parties governing amid the post-pandemic rise in prices have found themselves punished at the ballot box. While typified solutions revolve around fiscal discipline, many critics are returning to dependency theory to argue that inflation must be understood…

February 27, 2025

Analysis

The Canal Zone

Panama’s transit-oriented development model remains subjugated to imperial interests

Trump’s vows to “take back” the Canal are part of a broader push to return to the heyday of American expansionism, throughout which Panama served as a key neocolonial outpost. Over the past two decades, Panamanian control of the canal…

February 21, 2025

Analysis

Controlling Capital

Inflation targeting and external vulnerabilities in the Brazilian economy

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…

February 18, 2025

Reviews

Democratic Decarbonization?

Sandeep Vaheesan’s new book maps the structures of power that business holds over the US electricity grid

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…

February 11, 2025

Interviews

Party Bus

An interview with André Singer on the right, party politics, and Brazil’s position in the world

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…

February 6, 2025

Interviews

Recycled Liberalism

An interview with Marta Castilho on the EU–Mercosur trade agreement

Since 1999, the European Union (EU) and Mercosur have been negotiating a bi-regional partnership agreement comprising three pillars: trade, cooperation, and political dialogue. A quarter century later, in December 2024, the parties announced the conclusion of negotiations during the Mercosur…

Shortform

March 28, 2025

Analysis

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…

February 28, 2025

Analysis

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

Analysis

How 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

Analysis

Oil 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

Analysis

Slashing 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.

January 31, 2025

Analysis

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)…

December 18, 2024

Analysis

Transfer and Transition

Technology transfer and green industrial transformation

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

America First?

Escalation and reverberations in the trade war

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…

October 16, 2024

Analysis

Breaking Up Google

Antitrust, competition, and the intricacies of monopoly

In late August, Judge Amit P. Mehta of US District Court for the District of Columbia found Google guilty of maintaining an illegal monopoly in online search. Google had paid billions to device manufacturers and browser developers—including Apple, Samsung and…

October 11, 2024

Analysis

Marshall Plans

New green industrial diplomacy?

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…

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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.

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