Anatomy of a Defense Budget

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.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…