Analysis

A Legacy in Dispute

Colombia’s presidential election will determine whether Petro’s reformist agenda endures or the far right gains national power.

Bolivia After MAS

For the past month, Bolivia has experienced massive roadblocks across eight of its nine departments, which have upended logistics, trade, and daily movement. Protesters have launched these roadblocks to call for the resignation of President Rodrigo Paz, who took office just seven months ago after winning the runoff election in October 2025.

Trucking’s Window of Opportunity

Will the Trump administration, the Supreme Court, and the data center boom bring about a restructuring in motor carrier logistics?

Mosaic of Deterrence

The US-Israeli war on Iran has foregrounded a question that has become increasingly urgent since the onset of the genocide in Gaza: how should we understand the reconfiguration of imperial power in West Asia?

The State and Its Workers

China’s rapid rise as a global power has been accompanied by an internal shift in industrial politics and a process of class recomposition. 1989 marked a fundamental rupture between two modes of industrial class politics in post-Mao China, particularly in terms of the relationship between the Party-state and the industrial working class.

Trading Sovereignty

Did the Trump tariffs inadvertently make Lula great again? In 2025, the US unilaterally imposed a 50 percent tax hike on US imports of Brazilian imports in an effort to interfere with the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro. But rather than capitulation to Trump, what followed was a rapid cycle of Brazilian economic adjustment, with declining exports to the US more than offset through growth in other markets.

Three Frontiers of Global China

What defines Global China today? China’s global power extends beyond infrastructural investments in the global South to entail normative and epistemic shifts as well, with China promoting new standards of global governance and regimes of knowledge as an alternative to the Western system.

Arms Markets

The US is far and away the world’s largest military spender, military producer, and arms exporter, accounting for more than a third of global military expenditure and 42 percent of all exports, surpassing one trillion dollars in 2024. Yet the global military economy is also populated by other actors who can influence the number and variety of weapons that are produced, bought, sold, and used on the battlefield.

Histories of Decline

American elites have raised the question of US decline periodically for most of the last sixty years. What can we learn from this march of failed predictions? Will the doomsayers always be wrong? Or just early? 

Introduction

The Editors introduce PW Issue 1: American Power

The Dollar’s Dominance

Is de-dollarization on the horizon? One of the mainstays of the global order for the past seventy years has been American economic leadership and the use of the US dollar as the core means of exchange, store of value, and unit of account. While the eruption of war and trade instability threaten the endurance of US hegemony, a currency transition seems unlikely to place.

Monroe Doctrines

The “Donroe Doctrine” is the latest iteration of long-standing claims to regional domination in the absence of hegemony—an exaggerated reformulation of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny.

Bolivarian Twilight

After the US invasion of Venezuela, acting President Delcy Rodríguez was named as a “friend” and ”partner” of the Trump administration. Why has Rodríguez managed to remain in office after the kidnapping of Maduro—her former boss and ally? The answer can be found in the trajectory of Venezuela politics since the Bolivarian Revolution and the cracks in an inter-bourgeois agreement under Madurismo.

Socialism Under Siege

In January of 2026, the Trump administration imposed a total blockade of oil shipments to Cuba, plunging its oil-dependent electricity grid into chaos. The administration’s economic war marks the latest in a long line of attempts to strangle the country and topple its Revolutionary government.

After Brent

The UK’s North Sea is one of the most mature and explored hydrocarbon basins on earth. Production peaked around the turn of the new millennium at 4.5 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, falling to around 1.4 million barrels a day in 2023—a decrease of 69 percent.

Unstitching America

No private company is logistically capable of delivering the mail. So what does privatization of the US Postal Service mean?

Soy Republics

The region's role as a key soy exporter has empowered reactionary politics and fuelled ecological resistance, in the biome and beyond.