Analysis

Green Gold

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?

Wages of Citizenship

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 the exploitation of undocumented labor while holding the credible threat of deportation over workers.

Regimes of Bankruptcy

Faced with the rise of interventionism by the United States, Latin American political thinkers tried to scale up the mechanics of bankruptcy—the civil means to establish the legality of a debt—to a global scene, but they were afforded all of the shame and none of the rights associated with a declaration of insolvency. 

Colombia’s New Right?

Uribismo has undoubtedly been the most influential political phenomenon in Colombia in the past three decades. Uribe consolidated the wide spectrum of the political right through a synthesis of authoritarian security, neoliberal technocracy, and alliances with military and powerful economic sectors. His diagnosis transformed the political space of the right in Colombia and bears important lessons for the consolidation of right-wing power today. But can Uribismo survive without Uribe?

The Fourth Transformation

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.

Brazil’s Neo-Extractivist Trap

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 of primary export producing countries. Such a model is crucial to understanding the obstacles to a just ecological transition in the twenty-first century.

Militarized Capitalism

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 this uneasy alliance continue under Sheinbaum?

Anatomy of a Defense Budget

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?

Mercenary State

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 corporations, and other armed groups. The reach of these industries has spread beyond the African continent, implicating geopolitical warfare across the world.

The Real Economy

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 appropriating or criticizing the methods of economics, other disciplines have failed to articulate any alternative conceptions of the economy.

Concentration Spiral

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 the country’s banks, but they also own the country’s largest pension funds and insurance companies. Together, these conglomerates have opposed President Petro’s proposals for financial and economic reform.

The Canal Zone

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 has solidified the consensus around the country’s transit-oriented developmental model, but it has failed to challenge the foundation of an economy vulnerable to whims of the global market and interimperial rivalry.

How to DOGE USAID

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 capital.”

Slashing the State

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

After the Diamond Rush

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 segregation in the world. Blessed with the largest gold deposits on the planet, successive governments in the colonial and apartheid periods cultivated a tight relationship between industry and the state. Mining wealth was used on a large scale to economically uplift white residents and to finance industrialization through state-owned corporations.

State and Development

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. The primary antagonism between the US and China over core technologies has shaped both industrial policy’s revival among countries that abandoned it at the height of neoliberalism, and its further development as an economic tool among countries that historically adopted it.

After Antitrust

During the 1950s and 1960s, 35 percent of workers were unionized, 25 percent of the economy by GDP was price regulated, the corporate tax rate was 53 percent, and the top marginal income tax rate was 94 percent. Inequality fell to the lowest levels on record. The antitrust bandaid taped over the gaps in this regulatory web was of limited importance to this qualified Progressive triumph. 

Developmental Tracks

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 their countries are no longer condemned or dismissed. And somewhat surprisingly, given the country’s longstanding reputation as a bastion of liberalism, the origins of industrial policy as a concept are now routinely traced back to the early United States, particularly to Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures in the aftermath of the American Revolution, Henry Clay’s American System in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and Henry Carey’s neomercantilism in the decades straddling the Civil War. The political designs of these elite figures reveal that what would later be called “industrial policy” was never antithetical to American traditions and ideals.