Analysis

Argentina’s Debt Trap

After publicly endorsing Javier Milei’s economic achievements since coming to power in December 2023, the IMF has approved a new Argentine bailout package of $20 billion. This comes seven years after former President Mauricio Macri negotiated a $45 billion loan in 2018, of which not a single dollar has yet been repaid. Milei's reforms, in turn, have deepened the country’s cycle of debt dependency in an increasingly unstable global context.

Offshoring the Planet

The rise of green offshore finance threatens to encase biodiversity and climate policymaking within global South states and across the multilateral system, locking in a standardized set of biodiversity and climate financing, governance, and policy measures for decades to come.

America’s Braudelian Autumn

In its efforts to revive the American Empire, the Trump administration will have to delicately balance the interests of both manufacturing-oriented nativists and capital factions whose interests span the globe. Navigating these competing agendas will pose an enormous challenge to the longevity of the Trumpian coalition—and the stability of the global financial system as a whole. 

Capturing Production

The implementation of the USMCA in July 2020 heralded major changes for the North American automotive industry, with increased regional content and fundamental labor rights becoming requirements to gain entry into the North American market. While Mexico's wage objectives remain unmet, as does the goal of increased production in the US, cross-border coordination in the manufacturing and commercialization of EVs could benefit all regional actors under a renewed USMCA.

The Tariff Threat

Mexico's current model of integration is vulnerable to external shocks. In order to protect its industrial base and establish sovereignty over its economic development, and to sustain its position in international trade, the state will have to scale up high-value exports and strategically diversify. The tariff threat is merely a symptom of Mexico's need for more resilient supply chains.

After Impeachment

Ahead of a presidential election in June, Korea remains engulfed in political turmoil following the declaration of martial law and subsequent presidential impeachment back in December. A poster child of late twentieth century democratic transitions, hailed for its export-oriented growth model, Korea now confronts democratic backsliding and economic stagnation. A robust program of public investment is needed to shift this course. 

OPEC Plus

While OPEC's economic stratagem has always trumped the political orientation of some of its members, wide geopolitical shifts have diminished the role of some nations while allowing for new partnerships unimaginable in the twentieth century. As an expanded organization, OPEC+ continues to face both contingent and existential challenges. However, the fact that OPEC+ retains its solidity despite enormous internal differences and turbulent geopolitical conditions indicates the potential of international alliances of countries from the global South to endure in the changing world order.

A Class Coup

The struggle for rights of Brazilian workers, and its fierce public presence since the end of the Second World War, reached its apogee early in the 1960s. In a climate shaped by the Cold War, many in Brazil's middle and upper classes supported military dictatorship as alternative to the growing power of the country's labor unions. While the regime's conservative modernization initially proved to be as productive as it was repressive, millions of Brazilians who experienced this forced industrialization came to see themselves and their forms of political activity as workers, and it was through action as workers organized into unions that the popular demonstrations that shook the dictatorship began to grow.

Unbankable Transitions

It is only by looking at the whole picture of climate financing flows—and the other sectors and material demands of the green transition—that we can begin to reckon with the fundamental limitations of our existing climate governance regime.

Green Indicative Planning

With derisking regimes falling short of meeting governments' pledges to reach net zero carbon emissions, what lessons can we learn from governance through indicative planning? Historically strong coordination between states and corporate elites in Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Japan led to a range of successful planning economic arrangements. Many strategies, as well, can be implemented from China's mixed economy model without espousing a party-state system. Are democracies too democratic for coordinating climate resilience, or can they rise to the occasion of tackling the climate crisis?

Nodes for Socialization

While fully socializing the clean manufacturing and infrastructure apparatus is politically unfeasible, public development of renewable capacity can impose rationality on the clean power transition, helping to clear distributional conflicts. In this article, Melanie Brusseler and Chris Hayes argue for what they term nodal socialization, a framework for allocating public investment—and attendant ownership rights—under macrofinancial constraints.

Coordination in Chaos

The first 100 days of the second Trump administration have indicated that the next months, and perhaps years, will be marked by more uncertainty and increasing political and economic fragmentation. Despite this uncertainty, “green” industrial policies are likely here to stay.

Global BYD

Amid the intensifying retreat of American hegemony, an alternative geo-economic and geopolitical arrangement is coming into view: a battery-powered globalization with Chinese characteristics. Chinese EV manufacturer has recently raced ahead of Tesla in global EV sales. How will China’s EV dominance navigate an increasingly protectionist climate?

Restoring Multilaterism

In the face of increasing protectionism and the threat of tariffs, defenders of the international order have called for a “return to normalcy.” But the emergence of a more hostile international economic environment pre-dates Trump, beginning with the global financial crisis, if not before.

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?