World
April 10, 2025
AnalysisWages of Citizenship
The undocumented worker represents the future of labor relations in the US, not its past
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.
Longform
April 19, 2025
AnalysisRestoring Multilaterism
A reformed global agenda built on public foundations
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…
April 17, 2025
AnalysisGreen Gold
Palm oil and Indonesia’s plantation economy
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?
April 10, 2025
AnalysisRegimes of Bankruptcy
Debt and intervention in Latin America
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…
April 4, 2025
AnalysisColombia’s New Right?
Uribismo and the failures of “Democratic Security”
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…
April 3, 2025
AnalysisThe Fourth Transformation
The political economy of Claudia Sheinbaum’s popularity
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.
April 3, 2025
AnalysisBrazil’s Neo-Extractivist Trap
Dependency patterns at the dusk of neoliberalism
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…
March 27, 2025
AnalysisMilitarized 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 27, 2025
AnalysisAnatomy 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…
March 13, 2025
AnalysisMercenary 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
AnalysisThe 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…
Shortform
April 3, 2025
InterviewsNever Again?
An interview with Frei Betto on Brazil’s 1964 military coup and the authoritarian advance in everyday life
With the attempted coup of 2022, and the consolidation of the nation’s right behind Bolsonarism, memories of Brazil’s horrific military dictatorship are more prominent than they’ve been in decades. To explore the meaning of these experiences in light of current…
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…
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
AnalysisHow 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
AnalysisOil 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
AnalysisSlashing 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.
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
AnalysisTransfer 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…
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
AnalysisBreaking 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…
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The Trump administration’s drastic shift on the US’s approach to the war in Ukraine has unleashed a reckoning about European power—its internal fissures and path dependencies, its security guarantee from the United States, and its freedom of movement on the world diplomatic stage. Three pieces from the archive mine enduring political fractures regarding Europe and its place in the twenty-first century.
An interview with Marta Castilho on the EU–Mercosur trade agreement
Editor’s Note: Amidst talk of a new protectionism, trade volumes and their regulation continue to expand and shape new political configurations. In December 2024, the EU and Mercosur concluded a decades-long negotiation process on a bi-regional trade agreement. In an interview, Marta Castilho discusses the agreement’s potential consequences for European markets and South American industry.
On Fritz Bartel’s The Triumph of Broken Promises
Editor’s Note: Historian Fritz Bartel argues that the success of the North Atlantic capitalist world in the ending of the Cold War was contingent on their superior ability to break democratic promises and rewrite their social contracts. Reviewing Bartel’s book, Max Krahe asks: what kind of politics will emerge as the era of broken promises enters its own period of disintegration?
What’s at stake in the fiscal rules debate?
Editor’s Note: Any shift in Europe’s coordination and military expenditures would mark a sea change from the unequal and austere status quo of the continent’s fiscal politics. Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay explain the persistent paralysis from the point of view of climate coordination.
Series
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.
The Polycrisis is a newsletter and a series of essays and panels exploring intersecting crises with a particular emphasis on the political economy of climate change and global North/South dynamics. It is edited by Tim Sahay and Kate Mackenzie. Follow The Polycrisis on Twitter here.
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…
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…