Category: Global Insights
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Empire and Nation Revisited: 50 Years after Bandung (Partha Chatterjee, 2005)
I wish to propose a general definition of empire that does not tie it with annexation and occupation of foreign territories and, therefore, is able to capture the new forms of indirect and informal control that have become common in recent decades. The imperial prerogative, I suggest, is the power to declare the colonial exception….
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The Conflict in Ukraine and Contemporary Imperialism (Radhika Desai, 2016)-Highly Recommended)
In this introduction, we provide an overall framing of the articles that follow by placing the Ukraine conflict which today embroils the West in confrontation with Russia, within an historical account of the geopolitical economy of contemporary capitalism and the dynamics of imperialism in the twenty-first century, taking particular account of the decline of US…
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China and the Crisis of the European Security System (Ivan Yu. Zuenko, 2022)
If there had not been an active rapprochement between Moscow and Beijing over the past decades, there would have been no Asian alternative to the European markets for Russian oil and gas, and nothing would have happened on February 24. But is China the main beneficiary of the European crisis? Is the situation developing according…
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Perestroika and New Thinking: A Retrospective (Mikhail Gorbachev, 2021)
Perestroika inherited a difficult situation in terms of interethnic and federal relations. I have to admit that when we started perestroika, my colleagues and I did not see the full extent of that problem. It is obvious now that preserving and renewing the country that represented “a world of many worlds”—a conglomerate of nationsas different…
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The Downside of Imperial Collapse,When Empires or Great Powers Fall, Chaos and War Rise (Robert Kaplan, 2022)
Wars are historical hinges. And misbegotten wars, when serving as culmination points of more general national decline, can be fatal. This is particularly true for empires. The Habsburg empire, which ruled over central Europe for hundreds of years, might have lingered despite decades of decay were it not for its defeat in World War I….
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More Proof That This Really Is the End of History, (Francis Fukuyama, October 2022)
Over the past decade, global politics has been heavily shaped by apparently strong states whose leaders are not constrained by law or constitutional checks and balances. Russia and China both have argued that liberal democracy is in long-term decline, and that their brand of muscular authoritarian government is able to act decisively and get things…
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Geopolitical Cleavages of the Twenty-First Century: What Future for the World? (Immanuel Wallernstein, 2003)
In this first decade of the twenty-first century, and probably for several decades to come, the world is beset by three quite different geopolitical cleavages, which interact with each other but have separate dynamics. Most analysts of the contemporary world situation err precisely by failing to discern the distinctiveness of the three cleavages, sometimes seeming…
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From Bandung (1955) to 2015: Old and New Challenges for the States, the Nations and the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America (Samir Amin, 2015)
Third World Forum, Dakar, SenegalThis paper reminds us what was really Bandung and non-alignment, which the author understands as having been in its time “non-alignment on the imperialist pattern of globalisation” of the time. Today, again, states and societies of the global South are the victims of the pattern of imperialist unipolar globalisation of our…