Far from heralding the return of the nation-state, today’s wars and struggles are fights for the future of globalization
The unipolar world has exploded. In the wake of a pandemic that has tested economies and societies, geopolitical conflict is no longer a prospect but a reality.
The Rest and the West locates the makings of this situation in turbulent dynamics of the capitalist world market. Understanding the conjuncture to spur competition for the political organization of the spaces of globalization, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson resist the reduction of this conflict to great power rivalries or processes of economic decoupling.
Instead, they investigate how geoeconomic forces cross the rising centrality of war to capital operations and the transformations of capitalism. The arc of Mezzadra and Neilson’s analysis is wide, encompassing topics such as the pandemic crisis of mobility, shifts in the relation of social reproduction to capital circulation, state transformation in Russia and China, the politics of infrastructure and energy, and the impact of geopolitical change upon social struggles.
The book’s gambit is to forge a theory of imperialism adequate to a world in which the rest no longer provides a putative unity that makes and opposes the West.
