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Nero played his fiddle, Obama shot baskets and Trump twittered while their empires burned. What makes empire decay and what makes empires expand has everything to do with the relations between rulers and the ruled. Several factors are decisive. These include: (1) rent, land and housing, (2) the direction of living standards, (3) the rise or fall of mortality rate, (4) decline or rise of families. Throughout history, rising empires bring their population on side for the task of empire by distributing a portion of their plunder to the masses— providing them with land, low rents and housing. Large-scale landlords facing the return of young war veterans reduced excessive land concentration to avoid domestic unrest. Rising empires raised living standards, with salaried employees, workers and artisans, merchants and scribes finding employment as the oligarchies expanded conspicuous consumption and the state bureaucracy running the empire. A prosperous empire is cause and consequence of increases in the population and the growth of healthy and educated plebeians who service and serve the rulers. In contrast, declining empires plunder the domestic economy, without regard to the negative social consequences that include a reduction in life expectancy, which in the US is among the lowest of all advanced industrialized countries—even lower than in Cuba. As a result, deteriorating empires experience a declining rate of mortality; homeownership and land is concentrated in the hands of an elite of renters living off unearned wealth via inheritance, speculation and rents, which degrades productive work based on skill and knowledge. Declining empires are cause and consequence of vulnerable families composed of opioid-addicted workers suffering from rising inequality between rulers and ruled. The US imperial experience over the past century embodies the trajectory of the rise and fall of empires. The past quarter-century describes the relations between rulers and ruled at a time of declining empire. Living standards of Americans have declined precipitously. Employers have ceased paying for pensions; reduced or eliminated health coverage; and reduced corporate taxes, thus lowering the quality of public education. Over the past two decades, the wages and salaries of the majority of households have stagnated or declined; education and health expenses have bankrupted many and reduced university graduates to long-term debt peonage. Access to home ownership for Americans under the age of forty-five has fallen dramatically from 24 percent in 2006 to 14 percent in 2017. At the same time, rents have skyrocketed, especially in large cities across the country, in most cases absorbing between a third and a half of monthly income. Business elites and their housing experts divert attention to ‘intergenerational’ inequalities between pensioners and younger wage and salaried employees and away from rising income inequality between CEOs and both workers and pensioners, which has risen from 100 to 400 to one over the past three decades. Mortality rates between the business elite and workers have widened as the wealthy live longer and healthier lives while workers experience declining life expectancy, the first time in American history! As the business elites’ income from profits, dividends and interest increases they can afford high-cost private medical care that prolongs life, while millions of workers are prescribed opioids to ‘reduce pain’ that precipitate premature deaths. Births are declining as a result of the high cost of medical care and the absence of day care and paid maternal/paternal leave. The most recent studies reveal that 2017 experienced the fewest babies in thirty years. The socalled ‘economic recovery’ following the financial collapse of 2008/9 was class based: real estate and financial elites received over two trillion dollars in bailouts while over three million working-class households were evicted by financial mortgage holders. The result was a rapid rise in homeless people, especially in cities with the highest rate of recovery from the crisis. Homelessness and crowded, overpriced rentals and minimum wages are likely causes of declining birth rates and increasing mortality rates. Imperialism Expands, Living Standards Fall[:] Unlike the earlier, post-World War II decades when overseas expansion was accompanied by low-cost higher education, accessible low-cost mortgages and increasing home ownership and employer-paid pensions and health coverage, over the past two decades. The imperial expansion has been based on forced reductions in living standards empire grew and living standards declined because the capitalist class evaded trillions of taxable income via overseas tax havens, transfer pricing and tax exemptions. Moreover, capitalists received massive state subsidies for infrastructure, and cost-free transfers of publically funded technological innovations. Imperial expansion is now based on the relocation overseas of multinational manufacturing corporations to lower costs, increasing the percentage of low-wage service workers in the US. The decline of living standards for the majority is a result of the restructuring of the empire, the advent of the regressive tax system, the redistribution of state welfare transfers from public social spending to private finance and real estate subsidies and bailouts. Conclusion In the beginning, imperialism involved an explicit social contract with overseas expansion, shared profits, taxes and income exchanged for workers’ political support for imperial overseas economic exploitation and resource plundering as well as service in the imperial armed forces. The social contract was conditioned by a relative balance of power: unionized workers represented the majority of manufacturing, public sector and skilled workers. But this balance of power in class relations was based on the capacity of workers to engage in class struggle and influence the state. In other words, the entire imperialism and welfare configuration was based on a particular set of conditional relations intrinsic to the social pact. Over time, imperial expansion faced overseas constraints from rising national and socialist opposition that forced or encouraged corporations to relocate capital abroad. Imperial rivals in Europe and Asia competed for overseas markets, forcing the US to increase productivity, lower costs, relocate abroad. Unions divorced from the broader community movements and lacking an independent political movement, corrupted from within and committed to a disappearing social compact, declined in number and capacity to formulate a new combative post-social pact strategy. The capital class gained total control over class relations and, therefore, unilaterally set the terms of taxation, employment, living standards and, most importantly, state expenditure. Imperial military and economic expenditures grew in direct proportions to the decline of social welfare payments. Rival power groups fought over the share of capitalist budgets and political-military priorities. Economic imperialists competed with or converged with military imperialists; free market neoliberals competed for overseas markets with national militarists pursuing territorial occupations, conquests, closed markets and submissive clients. Rival political power configurations competed over imperial priorities—powerful Zionist configurations sought regional wars for Israel, while multinationals looked to advance their political-economic expansion in Chinese, Indian and Southeast Asian markets. Competing elite factions monopolized budgets, taxes and expenditures, driving living standards downward. Imperialist classes formed pacts—though only amongst themselves—but the quality and quantity of workers decreased through impoverished healthcare and educational systems. In contrast, elite offspring attended the best schools and secured the highest posts in government and the economy. Privilege and power did not produce imperial triumphs. China harnessed educational programs and skilled workers to productive work. In contrast, privileged US university graduates sought employment in lucrative but parasitical financial services rather than in science, engineering or social welfare. Military academy graduates joined networks of ‘commanders’ who condoned sexual abusers, trained and promoted officers who sent missiles which targeted military bases and bombed population centers and trained naval captains specializing in own-ship collisions. Ivy League graduates secured high government positions, leading the US into endless Middle East wars, multiplying adversaries, antagonizing allies and spending trillions on wars for Israel, not social welfare and higher wages for American workers. Oh yes, the economy is recovering … only the people are doing worse.

Historians have demonstrated that the rise of Western Europe depended in large part on natural resources and labour forcibly appropriated from the global South during the colonial period, on a vast scale. Spain extracted gold and silver from the Andes, Portugal extracted sugar from Brazil, France extracted fossil fuels, minerals and agricultural products from West Africa, Belgium extracted rubber from the Congo; and Britain extracted cotton, opium, grain, timber, tea and countless other commodities from its colonies around the world – all of which entailed the exploitation of Southern labour on coercive terms, including through mass enslavement and indenture. This pattern of appropriation was central to Europe’s industrial growth, and to financing the expansion and industrialization of European settler colonies, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, which went on to develop similarly imperialist orientations toward the South (e.g., Naoroji, 1902, Pomeranz, 2000, Beckert, 2015, Moore, 2015, Bhambra, 2017, Patnaik, 2018, Davis, 2002). According to the conventional public narrative, colonial patterns of extraction ended with the withdrawal of colonial troops, flags and bureaucrats from the territories of the global South. Today, we are told, the world economy functions as a meritocracy: countries that have strong institutions, good markets, and a steadfast work ethic become rich and successful, while countries that lack these things, or which are hobbled by corruption and bad governance, remain poor. This assumption underpins dominant perspectives in the field of international development (Sachs, 2005, Collier, 2007, Rostow, 1990, Moyo, 2010, Calderisi, 2007, Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012), and is reinforced by the rhetoric, common among neoclassical economists, that free-trade globalization has created an “even playing field”. This narrative of post-colonial innocence has long come under critique. In the 1960s and 1970s, economists and historians associated with dependency theory and world-system theory argued that the general structure of the colonial economy remains in place, with industrial growth in the global North continuing to rely on appropriation from the South well into the post-colonial era (Rodney, 1972, Prebisch, 1950, Galeano, 1973, Wallerstein, 1974, Frank, 1967, Nkrumah, 1965). Rich countries and monopolistic corporations leverage their geopolitical and commercial dominance in the world economy to depress or cheapen the prices of resources and labour in the global South, both at the level of whole national economies as well as within global commodity chains (section 5.2). As a result, for every unit of embodied resources and labour that the South imports from the North they have to export many more units to pay for it, enabling the North to achieve a net appropriation through trade. This dynamic was theorized by Emmanuel (1972) and Amin (1978) as a process of “unequal exchange”. Emmanuel and Amin argued that unequal exchange enables a “hidden transfer of value” from the global South to the global North, or from periphery to core, which takes place subtly and almost invisibly, without the overt coercion of the colonial apparatus and therefore without provoking moral outrage. Prices are naturalized on the grounds that they represent “utility”, or “value”, or the outcome of “market mechanisms” such as supply and demand, obscuring the extent to which they are determined by power imbalances in the global political economy. Price differentials in international trade therefore function as an effective method of maintaining the patterns of appropriation that once overtly defined the colonial economy, allowing blame for “underdevelopment” to be shifted onto the victims. This pattern remains entrenched despite the fact that, with the rise of neoliberal globalization in the 1980s, manufacturing has shifted overwhelmingly to the global South, to the point where Southern countries contribute the vast majority of the world’s industrial labour and industrial production (Smith, 2016). Northern appropriation from the South comprises resources and labour embodied not only in primary commodities but also in manufactured goods, including high-technology products such as smartphones, computer chips, cars, designer fashion, etc., along with intermediate parts. Most of this appropriation occurs through global commodity chains, wherein Northern firms deploy monopsony and monopoly power to depress Southern suppliers’ prices at every node, from extraction to manufacture, while setting final prices as high as possible (Suwandi, 2019, Clelland, 2014). Several attempts have been made to estimate the monetary value of appropriation or drain from the global South through unequal exchange, generally by correcting the South’s export revenues for North-South price distortions in order to arrive at some representation of “losses”. Amin (1978: 144) focused on international wage inequalities, although doing so meant he was unable to account for other inputs that may affect overall price differentials. Köhler (1998) developed a more holistic method, using the distortion factor between market exchange rates (MER) and purchasing power parity (PPP) as a proxy for overall price inequalities. Using a modified version of Köhler’s method, recent research has found that in 2015 drain from the South through unequal exchange amounted to $2.1 trillion (constant 2011 dollars), represented in Northern prices (Hickel et al., 2021). Köhler’s proxy approach is limited in several respects, however. It relies on PPP figures that do not adequately account for the comparatively high prices of Northern exports; it relies on GDP figures that are affected by the low prices of imports from the South; and it compares Southern exports to prices across whole economies, rather than to those of only traded goods. All of this leads to underestimating the scale of drain (see Hickel et al., 2021). Perhaps more importantly, existing methods are limited in that they rely on trade revenues and price differentials as proxies by which to estimate drain without any reference to actual goods, precisely because goods remain hidden behind monetary trade data. Moreover, the conventional monetary data relates only to traded goods themselves and does not capture the upstream inputs that go into producing them, the prices of which significantly affect trade prices and, in a context of globally dispersed commodity chains, may involve many different countries. For instance, if the USA exports an aircraft, it may embody parts imported from China and Bolivia, which existing methods can account for using conventional trade data (e.g., Hickel et al., 2021), but it also embodies the materials and labour deployed in China and Bolivia to produce those parts, which existing methods cannot capture. Here we take a novel approach that seeks to overcome the limitations of previous work. Following Dorninger et al. (2021), we use a “footprint” analysis of input–output data to quantify the physical scale of raw materials, land, energy and labour embodied in trade between the North and South, looking not only at traded goods themselves but also the upstream resources and labour that go into producing and transporting those goods, including the machines, factories, infrastructure, etc. (Lenzen et al., 2013, Lenzen et al., 2012, Wiedmann et al., 2015). This approach builds on scholarship in ecological economics and industrial ecology. Using footprint metrics allows us to capture inputs even when they flow through complex global commodity chains: we can identify where the labour and resources are rendered and where the value is ultimately captured. This enables us to ground our analysis of unequal exchange in real resources and a more robust assessment of prices and price inequalities in trade, while maximizing the comparability of flows between the North and South. Using environmental input–output data, we find that there has been a significant net flow of embodied labour and natural resources from the global South to the global North over the period 1990 to 2015 (section 3). By comparing the physical scale of net resource flows to global price differentials, we estimate the monetary dimension of the drain. This is calculated not with respect to some objectively “correct” price for labour and resources (there is no such thing), but rather by representing the drain in terms of prevailing Northern prices, as well as in terms of global average prices for comparison. For “prices” we use trade in value-added (TiVA) per unit of resources embodied in traded goods, which is the monetary counterpart of our footprint method. Grounding our analysis in the physical dimensions of unequal exchange is important for several reasons. First, these resources – raw materials, land, labour and energy – embody the productive potential that is required for meeting human needs (use-value) and for generating economic growth (exchange-value). Physical drain is therefore ultimately what drives global inequalities in terms of access to provisions, as well as in terms of GDP or income (see Hornborg, 2020). Second, this approach allows us to maintain sight of the ecological impacts of unequal exchange. We know that excess energy and material consumption in high-income nations, facilitated by appropriation from the rest of the world, is causing ecological breakdown on a global scale. Tracing flows of resources embodied in trade allows us to determine the extent to which Northern appropriation is responsible for ecological impacts in the South; i.e., ecological debt (Roberts and Parks, 2009, Warlenius et al., 2015, Hornborg and Martinez-Alier, 2016).

The world remains highly uneven and riven by conflict. Neoliberal development produces islands of middle-class prosperity in societies that become more unequal overall. Even the alternative, state-led, export-oriented development is met, in China, by 80,000 violent protests a year by excluded and exploited peasants and workers – so China too seeks alternative development. As well as producing USstyle affluence for a few, neoliberalism has exacerbated the already miserable conditions experienced every day by billions of people who never had it so bad. And as these billions watch their children die in agony so the world’s rich can dine in splendour they commit themselves to social movements that propose alternative development as part of social transformation. In the past, these Third World upsurges of anger and longing were restrained by their forming in countries where the argument could be made, and widely believed, that progress depends on foreign investment … investment from the ruling elite and from global finance capital. In this formation, development could be bought only by bribing financiers with the promise of high returns to compensate for the risk of investing in unequal and volatile societies. Where Third World countries, such as Cuba, persisted in pursuing alternative routes to a different development, the capitalist world under the ‘leadership’ of the USA did its utmost to overthrow their governments, isolate their economies and denigrate their political systems. But now, in Latin America, the continent that suffered most from the ravages of the Washington Consensus, we begin to see what people who hate neoliberalism can do instead, in the way of education for the masses, doctors freely available to the poor, nationalized industries paying dividends to the people, state-supported cooperative enterprises, liberated golf courses turned into green housing space for the homeless, and all those other ‘mad economic practices’ that collectively make up alternative development. These experiments are sustained not by foreign investment but by the revenues from oil and natural gas being returned as investments in the people instead of profits to the elite. As the World Social Forum shows, there is widespread, global support for an alternative to neoliberal policies that deliberately and consciously skew economic growth to favour the investor. Even so, the institutional structure of alternative, counterhegemonic policy formation remains weakly developed. Movements that mobilize millions are represented by theories devised by a relative few, backed by meagre resources and with a precarious institutional existence. To further their end, this book proposes a counter-expertise to produce an alternative development. All that I have managed to do, so far, is to outline the theoretical and institutional structure of hegemonic policy formation, to look at sub-hegemonic subversion of alternative development, and to give some idea of what I take to be the first moments of truly counter-hegemonic developments in Latin America. The really hard work on counter-hegemonic theorization remains to be done. My conclusion is that counter-hegemonic policy formation deserves the thoughts and the theories, the practice and the persuasion, of the world’s activists and intellectuals, those who believe in equality, social justice and real democracy, and think that human beings are capable of finer sentiments in building a far better world.

Nonetheless there really is no “we” in fighting climate change in a Westphalian lexicon. Today’s countries: developing and developed, autocratic and democratic, rich importer and poor exporter, religious fundamentalist or secular, also face far too many internal contradictions to address climate change as one-coherent voice, in fact, it’s impossible. Societies begin to work at cross purposes, redundancy and contradiction becoming the result. For example, Australia wants green initiatives but is one of the world’s largest coal exporters. Germany seeks a low carbon society, but has allowed brown coal to retake much of their electricity grid to support jobs. Indonesia has great expectations of becoming a responsible player with the Paris accords, but at the same time not only exports thermal coal, but lets the Chinese build gigantic coal-fired plants that dot the Java landscape in the time being. What the Westphalian system does do however, is allow these same countries to default to do nothing, or take weakly conceived positions that firstly enable support for their economic activity, which 88% of the world’s economy is predicated on continued use ([and abuse] such as with government subsidies) of fossil fuels. This predicate to the carbon addiction as an economic driver fits the total bill: Fuel for mobility (planes, trains, and automobiles), heating (coal, diesel, and natural gas powered) and poly-vinyls (plastic bags, bottles, and Apple iPhones). The world runs on fossil fuels, and the Westphalian system, with its main pillar of the “exclusivity of sovereignty” abets all the countries in doing so. This complicity is universal and beyond question. The science behind climate change, leading to global warming, is incontrovertible. The process of burning fossil fuels like oil and coal release carbon dioxide which amplifies the impact of the greenhouse effect as populations, in particular in developing countries, grow. People didn’t cause the greenhouse effect by using fossil fuels: it’s a natural process in which gasses released in the atmosphere trap the sun’s heat and cause warming. Without this effect, the Earth would be much colder and, perhaps, not nearly as hospitable to live on. Nonetheless, oil, coal, and natural gas are simply too crucial to our existence to simply remove them and are here to stay. As BP’s Bernard Looney, chief executive of the energy giant’s upstream division, puts it, “[I]n almost every scenario – oil and gas together are forecast to represent greater than 40% of the energy mix in 2040”. Keep in mind that as world population densities grow, so do the overall numbers of use, even though actual or gross percentages used may decline. That is a real problem. There is no “knocking about the bushes” with this issue. The year 2017, was the hottest recorded year in human history since the Industrial Age began in the early 1850s, and with 2019 now recently ranked as the second hottest year in recorded history. As of this writing, 400 ppm of CO2 has already been recorded as average for 2017, with 2018 closely behind. These are all factual issues. The world cannot be allowed to burn carbon banks (the planets yet unused stores of oil, gas, and coal reserves that are still in the ground) unmitigated and without consequence. Yet, that is what is exactly continuing to happen, and all country’s economies are betting on it. For example, consider the much publicized economic joy a nation receives when a new deposit of oil is found. Renewables are an emerging technology, less than 10% of worlds energy usage at best, and far too costly for developing countries despite the public relations campaigns by vendors. Further, renewables are not able to provide the consistent baseload of power that are guaranteed with fossil fuels (Fig. 2.1). There is also no sense in rehashing all the technical climate change issues that have been passed on or ignored by respective politicians…everywhere. The problems with global warming and its causation are now well understood by everyone, including fossil-fuel companies and even world militaries. It is no longer disputable science, but indisputable reality. Bill McKibben’s 2012 seminal article “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” presciently displays the climate change problem in very good layspeak, his yardsticks (350 ppm, 2 degrees Celcius, 565 gigatons, etc.) and the repercussions of inaction are quite clear. Simply too much carbon burning overwhelms the planets natural capacity for CO2 absorption. While the science is indisputable, the economics not so much. As with pouring more and more sugar into a glass of hot water in that an overload eventually will not dissolve, a continuing buildup of CO2 expands in the atmosphere, distorting the earth’s natural absorption and cooling processes, and wreaking havoc with weather patterns. The science, again, is indisputable, yet the fossil fuel band plays on. The emotional appeals featuring polar bears, melting Alpine glaciers, submerged islands in the Pacific, or flooded New York City streets are well meaning, but the facts are already registered. It is politicians locked in their Westphalian systems of power and money refusing to act in unison. Action will also require wholesale changes in everyone’s energy consumption. Simply put, we’re not there yet. There is no sense in discussing renewables ad nauseum either, because their front-end costs, without large subsidies are simply too expensive for most of the developing world to power their grids. Coal is cheaper and plentiful, as is natural gas, which is also a fossil fuel, despite politically correct energy markets presenting it as a ‘transition energy’ source, between fossil fuels and renewables. Developing countries will use their Westphalian exclusivity to default every time, as they have before, and will continue to do so. To put this into perspective, consider global events: Ford Motor company is announcing record sales of SUVs in the US, Toyota is expanding into Africa, China is going to bring several hundred coal-fired plants online in the next 20 years, and in all Asia as part of its financing in its new “Asian Infrastructure Development Bank”, Indonesia is expanding huge airports to accommodate more traveler’s in its huge archipelago, Exxon discovers a huge oil field off Guyana’s coast, Brasil hopes that its new “pre-salt” deep sea oil strike developed with the Norwegian oil giant, Statoil will power its corrupt and weak economy ahead, BP has found new oil in the Atlantic off North Africa, Argentina seeks to develop shale oil in the west of its country, the Kurds in Northern Iraq hope to form a new nation financed with access to vast oil deposits, South Africa wants to turn its vast coal reserves into synthetic oil to reduce imports, Australia hopes to regain economic traction when the price of commodity resources (i.e., coal) allow it to begin profitable exporting again, Canada and its leader, Justin Trudeau, hopes to monetize the tarsands in Alberta for a more prosperous nation. Kazakhstan seeks to be the oil conduit between Europe and China. Saudi Arabia privatizes part of its behemoth Saudi Aramco to finance economic diversification, but still leaves the House of Saud firmly in power. Nigeria looks for better social harmony once oil prices rebound. It becomes all about fossil fuels. The US Permian Basin in Texas seeks new shale discoveries. Venezuela hopes to use its oil reserves to salvage its economy again once Maduro goes. Laos, Burma and Cambodia, after years of war and calamity seek exploration in their hinterlands for undiscovered oil and gas deposits. Trade deals such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), United States– Mexico–Canada Free Trade Agreement (USMCA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) mention little if anything about climate change, and even have clauses that allow corporations to sue the governments of the host countries if laws are later passed that impact their businesses reliance on fossil fuels, such as the Canadian corporation TransCanada suing the US over rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline under then-President Barrack Obama in 2014. Hopes, dreams, economies, investments and politics of so many Westphalian nations are pinned on oil and gas, which in turn becomes the linchpin of all Westphalian finance, as we will discuss later, even named inasmuch in the form of ‘sovereign bonds’. The fossilfuel list goes on and on. Does the reader really get the picture? This is a hopeless addiction.

The US has spent several trillion dollars over the past two decades in the Middle East, North Africa and West Asia. US interventions, from Libya, South Sudan and Somalia across to Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, have resulted in enormous costs and dubious advances. The results are meager except in terms of suffering. The US has spread chaos and destruction throughout Libya and Syria but failed to incorporate either into an enlarged empire. The Middle Eastern wars, initiated at the behest of Israel, have rewarded Tel Aviv with a sense of invulnerability and a thirst for more while multiplying and unifying US adversaries. Empires are not effectively enlarged through alliances with armed tribal, sectarian and separatist organizations. Empires allied with disparate, fractured and self-aggrandizing entities do not expand or strengthen their global power. The US has waged war against Libya and lost the political leverage and economic resources it enjoyed during the Gaddafi regime. It intervened in Somalia, South Sudan and Syria and gained enclaves of warring, self-serving ‘separatists’ and subsidized mercenaries. The war in Afghanistan, the longest in US history, is an unmitigated military disaster. After seventeen years of warfare and occupation, the US is holed up in the walled enclaves of the capital, Kabul. Meanwhile, the puppet regime feeds on multi-billion-dollar monthly subsidies. Iraq is a ‘shared’ imperial outpost—the result of fifteen years of military intervention. Kurdish clients, Sunni-Saudi warlords, Shia militia, Baghdad kleptocrats and US contractor-mercenaries compete for control and a larger piece of the pillage. Every square meter of contested territory has cost the US 500 million dollars and scores of casualties. Iran remains forever under threat but retains its independence outside of the US-Saudi-Israeli orbit. The US geo-political map has been reduced to dubious alliances with Saudi Arabia and its micro-clients among the Emirate statelets—which are constantly fighting among themselves—and Israel, the ‘client’ that openly revels in leading its patron by the nose! Compared to the period before the turn of the millennium, the US imperial map has shrunk and faces further retrenchment. The US-NATO-EU Map Russia has reduced and challenged the US pursuit of a unipolar global empire following the recovery of its sovereignty and economic growth after the disaster of the 1990s. With the ascent of President Putin, the US-EU empire lost their biggest and most lucrative client and source of naked pillage. Nevertheless, the US retains its political clients in the Baltic, the Balkans and Eastern and Central European regimes. However, these clients are unruly and often eager to confront a nuclear-armed Russia, confident that US-NATO will intervene, in spite of the probability of being vaporized in a nuclear Armageddon. Washington’s efforts to recapture Russia and return it to vassalage have failed. Out of frustration Washington has resorted to a growing series of failed provocations and conflicts—between the US and the EU, within the US between Trump and the Democrats, and among the warlords controlling the Trump cabinet. Germany has continued lucrative trade ties with Russia, despite US sanctions, underscoring the decline in US power to dictate policy to the European Union. The Democratic Party and the ultra-militaristic Clinton faction remained pathologically nostalgic for a return to the 1990s’ Golden Age of Pillage (before Putin). Clinton’s faction was fixated on the politics of revanchism. As a result they vigorously fought against candidate Donald Trump’s campaign promises to pursue a new realistic understanding with Russia. The ‘Russiagate’ investigation is not merely a domestic electoral squabble led by hysterical ‘liberals’. What is at stake is nothing less than a profound conflict over the remaking of the US global map. Trump recognized and accepted the re-emergence of Russia as a global power to be ‘contained’, while the Democrats campaigned to roll back reality, overthrow Putin and return to the robber baron orgies of the Clinton years. As a result of this ongoing strategic conflict, Washington is unable to develop a coherent global strategy, which in turn has further weakened US influence in the EU in Europe and elsewhere. Nevertheless, the intense Democratic onslaught against Trump’s initial foreign policy pronouncements regarding Russia succeeded in destroying his ‘pivot to realism’ and facilitated the rise of a fanatical militaristic faction within his cabinet, which intensified the anti-Russia policies of Clintonite Democrats. In less than a year, all of Trump’s realist advisers and cabinet members were purged and replaced by militarists. Their hard-core confrontational anti-Russia policy has become the platform for launching a global military strategy based on vast increases in military spending, demands that EU nations increase their military budgets, and open opposition to an EU-centered military alliance, such as the one recently proposed by French president Emmanuel Macron. Despite President Trump’s campaign promises to ‘pull back’, the US has re-entered Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria in a big way. The Trump shift from global containment and realism to rollback and aggression against Russia and China has failed to secure a positive response from either past or present allies. China has increased economic ties with the EU. Russia and the EU share strategic gas and oil trade ties. Domestically, the US military budget deepens the fiscal deficit and drastically threatens social spending. This creates a scenario of increasing US isolation, its futile aggression pitched against a dynamic and changing world. Conclusion The Trump remaking of the global empire has had uneven results, which are mostly negative from a strategic viewpoint. The circumstances leading to new clients in Latin America is significant but has been more than countered by retreat in Asia, divisions in Europe, turmoil domestically and strategic incoherence. Remaking global empires requires realism—the recognition of new power alignments, accommodation with allies and, above all, domestic political stability balancing economic interests and military commitments. The key shift from realism toward a recovered Russia to militarization and confrontation has precipitated the breakdown of the US as a unified coherent leader of a global empire. The US embraces prolonged losing wars in peripheral regions alongside destructive trade wars in strategic regions. It has budgeted vast sums on nonproductive activities while impoverishing state and local governments via sweeping tax ‘reforms’ that favor oligarchs. Global remapping now involves a volatile and impulsive US-driven empire incapable of succeeding, while emerging powers are immersed in regional power grabs. There is no longer a coherent imperial empire controlling the fate of the globe. We live in a world of political maps centered on regional powers and unruly clients, while incompetent, gossip-mongering politicians in Washington compete with an arrogant, benighted President Trump and his fractured regime.

Let us first take the case of wars. It is true that after the Second World War, there has not been any major armed conflict between the advanced capitalist countries. However, there have been very serious military interventions in countries like Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya to name just a few. Wikipedia lists more than 40 armed conflicts in which the US army participated since the Second World War.30 In all these military aggressions, the entire advanced capitalist countries have acted as a single block under the leadership of the United States. In all these cases, the attack was against a developing country. This essentially shows that the muting of intra-imperialist rivalry of Lenin’s time has brought in an alliance of the imperialist bloc under the leadership of the United States. The alliance between the advanced capitalist countries does not end there. International multi-lateral bodies like the World Bank, IMF, WTO or the UNPCCC have witnessed how developed countries act as a block and try and out-manoeuvre developing countries to maintain their advantageous position in the world economy. These continuing wars waged against the third world countries and the economic bargaining against the developing countries in different forums, essentially show how, even today, there exists conflict in the world arena; but the geography of that conflict has changed from being intra-imperialist to being conflict between the advanced capitalist countries and the developing countries. Theorising global conflicts today In an earlier era, within the premise of Marxist theories, there was this idea that the bourgeoisie of the erstwhile colonies were nationalist in nature or compradors. By nationalist bourgeoisie, it was meant that the ruling classes of these countries were in conflict with imperialism and wanted capitalist development in the domestic economy which imperialism thwarted. The other idea was that in some countries the ruling classes were completely subservient to global metropolitan capital and acted as agents of imperialism. Therefore, the earlier theories predicted a conflict between nationalist bourgeoisie and imperialism and collaboration between comprador bourgeoisie and imperialism. Our point is that both these characterisations have become irrelevant and cannot explain the conflicts of the current era. There is no doubt that the bourgeoisie in the third world countries, particularly in BRIC, have become immensely powerful since the policies of globalisation have been adopted. All indicators in terms of the total assets, wealth, profits and so on of the big companies in these countries suggest their increasing strength. It is also the case that some of these companies have become global players in the world market. There exists a complex relationship between the bourgeoisie of these countries and imperialism. On the one hand, we have certain bourgeoisie coming into the ranks of the global players. This is happening through a process of enrichment of the ruling classes through the policies of reforms and globalisation itself, or through its alliance with global finance capital. However, as has been argued above, the vast masses of people remain detached from these capitalist processes and remain impoverished. This co-option of the bourgeoisie of the third world as junior partners of imperialism is a feature of today’s world conjuncture. But in fulfilling the global aspirations of these ruling classes, conflicts arise between metropolitan capital and these bourgeoisies. These conflicts are fundamentally different from the times of colonialism. During colonialism, the big bourgeoisie was essentially fighting to implement capitalism under its own leadership in countries like India. However, in order to mobilise the masses for independence, certain demands of the people, like land reforms, were incorporated into the demands of the freedom struggle and implemented to some degree after independence. Moreover, the bourgeoisie of the newly independent countries tried to pursue a developmental path autonomous to imperialism by following a planning process in the domestic economy. This anti-imperialist stance of the bourgeoisie was hailed as being nationalist, and indeed, the processes of decolonisation helped improve the lives of the people to some extent. But today’s conflicts with imperialism have got no such pro-people content. It is aimed simply at maintaining the global reach of the bourgeoisie. That global reach has not resulted in any improvement of the working people, as has been enumerated above. Hence, the bourgeoisie cannot be termed as nationalistic any more, in the sense that class interests are not aligned with the interests of workers, farmers or common people in its nation-state. This does not mean that the bourgeoisie of these countries have become compradors. Comprador bourgeoisie do not have any production base and essentially live off commissions from the sales of the metropolitan bourgeoisie. But as has been repeatedly argued, today’s third world bourgeoisie, particularly BRIC, are very powerful and have a global production base. In other words, in order to characterise the current conjuncture, we need to do away with these terms which were applicable for a conjuncture which is long past. Therefore, we come back to the earlier assertion that while it is true that the intra-imperialist rivalry of Lenin’s period has come to an end, contradictions in the realm of global political or geo-political economy has not become a thing of the past. Currently, the contradiction between BRIC and US-led advanced capitalist countries are coming to the fore. We have seen repeatedly how BRIC, as a block, has taken contrary positions to those of the United States or G7 in international forums like the UN or UNPCCC. Moreover, India and particularly China, because of its growth, is exerting a tremendous demand on the energy resources of the world. China’s forays into Latin America and Africa are manifestations of that. Here, conflict between the United States or advanced capitalist countries with China is bound to arise. The conflict in Syria and recently in Ukraine show that this conflict is moving into the domain of military or strategic conflicts, beyond purely economic contradictions between the upcoming bourgeoisie of BRIC and that of advanced capitalism.

The exponential rise of far-right groups and other hate-mongering organizations in the West, especially in the United States, has been a cause for alarm among various stakeholders, particularly those at the receiving end. A source gives the figure at above 1,000 such organizations in the US alone (New York Times, 2019). They are notably well financed, highly interconnected and have a strong presence in the internet as well as influence on the mainstream media. Prominent Islamophobic purveyors in the United States include individuals and organizations like Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Steven Emerson, Frank Gaffney, Pamela Geller, Jihad Watch, Act! For America, Middle East Forum, American Freedom Defence Initiative, Center for Security Policy, Clarion project, Center for the Study of Political Islam and the David Horowitz Freedom Center (Carter Centre, 2017; Council on American-Islamic Relations & , 2016; Center for American Progress, 2011). While in the UK they include the English Defence League, Britain First, National Action, No Shariah Here, among others (Perocco, 2018; Allen 2011, 2017), who partake not only in political rallies but organize protests against the building of mosques, and stir up citizens about supposedly creeping Shariah and Jihad, among other things. Their xenophobic aura becomes manifest in their targeting immigrant communities, particularly Muslims, and sustained attack on immigration/multicultural policies under the pretext of national security and purity, identity protection, nationalism etc. They do not openly call for violence against Muslims but the persistent demonization arguably triggers people with violent impulses to act thus (at least Anders Breivik, the Norwegian white supremacist who killed 77 people in July 2011 mentioned Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller more than 170 times in his 1,500-page manifesto, describing them as experts on Islamic mission in the West [Center for American Progress, 2011], while the Christchurch far-right attacker, Brenton Tarrant, who killed 50 Muslims while they were praying in mosques in New Zealand, showered praise on Trump as "a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose" [Aljazeera March 16, 2019]). Such groups are more widely spread in the United States because of the extraordinary privilege and protection available under the First Amendment. Simon Boazman (2018) of the Aljazeera Investigative Unit has recently traced the origin and development of such Islamophobic organizations as Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch, Pamela Geller's American Freedom Defence Initiative, Brigitte Gabriel's Act! For America, Frank Geffney's Center for Security & Policy, and Daniel Pipes' Campus Watch, their missions and connection with members of Trump's administration, their strategies of penetrating (social) media, policy environment and law enforcement agencies, and most importantly their sources of funding. These groups get millions of dollars annually as donation from such foundations as the Lynde and Harry Foundation, Jewish Community Federation of Sans Francisco, The Peninsular Marin & Sonoma Counties, Jewish Community of Los Angeles, Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago, among others. "Almost 80% of the donors," says Boazman (2018), "have vocally or financially supported causes that promote the state of Israel." According to a 2016 report released by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and University of , Berkeley, Centre for Race and Gender, 33 of these organizations received at least $205,838,077 between 2008 and 2013. The Center for American Progress, on the other hand, revealed that seven of such donor foundations spent $42.6 million between 2001 and 2009 on spreading Islamophobic rhetoric in the US alone (Considine, 2017). According to Saylor (2014), the David Horowitz Freedom Center received $488,953 in 2011 alone, while Brigitte Gabriel's Act! For America witnessed a hike in donations from $87,300 in 2010 to $156,473 in 2011. While Boazman's documentary exposed a document in which Daniel Pipes requested $120,000 for his Campus Watch to counter the Muslim Students Association's voice and activities, Saylor's (2014) investigation noted his Middle East Forum's disbursement of funds of $1,242,000 to Steve Emerson's Investigative Project on Terrorism between 2009 and 2010 and $450,000 to Yagal Carmon's Middle East Media Research Institute within the same period of time, among several others. On the whole the Council on American-Islamic Relations and University of California's (2016) investigation acknowledged the existence of 33 well-funded groups for the spread of antipathy and prejudice against Muslims, and 41 foundations fun-neling funds to the cause. But the top seven of the donor groups, according to Center for American Progress (2011), remain: 1) Donors Capital Fund, 2) Richard Mellon Scaife foundations, 3) Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, 4) Newton D. & Rochelle F. Becker foundations and charitable trust, 5) Russell Berrie Foundation, 6) Anchorage Charitable Fund and William Rossenwald Family Fund, and 7) Fairbrook Foundation. The primary objective of this movement is to galvanize public sentiment against Muslims so that they can be pariahs in the American public sphere. The pervasiveness of fear and hatred toward them would ultimately drown or suppress the voices of American, nay Western Muslims, from canvassing for Palestinian rights (Carter Center, 2017).

American Muslim diaspora are themselves mistreated and discriminated against; they are not in a strong position, especially if they are at airports, travelling or socializing in a different milieu. Tellingly, Muslim parents hardly do they report any racist or Islamophobic acts to the police either because they want to protect their children or because they do not want the situation to aggravate more. According to the vanguards of Islamophobia Studies, Islamophobia presumably feeds off the ISIS rhetoric, and it helps the proponents of  and extremism by fueling their narrative against the West. While propagating Muslim's immigration and Islam's expansion as dangerous ideologies not only do the Islamophobes create and manufacture myths about the Muslim immigrants, but they also direct  through the formation of ample epistemologies that excludes and never includes people. No wonder then to find horrendous phrases evoking the social exclusion of Muslims such as "terrorist savages" and "mongrels" (Foreign Policy, June 14, 2016), "rabid dogs" and "rattlesnakes" (The Washington Post, November 21, 2015), or even "suicide bombers" and "misogynists" (The New York Times, August 2, 2016), widely circulating among some media actors, political activists and even ordinary people. The Muslim diaspora are arguably the most despised, targeted and criticized groups. They are "the wretched of the earth," to borrow Fanon's (1925-1961) phraseology; their language, and so are their faith and culture, are constantly ridiculed and demonized. They feel themselves obliged to cope with innumerable cases of humiliation, insults, physical and verbal onslaught. Some years ago Jews underwent the same experience. Marcus assumes that "discrimination against the Jews is a phenomenon nearly as old as . At different times and places, it has taken different forms and varied in intensity (Marcus 1983, 2012). Although their case is dissimilar to Jews, Muslims appear to be enduring considerable afflictions and an unpretending persecution. In Myanmar, which is Buddhist majoritarian, the Muslim minority are sometimes denied  and other rights like their Buddhist counterparts. They are facing discrimination and violence, yet this state of affair is hardly noted or covered by global media. Muslim Uyghurs' oppression and unending sufferings in Xinjiang are seldom documented or reported on. They have in turn sustained times of fear, violence and repression owing to the  government's exaggerated crackdown on terrorism and religious extremism. If Muslims, in the United States of America and Europe, or even in Burma, China and other parts of the globe, do not conform to and abide by the codes and conventions (or even values) of the host land, and if they do not play the political game correctly, or if they attempt to alter the rules and regulations, they will be rejected, prejudiced and discriminated against. This is more or less identical to the very famous Japanese "anime" Yu-Gi-Oh, being now a worldwide phenomenon among youngsters. That means if one aspires to be affiliated to the Yu-Gi-Oh and be considered a member and a player, they must meet what Gee (1999) has termed a "social good." (3) If they get accepted "win"--the game--they gain a social good, and if they do not get fully accepted--"lose" the game--they lose a social good. And so long as racism is exercised against Muslims and hatred is enacted upon them, they have not earned any social good yet, for they might be expected to turn over their religious suit to have that prerogative. The situation of Muslim diaspora in Europe is sometimes more disastrous because they seem to face deep-seated discrimination in education, housing and employment. Irrespective of the fact that they were born in Europe, these Muslim subjects experience different traumas of social exclusion, hatred and xenophobia. The repetitious questions addressed, for example, to this Dutch Muslim woman have one point in common: Muslim women are unwelcome in Europe like their male partners. "A question I have heard many times is, 'When are you going back?'" a Dutch Muslim woman said in a news report to Reuters. "I say, 'I was born in Rotterdam, so where would I go?' It's a really painful question and makes you feel like a foreigner" (The New York Times, December 19, 2016).

Another debate surrounding Islamophobia is its consideration as racism like anti-Semitism. Some stakeholders resist its referral as racism because racism essentially deals with immutable, innate features such as skin color, whereas religion can be subject to change. One can move from one to another. Other interlocutors consider this viewpoint as limited in conceptualizing racism due to its multifacetedness and dynamism. In other words, it is not exclusively biological--there is cultural racism too. The ultimate determinant here is culture, to which religion is subsumable. Because of common religious practices/markers and similar physical features, Muslims, especially those from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Algeria, are often considered as an ethnic entity in most Western countries. That is why the spycams of the War on Terror and intelligence agencies target their homes more; they are stopped and searched by police on the street more; they are investigated at airports more etc (Bazian, 2018; Nazroo & Becare, 2017; Saeed, 2007; Sarwar & Raj, 2016; Alexander, 2017). Furthermore, Meer and Modood (2009) noted that what biological racism pundits miss is the fact that one has no choice in regard the religion of the family or country one is born into. Often orchestrated by far-right groups, this new form of racism saunters into the public sphere under the veneer of protecting national identity (English, white, Christian) and countering the negative effects of immigrant culture on the "superior culture"--here crime is often conflated with race (Perocco, 2018). Statistics about the level of antipathy against Muslims in both Europe and America are staggering and scary. A 2008 poll by Pew Research Center reveals that virtually one in every four Britons has a negative feeling about Muslims and Islam (see Pew (2008)). A follow-up survey by the same Center in 2016 found the pervasiveness of such feeling across Europe--where specifically 72% of Hungarian, 69% of Italian and 66% of Polish respondents revealed antipathy towards Muslims and Islam (see Pew (2016)). The picture is similar in the United States (see Pew (2017)). After 9/11, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia noticed a hike in violence and discrimination towards Muslims (Allen & Nielson, 2002). Specifically, Allen (2001, 2004) recounts how Muslim women were thrown off a moving bus or denied boarding, spat on and their hijabs torn publicly, or verbally assaulted on account of their faith in such countries as Germany, Italy, Denmark and the UK. Hasan (2015), on the other hand, discusses how Muslim men were repeatedly denied job and educational opportunities, particularly in Germany and France, while Power (2008) details their ordeals in workplaces, especially in France and Spain. The net effect is that Muslims become social anathema and pariah. Their participation in political space is consequently winnowed, if not blocked completely. On this basis, Dekker and van der Noll (2009) observed that Muslims generally have high poverty levels, below average education, live in poorer areas of towns and cities, are overrepresented in low-wage jobs and have little access to standard healthcare. They share these situations with other minority communities such as blacks, Irish, Hindus, Boers and Latinos (Fabregat & Kperogi, 2018; Halliday, 1993). However, what makes Muslims stand out according to Perroco (2018), is that theirs "is the deepest, most acute and widely spread form of racism" (p. 26); in the words of Nazroo and Becare (2017, p. 31), they "are repeatedly described as the social group most frequently discriminated against." The cumulative effects of all this bears on their mental and physical health (Nazroo & Becare, 2017). The duo's research and those of their peers found that "chronic exposure to everyday racial discrimination is associated with poor sleep, coronary artery calcification and hormonal stress responses such as altered diurnal cortisol patterns and a higher cortisol awakening response" (Nazroo & Becare, 2017, p. 32). When all these are taken into cognizance, in addition to stringent policies targeting Muslim communities, the chances of their vulnerability to radicalization are very high (Dekker & van der Noll, 2009). During the BBC program (of February 14, 2019) "Salman Rushdie radicalized my generation," Alyas Karmani, among others, recollected how social rejection by his white liberal friends following their disgust over the fatwa against Rushdie, had pushed his journey to the fringed radical politics of "Islamic" identity. In other words, there is nexus, in practice, between the thesis of frustration-aggression theory and the cyclic interaction of structural and physical forms of violence.

The right to self-determination of Muslims to define Islam, the questions of who can speak for Islam connect to this economic agenda of globalization and monopoly capitalism. Defining Islam defines the ontological reality of human beings who are Muslim, the nature of political organization, and the questions of the role and definition of religions. Media creations of Islam and the work of the West in religion-building situate themselves in the discourses of securitization, the control and regulation of fossil fuels, particularly oil, and impede the future of the global work to fight climate change and create a new environmentalism. Dehumanization is at the heart of racism and capitalism (Quijano, 2000). Racism assumes that some people are less human than others based on their racial or ethnic identity. Capitalism assumes that the treatment of some people as less human than others, and the denial of their human rights, as a result, is an acceptable form of social organization. Grosfuguel (2016) states: The people classified above the line of the human are recognized socially in their humanity as human beings and, thus, enjoy access to rights (human rights, civil rights, women rights and/or labor rights), material resources, and social recognition of their subjectivities, identities, epistemologies, and spiritualities. The people below the line of the human are considered subhuman or non-human; that is, their humanity is questioned and, as such, negated (p. 10) It is also possible to define Islamophobia as a form of racism. Muslims and Muslimness have become racialized categories as a result of the ongoing persecution of Muslims globally. Racialized categories draw the line of the human to exclude Muslims. The majority of EuroUS countries have exploited oil-rich economies and economies rich in natural resources and justified this exploitation with racism (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018) and Islamophobia. Lenin called this “parasitic capitalism” (Lenin, 1916) and predicted its advance in human culture at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Global climate change has been called the single greatest threat to human civilization. It threatens to kill or displace millions or even billions of people and will irrevocably change the lives of practically every human being on the planet. This topic has deservedly received much critical attention. The effects of imperialism and colonialism on climate change, however, is a topic that has not received adequate scrutiny. As Amitav Ghosh (2016) states: “[i]n accounts of the Anthropocene, and of the present climate crisis, capitalism is very often the pivot on which the narrative turns…. However, I believe that this narrative often overlooks an aspect of the Anthropocene that is of equal importance: empire and imperialism” (p. 87). This lack of attention is not restricted to just environmental critics, as Rob Nixon (2011) points out in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, “postcolonial literary critics had, in turn, shown scant interest in environmental concerns” (p. 236). Dating back to the rise of coal during the Industrial Revolution, empire has been a significant factor in the rise of fossil fuels. This is no less true today as, for example, petro-imperialism remains a contributing factor in American foreign policy from Venezuela in Latin America to the Middle East. These complicated connections between conservation and empire also make it difficult to reconcile the disparate fields of ecocriticism and postcolonial studies. This paper will build on the work of Amitav Ghosh, Rob Nixon, Naomi Klein, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley to discuss how empire and imperialism have contributed to and continue to shape the ever-looming threat of climate crisis. Global climate change reinforces disparate economic, social, and racial conditions that developed, fostered, and thrived throughout the long history of colonization, inscribing climate change as a new, slow form of imperialism that is retracing the pathways that colonialism and globalism have already formed. Ultimately, it may only be by considering climate change through a postcolonial lens and utilizing indigenous resistance that the damage of this new form of climate imperialism can be halted. There has already been significant work done to bridge the fields of ecocriticism and postcolonialism. In the introduction to their edited collected, DeLoughrey and Handley (2011) argue for a “sustained dialogue…between postcolonial and ecocritical studies” (p. 24) and go on to highlight several reasons why these fields have been kept disparate and the necessity for bringing them together. They contend that: “an ecological frame is vital to understanding how geography has been and still is radically altered by colonialism”; that postcolonialists are adept at “disentangling the hierarchies” formed through colonial binarism; furthermore that postcolonial studies prioritizes sustainability and “the health of the physical world”; and that “the field of postcolonial studies has long been engaged with questions of agency and representation of the nonspeaking or subaltern subject” (DeLoughrey & Handley, 2011, pp. 24-25). Chakrabarty (2012) expands upon these arguments to claim that postcolonialism complicates the configuration of the Anthropocene “of humans as constitutively one — a species, a collectivity whose commitment to fossil fuel based, energy-consuming civilization is now a threat to that civilization itself” to include “the contingency of individual human experience; belonging at once to differently-scaled histories of the planet, of life and species, and of human societies” (p. 2, 14). This is significant because anthropological differences necessitate deconstructing humanity into groups with varying political, economic, and social power, especially given “the uneven impacts of climate change” (Chakrabarty, 2012, p.14). Chakrabarty’s argument that within the study of global climate change humanity cannot be subsumed into a monolithic group lays the theoretical framework for this article. Different cultural groups have contributed to ecological destruction to varying degrees and the impact of climate change will indeed be distributed unevenly. However, I am further arguing for the necessity of postcolonial and anticolonial work within any study of climate change because its impacts will be distributed not just unequally, but in a direct echoing of colonial pathways. Global climate change is a form of slow violence. Slow violence is “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon, 2011, p. 2). This includes the current climate crisis due to “the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes” which rank among the examples of slow violence (Nixon, 2011, p. 2). What separates slow violence from other forms of violence is that it "is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (Nixon, 2011, p. 2). It becomes imperative to view climate change in these parameters when you consider the already recognized victims of climate change: Obviously, elsewhere in the world there are already victims of climate change. 300,000 deaths according to the U.N. 300,000 people in the Horn of Africa, in Bangladesh, India, Vietnam... But those deaths are due to the exacerbation of already existing problems. Drought, malnutrition, floods. Nothing seemingly 'climatic.' Furthermore, the victims of climate change die slowly, one after another—no drama, no media coverage—scattered over the whole year over the whole planet. If only they had the good sense all to die on the same day, like the victims of the 2004 tsunami. That would catch our attention. Those everyday deaths don't have the same weight as a large death toll on a single day... Little lives. In little boxes. And we don't notice a thing. (Squarzoni, 2014, pp. 250-1) Squarzoni is describing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people but is supremely concerned with the fact that these deaths are taking place on a temporal scale that is too long for most of us to adequately grasp. If the deaths were instantaneous, they would become the spectacle that marks traditional forms of violence. However, these first victims of climate change are the victims of a slow violence, which marks them as invisible. Despite the temporal differences between a quick violence, like military conflicts and forms of enslavement typical of colonization, and the slow violence of allowing the causes of global climate change to go largely unchallenged, climate change will nevertheless follow the same route and processes of imperialism.

The ‘war on terror’ dispositif () gains its State-centric legitimacy in the politico-media complex via a specific costly association (to adapt Freud), the metonymic displacement: terrorists → Muslims (Beshara, 2018a). This dangerous displacement functions like an unconscious mantra, or a “point de capiton” (, p. 681, Italics in original), in the symbolic field. The mantra’s racist logic is best captured in the following falsism espoused by many conservatives in the United States: Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims. The displacement (terrorists → Muslims), and accompanying conflation (Muslims = Arabs), is foundational to the binarism of the ‘war on terror’ discourse, which in turn positions postcolonial subjects in a manifest way as either ‘counterterrorists’ (us) or ‘terrorists’ (them). In Bush II’s () infamous words, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” The rhetoric of ‘us vs. them’ is not a logical paradox, according to , since for him colonialism “is precisely the organization of a Manichaean world, of a compartmentalized world” (p. 43). Even though the Manichean logic of “just war theory” can be easily deconstructed using Greimas and Rastier’s (1968) semiotic square, the painful truth is that binarism, in general is a foundational structure in any symbolic universe. Therefore, a substantial segment of the Euro-American public accepts the implicit Manichaeism of the ‘war on terror’ discourse as a commonsensical support for the “clash of civilizations” () myth or grand narrative. When  writes, “The colonial world is a Manichaean world” (p. 6), he means that even (and especially) scholar–activists who are occupying the ivory towers of academia are not living in a safe postcolonial space, but rather they, too, occupy a position in a neocolonial world. Given the objective reality of coloniality, it is our moral task as radical humanists to decolonize both latent and manifest Islamophobic knowledge (Bazian, 2014) by deconstructing the binarist, orientalist archive at its foundation (). The aim of our decolonization is the transformation of IICT into a counterhegemonic project: a transmodern/decolonial alternative. The logic of Manichaeism is not the logic of différance. Beyond a “play of difference” (, p. 133) between signs, the logic of Manichaenism is the logic of racism—“a global hierarchy of human superiority and inferiority” (Grosfoguel, Oso, & Christou, 2015, p. 636). That is why  argues that its logical conclusion is the dehumanization of the colonized subject (p. 7)—and by extension, the dehumanization of oppressors, too (). Having said that, let us keep in mind not only the West–East dialectic of knowledge (i.e., Orientalism) but also the North–South dialectic of power (i.e., Capitalism). Since Orientalism is a critical facilitator of a dehumanizing colonial discourse, the explosion of the binarist rhetoric/logic of the ‘war on terror’ discourse (e.g., the metonymic displacement: terrorists → Muslims) is the key to resisting everyday Islamophobia. I must add, however, that resistance to everyday Islamophobia must come from Muslims first and their allies second because “the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed [is] to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well” (, p. 44). Furthermore, there are at least two latent subject-positions that are not accounted for, but which are surprisingly afforded by the ‘war on terror’ discourse: namely, ‘not-counterterrorist’ and ‘not-terrorist.’ These two latent subject-positions are antiterrorist because they question and challenge the State-centric definition of ‘terrorism’ as political violence by nonstate actors against civilians. Antiterrorism expands the definition of terrorism to political violence by nonstate actors or the State against civilians (), which by implication allows for the possibility of viewing ‘counterterrorism’ as state terrorism—as  has been arguing for years regarding ‘humanitarian’ interventionism. Similarly,  distinguishes between humanitarianism and humanism when he writes: “The pedagogy of the oppressed, animated by authentic, humanist (not humanitarian) generosity, presents itself as a pedagogy of humankind” (p. 54, Italics added).

In the field of political science, rational choice theory often guides our understanding of political violence. In government institutions, the logic of security dictates all manner of invasive action against citizens and foreigners alike (e.g., NSA). Both logics suffer from an utter neglect of context. All too often, violent political events are dehistoricized, appearing as spontaneous psychoses of the body politic whose symptoms could be treated given the proper level of government and social intervention. The logics that emerge from rational choice theory and the security discourse depend upon both an abstraction and a normalization of social objects. As such, they work to cover-over histories and legacies that exert substantial influence on the subjectivities of the social objects they seek to manage. Our primary concern, I shall argue, should be centered on the legacies of colonialism and liberalism that continue to exert influence on our political projects. These are background conditions that too often evade our scrutiny despite their importance in framing our conventional understanding of political events. The discourses that both promote and oppose Islamophobia and antiSemitism potentially serve the projects of Western imperialism, neo-colonialism, and ethnocentrism when they are uncritically reproduced. They reveal a desperate attempt to demarcate the space between “us” and “them,” to reproduce a Cartesian division of the social world that could guide our rational politics by simplifying our interactions along functionalist lines (Walker 1992). The threat of Islam (or the threat to secular society) in France is counteracted by la€ıcite, a policy that affirms a pure French national identity at the same time as it reveals (through a negative relation) the heterodox identity of the French citizenry that must be marginalized. In America, it is not uncommon to hear the demand placed on the Muslim community to monitor their members in order to allay the fears of violent manifestations of radical Islam on Main Street. It is taken for granted that an individual who might identify as Muslim is thereby held accountable for all other varied forms of Muslim identity. Similarly, the recent violence against Jewish communities in Europe appears to be guided by the presumptive complicity of all Jews for the violence perpetrated by the Israeli government. All these concerns have developed alongside the recent history of American and European military intervention and coercions in the “Muslim world.” In Israel, the threat of an emerging fifth column, and the so-called demographic time bomb birthed from Palestinian wombs, is invoked while the occupation and colonialist roots of the state are actively marginalized in public and academic discourse. The U.S. war on terror continues under the guise of a security logic at the same time as it disavows, through silence, the violent legacy of Western hegemony over the Middle East.

Beyond genuine national security threats, countries across the world capitalized on the conflation of Islam with terrorism to serve discrete national interests. This American War on Terror furnished nations with license, and more importantly, a policing template and language to profile and persecute their Muslim minority populations. American Islamophobia,14 buoyed by swift state action including the War in Afghanistan and the USA PATRIOT Act, manifested in a surge of vigilante violence against Muslims and “Muslim-looking” groups15 and had global impact.16 This American Islamophobia was exported by way of policy and propaganda around the world, as surveillance of Muslim communities, enabled by the PATRIOT Act domestically, was emulated abroad, restrictions on Muslim immigration were more closely policed, and most fundamentally, states adopted the fundamental War on Terror baseline that Muslim identity was presumptive, and predictive, of terrorism.17 This new global crusade allowed other states to intensify policing and persecution of their Muslim populations, and in some instances, advance ethnic cleansing campaigns against indigenous Muslim groups. Using India and China as case studies, this Article examines the way that this new crusade diffused into an interconnected constellation of domestic campaigns whereby governments adopted the presumptions and conceptual and strategic frameworks of American Islamophobia to punish their Muslim populations.18 These nations, following in the footsteps of the American architects of the War on Terror, used counterterrorism as both an excuse and an expedient to advance desired political objectives. Part I of this Article theorizes the legal and discursive dimensions of Islamophobia, summarizing the framework I established in previous scholarship. Part II analyzes how the War on Terror, and the political demonization of Muslims, is strategically wielded by governmental regimes to advance political interests. In turn, this Article clarifies that Islamophobia is not exclusively rooted in irrational fear or bigotry, but is also a tool rationally deployed by governments to shore up political might and economic gain. Finally, Part III dissects how the American War on Terror has been adopted and remade by the Chinese government to perpetuate the ethnic cleansing of indigenous Uighur Muslims, and blended with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s militant Hindu nationalism to crack down on the approximately 200 million Muslims in India.19

Orientalists divided the globe into a dualistic geography of East and West. In the European colonial era, the East or “the Orient” was understood to encompass half the world: Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. The locus of “the West” was Western Europe, for while “the New World” was growing in economic and geopolitical prowess, Great Britain and France remained the greatest global and imperial powers of this era. Said describes Orientalism as “an imaginative geography,” which has always had less to do with the Orient itself than with fashioning “our world” (the West) by normalizing and naturalizing white European domination. Eighteenth and nineteenth century Orientalists served colonial administrations by generating a “new awareness of the Orient” as ineradicably distinct from, and antithetical to, the West. Their rhetoric halved not only the land, but the peoples of the Earth as well, constructing “the Oriental” as “a member of a subject race and not exclusively an inhabitant of a geographical area.” Kumar elucidates, Orientalism is based upon a civilizational view of history, or “the idea that civilizations come into being, prosper, and then decline.” The presumed strength, rationality and superiority of Western civilization over that of the weak, barbaric and undeveloped Oriental implied a burden upon the West to “penetrate” and “give shape and meaning to” the Orient, both militarily/materially and culturally/discursively. Although the binary construction of East and West did not disappear, it was fundamentally altered after WWII, as the US and the USSR rose to geopolitical prominence at opposite ends of an emerging bipolar international order. Europe’s experience of physical and economic devastation left Western Europe in a state of decline, whereby trauma and overstretch forced European empires to substantially withdraw from their colonies. The US and the USSR sat in prime positions to fill this power vacuum, as each had industrialized economies, had achieved moral victory in allying against Germany, and was further detached from imperialism than European colonial powers. As the two nations rose, so did each’s fear and spite of the other, thus beginning the Cold War. This new framework gave rise to reformulated imaginations of “the East” and “the West,” whereby the former developed into primary affiliation with Russia, the latter into primary affiliation with America. As the center of power in the West shifted from Europe to the United States, the emerging network of US government intelligence agents and collaborating scholars gained a more significant bearing on dominant Western discourse, and specifically on the Western imagination of the Middle East and Islam. The image of a West and an East engrossed in a post-colonial “Cold War” looked very different than the West and East of colonial times, which had been fixed into a naturalized master/slave dichotomy. Under the old order, the West fancied itself a paternal figure with a divine right and an obligation to dominate the East; the Orient was racialized, sexualized, feminized and identified with absence to prime it for European penetration and occupation. Even in the nineteenth century, as justifications for colonialism shifted from religious to scientific grounds, scientific racism had justified an imperialist racial superiority complex. Whereas the East (i.e. the Orient) had been positioned as a passive threat in the dominant Western imaginary of the colonial era, the East (i.e. the Soviet Union) was framed as the most active threat to the West in the post-colonial era. As the Cold War materialized, the East and the West came to emblemize two paternal world leaders vying for unipolar hegemony. Unlike past global superpowers, however, these two would have to establish dominance through proxies, forging alliances instead of capturing colonies. The multiplication of sovereign nation-states in post-colonial Africa and Asia called for a new imperial approach: to achieve geopolitical prominence, superpowers would have to rely upon their capacity to persuade Third World leaders to commit to security partnerships. In the Western pole of the new world order, “the Orient” was no longer a suitable frame for conceptualizing “the East” in its entirety. If US executive agents had limited their rhetoric to the tropes of Orientalism, they would have lost the ability to theoretically separate any postcolonies of the Middle East from the Soviet Union. As a result, they would have ceded important and winnable spheres of influence to their enemy. To facilitate participation in the emerging “game of nations” with the USSR, the executive branch moved past the confines of Orientalism by strategically reinventing geographies. In 1944, the State Department established, for the first time, an office of Near Eastern Affairs, broken into three divisions: Near Eastern Affairs, Middle Eastern Affairs, and African Affairs. These designations provided US agents with a more technical or professional lens to manipulate former colonies into submitting to a new imperial order. Colonies graduated to the “Third World,” a new conceptual geography categorized last on a tripartite geopolitical hierarchy and primed for political, economic, and/or military penetration by either the “Second World” of the Soviet Union or the “First World” of Euro-America. US executive agents had another significant reason not to embrace the geographical schema of Orientalism: its complex and maturing relationship with Israel. The US supported the creation of a Jewish state in Israel in 1948, and has since relied upon Israel as an ally which helps protect Western hegemony in the region. As the Jewish population steadily rose in the Middle East following the termination of WWII and the Holocaust, Western discourse ironically pushed Jews further and further from the category “Oriental” and its associated stereotypes. In classical Orientalist thought, Jews and Muslims alike were more closely associated with each other than with Christians, as both were considered Semitic, therefore Asiatic, therefore Oriental. After WWII, Jews were reclassified as “Western” and became more closely associated with Christians, in what Said refers to as the smooth “transference of a popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target.” In the post-colonial era, the Arab has been posited antagonistically to the Jew; both an ideological hatred for Jews and a practical disruption of Israeli existence are assumed intrinsic characteristics of Arab-ness. The perceived necessity to identify Israel with the West, despite its physical location in the Middle East, evidences a new significance in the relationship between political identity and conceptions of geography. In the Cold War era, a nation’s designation as Western or Eastern could not so easily be determined by locating its position on a globe; its (geo)political orientation, or identity, became a more significant determinant. “Western” nations embraced liberalism and democracy, and thus belonged on the side of the US and its Western European allies. “Eastern” nations were associated with communism (falsely applied as an umbrella term for all forms of socialism and often other anti-Western ideologies) and identified with the Soviet Union. Imagined as a competition not only between two superpowers, but between two mutually exclusive world orders, the Cold War framework called upon the leaders and allies of the US and the USSR to annihilate the other’s power to fully actualize a unipolar order. As Chapters Two and Three revealed, US executive agents would not accept Cold War neutralism as a position which political leaders could legitimately occupy. Instead, a bifurcated with us or against us logic was applied to diplomacy, sometimes pushing leaders like Nasser and Malcolm X closer to Russia in the process. The Truman Doctrine volunteered US military, diplomatic, and economic support to any free state who would assist in the global struggle against Soviet Communism. But nations or parties who refused the offer were treated with suspicion, political hostility, and sometimes economic and/or military intervention. Early Cold Warriors pictured the globe as divided into the God-worshipping “Free World” of the West versus the atheistic (and materially impoverished) tyranny of Soviet Communism to the East. Leaders of “Third World” post-colonial nations were asked (coerced) to position themselves within this new dualism. US promotion of modernization and “Westernization” in the post-colonies fostered a vision of the West that had the potential to expand into the (former) Orient through acts of political, economic, and cultural penetration. Unlike its European predecessors, the emerging US empire officially championed the Western way of life as one naturally and hypothetically available to all people, from all races and all hemispheres. The rising significance of geopolitical identity marks a definitive shift away from the colonial era, wherein geopolitical domination was justified via the naturalization of global racial hierarchies. Mahmood Mamdani explains that in the colonial era, “laws of war applied to wars among the civilized nation-states, but laws of nature were said to apply to colonial wars, and the extermination of the lower races was seen as a biological necessity.” But as colonies were rapidly graduating to nation-states, imperial leaders were forced to acknowledge postcolonial governments as “independent members of the world.” US executive agents thereby repositioned Third World post-colonies somewhere in between “civilized nation-states” and “lower races,” in the sense that their value was determined by their willingness to align with the US empire and to serve its expanding hegemony. The transition into post-colonialism and the Cold War geopolitical order thus brought with it new conceptualizations of “inside” and “outside” the East and the West. The case of Israeli Jews advancing from the category of Oriental to that of Western, as they migrated from Europe to the Middle East, is evidence of this phenomenon. Chapters Two and Three also demonstrate the fading connection between the geo-spatial location of a nation, and its association with a geographically-centered pole. Chapter Two analyzed the FBI’s rhetorical positioning of the Nation of Islam as an anti-American, anti-Western, and communist (sympathizing) cult. By targeting the NOI as a domestic and international security threat, executive discourse produced an image of “the black Muslims” as outsiders to the Western order emerging from inside the geographical and legal confines of the West. Ignoring the NOI’s decolonial demand for nation-statehood, the FBI rhetorically situated NOI members as traitors, who “disavow their allegiance to the United States and pledge their allegiance only to Allah and do not consider it their duty to… serve in the United States Armed Forces as they cannot serve two masters.”

The continuation of relations of colonial underdevelopment and dependency in the Congo, despite ‘Flag Independence’, is key to understanding the position of Congolese labourers within international relations of production, and of the systemic obstacles that efforts to ameliorate their exploitation would encounter. Though direct colonial rule became foreclosed by a mass independence movement, imperialist influence in the Congo maintained its hegemony during the period of ‘decolonisation’ through the overthrow of the country’s first Prime Minister, the left-leaning Pan-Africanist Patrice Lumumba, by Congolese officers in 1961 (backed by the CIA and Belgian secret services) - a victory for international capital over anti-imperialist elements that had envisioned independence as a radical break with the imperialist super-exploitation of their country. For Kabamba, the post-colonial (or neo-colonial) Congolese state chiefly functioned to 50 maintain the security and profitability of predatory extractivism in the country, embodying “the persistence . . . of the Leopoldian project” through internal “guardians of colonial structures.” The 51 regime of General Mobutu (1967-1997), serving at the pleasure of Washington and international mining concerns, typified the Fanonist conception of an alignment of interests between imperialist capital and the post-colonial “national bourgeoisie” which, lacking indigenous capital, facilitates the operations of international corporations in their country and thereby fulfils “its historic mission . . . of [profiteering] intermediary.” The contemporary state retains this kleptocratic character, with 52 government posts providing opportunities for personal enrichment in exchange for political loyalty to mining interests - Baudoin Nzowo, a former government employee, claimed that “out of 50 billion dollars produced from Congo mining, only 6 billion dollars reach the state treasury, the rest goes to individual pockets.” 53 This nexus between political corruption and corporate extractivism has engendered a situation in which the state, rather than functioning as an arbiter between mining firms and mineworkers (or those affected by mining), acts as a partisan force on the side of international capital against its own citizens. A Katangese ‘Community Respondent’ interviewed 54 by Sovacool claims that: ‘The biggest threat to democracy . . . in the DRC is not war, or poverty, but mining. Mining prevents the capability of the Congolese people to be governed by those they like. The mining sector and the state capture of resources undermines development for the whole country. It allows them to run the show and buy off whatever they need to prevent real democracy, freedom of speech, and free and fair elections. Mining has undermined the whole nation.”55 This neo-colonial predation upon the DRC was exacerbated by the neoliberal turn in global capitalism following the Third World Debt Crisis and advent of IMF ‘Structural Adjustment’, recomposing the political economy of Congolese super-exploitation into the modes which prevail today. ‘Neoliberalism’ constituted an offensive by organised capital in response to the profitability crisis of the 1970s, intensifying the general tendencies of capital accumulation, including “the deepening of commodity relations, the privatisation of formerly public services, the search for cheaper and more productive labour . . . and the collapse of space and time . . . ” ‘Globalisation’ 56 represented the triumph of neoliberalism, championed by an American Empire systematically imposing an international ‘liberalisation’ of capitalism through the ‘Washington Consensus’. For 57 the DRC, this catalyzation of capitalist accumulation meant the deepening of the neo-colonial relationship. Mobutu’s DRC was “one of the first recipients in the early 1980s of a harsh structural adjustment regime,” with market reforms demanded by the IMF in return for debt rescheduling seeing the decimation of “public institutions and the formal economy through privatization and liberalisation . . . ” The erosion of formal employment across the DRC during this era threw 58 millions into ASM, while macro-economic transformations accentuated the dependence of the DRC upon primary-commodity exports. Under neoliberalism the Congolese working-class has entered 59 into new labour relations that “perpetuate and deepen conditions of chronic poverty”, with the explosion of ASM representing one of Sassen’s "alternative survival circuits.” It is within this 60 context that Lebaron and Ayers situate the emergence of the modalities of unfree labour found within Congolese mining today, seeing them as “rooted in fundamental shifts in social property relations associated with the neoliberal project, rather than as a continuation of the timeless institution of slavery separate from the otherwise ‘free market’ in which the ‘new slavery’ happens to take place.” 61 Neoliberalism compounded pathologies in the DRC through the ‘digital revolution’ that emerged with the mass-production of consumer electronics - consoles, laptops and smartphones. The ‘New International Division of Labour’ (NIDL) that emerged from neoliberal globalisation provided corporate multinationals with “new networks of integrated production” across the globe, outsourcing primary and secondary production to countries with lower values of labour-power than the Global North, thereby increasing the rate of exploitation (and profit) within production. 62 Consumer electronics represented an epitomic product of these GPNs - for Panitch and Gindin, the Apple iPod “illustrated well the competitive integration and international hierarchy of production in this sector.” For the DRC the emergence of the NIDL has “intensified exploitation within the 63 extant colonial division of labour,” with increased demand for Congolese minerals as components for digital commodities exacerbating both corporate predation and illicit extractivist ventures within the country - provided with a desperate labour-force, and a comprador state eager to facilitate such operations. The colonial subordination of Congolese labour within global 64 production is actively reproduced by the international neoliberal paradigm upon which electronics consumer-capitalism relies - as this continued “provision of cheap raw materials by the Congolese people allows global consumers to purchase electronic commodities . . . at affordable prices.” The relationship between the profits of electronics capital and super-exploitation in the DRC, then, is “almost linear”. 66 The political economy of super-exploitation in Congolese mining - a neo-colonial, neoliberal project of capitalist accumulation through the exploitation of impoverished, brutalised and racialised workers, facilitated by a kleptocratic comprador state - is inextricable from the historical and contemporary totality of global capitalism. The Congo was colonially constructed as a space where profitability could be maximised through immense violence and immiseration - a logic which persists into ‘post-colonial’ capitalism through the continued devaluation of Congolese labour-power. The survival of the Lumumbist challenge by imperialist influence and by the Leopoldian state, catalysed by neoliberalism, produced the contemporary situation, where Congolese labourers, working for a pittance under hazardous conditions within various relations of unfreedom, excavate minerals with instrumental roles in the GPNs of some of the world’s wealthiest corporations. Under neoliberalism, the Congo has become the “vast productive garden” of Stanley’s dreams. 67 If the contemporary DRC is the cumulative product of one ‘side’ of capitalism’s janus-faced historical development, then modern electronics multinationals are the other - produced and maintained by the GPNs, legal regimes, markets, and divisions of labour established throughout the construction of the capitalist world-system. Tech corporations that profit from super-exploited Congolese labour directly emerged from the same capitalist structures that historically colonised, plundered and underdeveloped the Congo. The systemic development of modern ‘Globalised Capitalism’ has produced Silicon Valley at one pole, and the DRC at the other. We will now examine the specific relationship between super-exploitation in Congolese mining and electronics capital, taking the processes and relations implicit within the production of the Apple iPhone as a touchstone from which to extrapolate a wider analysis of the infrastructures of accumulation that bind the suffering of the Congo and the wealth of Silicon Valley together. We will then undertake a critical evaluation of extant efforts to alleviate pathologies associated with these GPNs, identifying senses in which their limitations exemplify the inadequacies of reformist solutions to systemic problems. This investigation will conclude with a consideration of potential avenues for political action of the requisite scale and ambition for the enormity of the task facing those seeking transformative justice for the Congolese people.

Economic domination – corporate colonisation and monopoly power Under colonialism, Europeans dispossessed the natives of their land, settled their territories, put them to work as slaves and servants, instituted horrific acts of violence, and perpetuated dependency and plunder through strategic underdevelopment. Corporations played a pivotal role through the ‘pathological pursuit of profit and power’.7 In 1602, the Dutch East India Company became the first modern global corporation. Fifty years later, it initiated European conquest in Southern Africa with the establishment of the Cape Colony. Over the next two centuries, whites seized large swathes of land as colonists expanded into the interior. After the discovery of diamonds and gold, the British and the Afrikaners consolidated the remaining majority of land and further subjugated the African population under racist regimes of labour exploitation. In no time flat, a handful of corporations came to dominate large parts of the economy.8 Today, a new form of corporate colonisation is taking place. Instead of the conquest of land, Big Tech corporations are colonising digital technology. The following functions are all dominated by a handful of US multinationals: search engines (Google); web browsers (Google Chrome); smartphone and tablet operating systems (Google Android, Apple iOS); desktop and laptop operating systems (Microsoft Windows); office software (Microsoft Office, Google G Suite); cloud infrastructure and services (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM); social networking platforms (Facebook, Twitter); transportation (Uber, Lyft); business networking (Microsoft LinkedIn); streaming video (Google YouTube, Netflix, Hulu); and online advertising (Google, Facebook) – among others. GAFAM now comprise the five wealthiest corporations in the world, with a combined market cap exceeding $3 trillion.9 If South Africans integrate Big Tech products into their society, the United States will obtain enormous power over their economy and create technological dependencies that will lead to perpetual resource extraction. Early research and case examples suggest the economic impact of Big Tech intermediaries is detrimental to local African industries. Murphy, Carmody and Surborg, who studied the role of ICTs among small, medium, and micro-sized enterprises (SMMEs) in South Africa’s and Tanzania’s wood and tourism industries, found that ICTs introduced the dominance of information intermediaries. Increased use of ICTs also led to greater worker surveillance in some instances. They concluded that ICT integration is, on balance, benefiting foreign-owned businesses and corporations.10 Similar conclusions can be derived from press accounts of the transportation industry. Since Uber began operating in Johannesburg in 2013, there have been labour strikes and violent clashes in the ‘South African taxi wars’. Several e-hailing taxi murders have been carried out by metered taxi drivers, who have warned that Uber will ‘burn’ if it remains in South Africa. At the same time, many Uber drivers endure onerous working conditions for low pay.11 Uber has had devastating effects in Africa and beyond.12 The company takes around 25 per cent commission for each trip, in addition to hidden costs,13 leading to an outflow of revenue from the local economy to foreign coffers. Moreover, it is able to undercut local markets by offering artificially low prices: Uber can operate at a loss – to the tune of billions – thanks to funding from Wall Street and other wealthy investors.14 With the backing of corporate finance, it leverages predatory subsidies, network effects, Big Data analytics, and the deregulatory effects of its position as an ‘intermediary’ to stamp out competition and colonise the market. Within just two years, Uber sported a net worth of R1.65 billion ($125 million) inside South Africa.15 Similar problems have emerged in the media. In April 2017, the online news outlet GroundUp dropped Google Ads from its website. GroundUp’s Nathan Geffen explains the Google advertising model is ‘broken’ for publishers who ‘have to put up with poor quality, misleading adverts in exchange for small change’. ‘The problem’, Geffen says, ‘is that nearly all the power in the online advertising relationship lies with Google.’ The ad giant also serves up censorship threats: in one example, Google issued a warning to GroundUp for publishing a picture containing a painted bare breast as part of a protest action.16 In November 2017, Financial Mail’s Anton Harber wrote a feature story deeming Google and Facebook ‘the biggest threat to South African news media’.17 Google takes 70 per cent of local online advertising, while social media – led by Facebook – takes another 12 per cent. The major South African media groups are left with just 8 per cent of the pie. The Google and Facebook ‘nemesis’ is an expanding duopoly: the two take 77 per cent of online advertising spend in the US and captured virtually all the ad growth in 2016.18 If this continues, Harber exclaims, ‘the big two could have a devastating effect on the media’s role in defining democracy’.19 These early examples provide clear instances of digital colonialism whereby foreign corporations undermine local development, dominate the market, and extract revenue from the Global South, with power obtained primarily through the structural domination of digital architecture, which leads to more general forms of imperial control. Imperial control through architectural design Colonial conquest typically entails dispossession of valuable resources from the native peoples and ownership and control of infrastructure by colonial powers. In many parts of the Global South, critical infrastructure such as railways was designed by foreign imperialists not to benefit the indigenous population, but to service the mother country. In the arrangement that emerged through European colonialism, raw materials were extracted by exploited local labour and shipped back to the empire. In some cases, colonial forces would import the cheap, machine-made industrial products to the villages, undermining local artisans and the capacity to build competitor industries. In Africa and elsewhere, railroads were built from the country interior straight to the ports and military stations, with little ‘spread effect’ to connect up the indigenous people. The architectural design of the production system was not engineered to benefit the local inhabitants, but to ‘serve immediate European needs’.20 Under digital colonialism, foreign powers, led by the US, are planting infrastructure in the Global South engineered for their own needs, enabling economic and cultural domination while imposing privatised forms of governance. To accomplish this task, major corporations design digital technology to ensure their own dominance over critical functions in the tech ecosystem. This allows them to accumulate profits from revenues derived from rent (in the form of intellectual property or access to infrastructure) and surveillance (in the form of Big Data). It also empowers them to exercise control over the flow of information (such as the distribution of news and streaming services), social activities (like social networking and cultural exchange), and a plethora of other political, social, economic and military functions mediated by their technologies. The control of code is foundational to digital domination. In Code: and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig famously argued that computer code shapes the rules, norms and behaviours of computer-mediated experiences in ways similar to architecture in physical space (e.g. imperial railways designed for colonisation).21 ‘Code is law’ in the sense that it has the power to usurp legal, institutional and social norms impacting the political, economic and cultural domains of society. This critical insight has been applied in fields like copyright, free speech regulation, Internet governance, blockchain, privacy, and even torts. What has been missed, however, is how US dominance of code – and other forms of digital architecture – usurps other countries’ sovereignty. Digital forms of power are linked through the three core pillars of the digital ecosystem: software, hardware and network connectivity.22 (Software is the set of instructions that define and determine what your computer can do. Hardware is the physical equipment used for computer experiences. The network is the set of protocols and standards computers use to talk to each other, and the connections they make.) Software functions as the coded logic that constrains and enables particular user experiences. For example, software determines rules and policies such as whether or not users can post a message anonymously at a website, or whether or not users can make a copy of a copyright-restricted file like an e-book. The rules that a programmer codes into the software largely determine technological freedoms and shape users’ experiences using their devices. Thus, software exerts a powerful influence on the behaviour, policies and freedoms of people using digital technology. Control over software is a source of digital domination primarily exercised through software licences and hardware ownership. Free Software licences allow people to use, study, modify and share software as they see fit.23 By contrast, non-free software licences grant a software designer control over users by precluding the ability to exercise those freedoms. With proprietary software, the human-readable source code is closed off to the public, and owners usually restrict the ability to use the software without paying. In the case of Microsoft Windows, for example, the public must pay for the programme in order to use it, they cannot read the source code to understand how it works, they cannot change its behaviour by changing the code, and they cannot share a copy with others. Thus with proprietary licensing, Microsoft maintains absolute control over how the software works. The same goes for other proprietary apps, like Google Play or Adobe Photoshop.24 By design, non-free software provides the owner power over the user experience. It is authoritarian software. Control over hardware is a second source of digital domination. This can take at least three forms: software run on third-party servers, centralised ownership of hardware, or hardware designed to prevent users from changing the software. In the first scenario, software is executed on someone else’s computer. As a result, users are dispossessed of their ability to control it. This is typically accomplished through Software as a Service (SaaS) in the cloud. For example, when you visit the Facebook website, the interface you are provided executes on third-party hardware (i.e. on Facebook’s cloud servers). Because users cannot change the code running on Facebook’s servers, they cannot get rid of the ‘like’ button or change the Facebook experience. ‘There is no cloud’, the saying goes, ‘just someone else’s computer’. Corporations and other third parties design cloud services for remote control over the user experience. This gives them immense power over individuals, groups and society.25 In the second scenario, people become dispossessed of hardware ownership itself. With the rise of cloud computing, it is possible that hardware manufacturers will soon only offer low-powered, low-memory devices (similar to the terminals of the 1960s and 1970s) and computer processing and data storage will be primarily conducted in centralised clouds. With end-users dispossessed of processing power and storage, software and data would be under the absolute control of the owners and operators of clouds.26 In the third scenario, hardware is manufactured with locks that prevent users from changing the software on the devices. By locking down devices to a pre-determined set of software choices, the hardware manufacturer determines which software is allowed to run when you turn on your device.27 Thus, hardware restrictions can prevent the public from controlling their devices, granting device manufacturers power over users. Control over network connectivity is a third source of digital domination. Net neutrality regulation proposes that Internet traffic should be ‘neutral’ so that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) treat content flowing through their cables, cellular towers and satellites equally. According to this philosophy, those who own the pipes are ‘common carriers’ and should almost never be allowed to manipulate the data that flows through them.28 This constrains the ability of wealthy media providers to pay for faster content delivery speeds than less wealthy providers (such as grassroots organisations, small businesses, and common people). More importantly, by treating traffic equally, net neutrality prevents network discrimination against various forms of traffic critical to civil rights and liberties. For example, the Tor browser facilitates anonymous Internet communications, but the use of the Tor network can be detected by ISPs and throttled (i.e. slowed to a crawl).29 Net neutrality prevents this form of discrimination and protects the end user’s freedom to utilise the Internet as they wish, without third-party favouritism, blocking, or throttling. Let us consider some concrete examples as to how software, hardware, and networks constitute sources of power and control related to social justice in the Global South.

Indigenous social policy in English-speaking settler states is changing. For the past 40 years, there was broad government consensus around a self-determination approach that aimed to secure Indigenous rights and entitlements, support self-governance and facilitate social reconciliation. But over the last 15 years, this consensus has slowly eroded (Lea et al. 2006; Te Atu O Tu MacDonald and Muldoon 2006; Bargh 2007). Emerging policies are less concerned with rights and relationships, and focus on reforming Indigenous behaviour, intervening in community ‘dysfunction’ and driving economic integration through mainstream employment (Preston 2013; Bargh 2007; I. Watson 2005; MacDonald 2011; Humpage 2005, 2008; Walter 2007; Altman 2007, 2010; Macoun 2011). In Australia this policy shift is particularly marked. Governments have abolished Indigenous representative institutions and reformulated Indigenous welfare provision in line with the ‘responsibility’ and ‘post-welfare’ agendas. But there are smaller corresponding changes in Canada, New Zealand and the US. Increasingly, political leaders and state agencies directly question Indigenous rights institutions (see, for example, the 2008 National Party commitment to abolish Maori seats in the New Zealand parliament; Tahana 2008) and focus policy attention on Indigenous ‘welfare dependency’ and community behaviour (see discussions of the Indigenous impacts of Canadian and US welfare reform, the latter through the Personal Opportunity and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 ; also federal government moves to takeover designated Indian communities for child safety reasons; Brown et al. 2001; Pulkington et al. 2010; Childress 2012). There are new policies emphasising mainstream economic participation and a discursive move from collective rights to individual equality of opportunity (see, for example, the 2012 US HEARTH Act of 2012 [‘Helping Expedite and Advance Responsible Tribal Home Ownership’] and Obama on Native American opportunity 2014). How can we make sense of this shift? In Australia it has been going on for some time, and there are multiple interpretations. Domestic political conditions play an important role, given the impact of a long period of conservative government (Sanders 2006). Some interpret the decline of the self-determination paradigm in terms of that paradigm’s internal contradictions and limitations. For example, they suggest that it was driven by misguided non-Indigenous investment in a particular kind of Indigenous cultural stasis. This meant that it failed to take account of the increasingly porous and transgressed boundaries of the Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds, and the diverse aspirations of Indigenous people (Lea et al. 2006; Sullivan 2011; Rowse 2012; Austin-Broos 2011). Finally, there is academic focus on changing public ideas, and the impact of prominent Indigenous and non-Indigenous critiques of the existing order. Such critiques came from all political directions – some challenged self-determination’s carefully circumscribed remedialism and others its corrosive welfare economies (see Bradfield 2006; Kowal 2008; Pearson 2000; Sutton 2009; Johns 2010). This book seeks to add another dimension to our understanding, by locating the Indigenous policy transition in the context of broader domestic social policy changes. Of particular significance is the shift from social to neoliberal framings of citizen– state relations. Indigenous self-determination policy was conditioned by post-war social liberalism, and its vision of a benign, multicultural, enfolding state that recognised and secured citizen entitlements. The decline of the self-determination paradigm in Anglophone settler states can be partly understood in terms of the neoliberal critique and reconceptualisation of this social liberal welfare state. From this perspective, the Indigenous policy transformation is not just a move away from a particular approach, but a move to a new liberal paradigm that has been dominant in other social policy fields for 30 years. The four Anglophone settler states are wealthy liberal democracies that each embraced the neoliberalisation agenda, and this goes some way to accounting for the transnational character of the Indigenous policy shift. But while Indigenous policy is part of the domestic social policy world, it overflows it. In the settler colonial context, domestic Indigenous policy is a crucial site of political encounter. I suggest that neoliberal Indigenous policy constitutes a contemporary example of the longer historical imbrication of liberalism and colonialism. Both of these political forces are changing in the contemporary world, and neoliberal domestic policy in settler states forms an important but under-examined site of intersection. I use the case study of Australian policy to reconstruct the interaction between the intellectual projects of neoliberalism and settler colonialism, and argue that ongoing settler colonial hierarchies have been rearticulated through, rather than revived or transcended by, neoliberal frameworks. Importantly, this book does not aim to give a comprehensive account of how particular policies with neoliberal dimensions operate, or to examine the problems and opportunities for Indigenous people enmeshed with such policies (see Altamirano-Jiminez 2013; Te Atu O Tu MacDonald and Muldoon 2006). Both of these are important projects, and do not allow easy moral and political judgements. In their day-to-day operation, policy programs cannot be pre-emptively condemned or celebrated, but must be considered in terms of their concrete interactions with the diverse life projects of individuals and communities. Instead, I build on critical Indigenous theory, social policy scholarship and settler colonial studies to explore the ways in which changing policy logics in Indigenous affairs reflect and drive broader changes in dominant understandings of political relationships in liberal and settler colonial contexts (for others engaged with these themes in Australian scholarship see Howard-Wagner 2010, 2012; Stringer 2007; Lovell 2011; Morris and Lattas 2010; and Moreton-Robinson 2009). Ultimately, I seek to offer a set of analytical tools that might facilitate more detailed empirical articulations, and more open debate, of neoliberal Indigenous policy in its diverse manifestations.

The shift from a colonial to multilateral international order was full of great promise. Colonialism was built on coercive domination. European colonial systems were famous for locating the most profitable economic elements in the metropole, while treating peripheral countries as producers of raw materials, as sites of grueling cheap and slave labor, and as captive markets for European finished products. The 1941 Atlantic Charter signaled the hopes of multilateralism, promising an end to territorial domination, a recognition of the right to self-determination, an effort to work collectively towards lowering trade barriers, improved labor standards and economic advancement, promoting freedom of the seas, and creating a world free of want and fear.1 The United Nations (UN) enshrined these goals, recognizing that nations would interact as sovereign equals drafting international law through multilateral processes.2 Multilateral institutions created new international legal rules to promote free trade, to keep oceans open for all, to create a stable currency exchange system, and to help secure peace and security. Colonial prerogatives including the right to use force to open markets or to compel the repayment of debts were eliminated. The shift to multilateralism created profound changes in international law, usually in the direction of creating international agreements and institutions that could garner greater international political support from states. Yet global capitalism operated alongside this international legal and institutional transformation. The forces of global capitalism served as a break on what was politically possible. Newly independent states hoped that their growing numbers would translate into a multilateral power to renegotiate the set of global economic rules that had been created by and for colonial powers. Their hopeful ideals—for permanent sovereignty over their own natural resources, for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), and for a set of more equal and fair international economic agreements—failed in large part because of the refusal of wealthy states to accede to developing country demands. Multilateralism therefore also served as a break on what was possible. This Foreword integrates international law (IL), international relations (IR), and global history conversations, using the global history of others to explore how the shift from the colonial to multilateral era influenced international lawmaking.3 I do this by creating an expansive definition of global economic law that includes categories that today’s legal scholars might call international law, transnational law and transnational legal orderings,4 and binding private contracts between firms, banks, and states that are then upheld by domestic courts. I need this larger category because state and economic actors have options. They can choose what I will soon develop as the category of multilateral international law, which must be made in a multilateral way and fit into a system of international law. Or they can choose the other legal forms that are part of global economic law—transnational law, private contracts, bilateral agreements—which can be more flexible and can better reflect the goals of powerful economic actors. To illuminate the normative and political tensions within global economic law, I construct a patchwork quilt review-essay of a new generation of scholarship, that is inserting a legal sensibility into the study of colonial systems or a capitalist sensibility into the study of international legal development. While a different seamstress could create a different quilt, this patchwork review-essay seeks to reveal the operation of global economic law by assembling studies where circumscribed examinations explicitly speak to and provide revealing insight about the larger whole of global economic law and the transition from the colonial to the multilateral international order. This Foreword’s analysis is a companion to a project that focuses on the post-World War II multilateral systems regulating global trade and money.5 As a prequel, the essay advances four main arguments. First, the scholarly gaze of IL and IR scholars includes blind spots that hide the legal infrastructure of global capitalism, thereby obscuring how states and firms use law, lawyers, and legal arguments to their advantage. What is thereby minimized is how the system of state-supported private contracting and the scholarly inattention to colonial law and private international law recreated certain colonial era practices. Also falling into the blind spot is the reality that a failure to collectively decide (what I call non-decisions) may be as important as collective decisions, especially when the topic is the global economy. Second, global economic law operates as an international regime complex—a form of global governance that has specific attributes.6 Regime complexes are usually not intentionally designed, rather they are incidentally created as different groups of actors construct agreements to their liking, and as international agreements get layered next to and over each other over time.7 While there are benefits to governing via an international regime complex, two challenges are salient for this study. Regime complexes generate holes that, despite their dysfunction, do not get repaired. Relatedly, regime complexes parcel authority and responsibility across elemental institutions so that sometimes no one institution or authority is fully responsible.8 In addition, a lack of an agreed-upon legal hierarchy across the elemental institutions and agreements allows actors within to play the different layers of authority against each other. For example, by moving from one institutional venue to another, actors can either escape or draw on legal obligations that are present in one system but lacking in another. These strategies are revealed when one studies how capitalist actors maneuver across the categories of law that are part of the global economic legal complex. Third, while both the laws and lacunae of the colonial and multilateral global economic systems reflect state decisions, economic actors can act independently in ways that constrain state action. In both the colonial and multilateral eras, global firms asked for and Sovereigns provided domestic and international law and international relations support to secure these firms’ global operations.9 Yet it is also true that firms have used jurisdiction jumping to escape state efforts to curb business excesses. The Marxist notion that states are mere handmaidens of capitalist interests misses how firms also work through and across the international regime complex to escape individual and collective efforts by states to regulate the global market. Fourth, this rearview-window analysis has its sights on the future. We should not expect these trends to change even if Western power declines and Asian power ascends. The nature of global capitalism is that it is adaptive and driven by an extractive and profit-seeking logic. Global capitalism can shed entire regimes—like slavery and colonialism—and then reform and reproduce inequality and exploitative relationships in new forms. Meanwhile global economic law, in its multilateral, bilateral, coalition of the willing and private law forms, remains the legal infrastructure that facilitates and structures global capitalism, enabling firms to jump jurisdictions to escape state regulation and to exploit gaps in the international regime complex of global economic law. If multilateralism remains the primary ordering principle of international relations, and if global capitalism remains a fundamental organizing element of the world’s economy and international relations, then new emerging powers (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS), or states with rising economies) are likely to replicate or reproduce pieces of the American-led multilateral order, even as they aspire to get beyond it. And these powers are likely to do so using the existing tools of global economic law

The neocons are known for their aggressive geopolitics – especially the expansion of ‘democratic freedom’. In the neoconservative lexicon, ‘American exceptionalism’ is ‘a belief in the uniqueness and the virtue of the American political system that, when translated into foreign policy terms, offers the United States as a model for the world’ (Kaplan and Kristol 2003: 64). The ‘Americanness’ of this exceptionalism is rooted in US liberal democratic principles and its market economy. Rather than the blood-and-soil conservative nationalism of the first imperialism, this second generation of neoconservative neoimperialists has ‘faith in the universal idea of freedom’. The USA, they say, has the ability to defend those principles, and more generally has an obligation to defend the free world against competing ideologies. This Americanness stands in contrast not only to the communist world, but also to the rest of the free (capitalist) world that cannot or will not defend itself. Americans, they say, rightly think that the security and survival of the USA is synonymous with security and survival of freedom in the world. Peace and political liberty can be fostered not by international organizations, such as the UN, but by American power and American-led alliances. The neocon position was spelled out late in 2003 in a book called The War over Iraq by Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol in terms of three principles of a Bush Doctrine: 1 Pre-emption. Pre-emption means striking first. In a world standing at the crossroads of radicalism and technology, the USA cannot rely on a reactive posture but must identify and destroy the threats posed by its enemies before they reach the country’s borders. More countries now possess weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them than in the past. Hence acts of ‘anticipatory self-defence’ are legitimate. 2 Regime change. The right to bring about by diplomatic or military means the demise of regimes with which the USA cannot peacefully exist – the ultimate aim being the spread of liberal democracy. 3 Pre-eminence. The USA must prevent potential adversaries from surpassing or equalling its power. American military power dwarfs that of any other nation, in its war-fighting capabilities and ability to quickly intervene in conflicts anywhere in the world. The USA, as the world’s sole superpower, commits itself to norms of international conduct – democracy, human rights, against aggression, against weapons proliferation – norms that successful challenges to American power would invariably weaken. Were the USA, through humility, self-abnegation or a narrow conception of the national interest, to retreat from the position that history has bequeathed, the turmoil that would soon follow would surely reach its own shores. A humane future requires an American foreign policy that is ‘unapologetic, idealistic, assertive and well funded. America must not only be the world’s policeman or its sheriff, it must be its beacon and guide’. (ibid.: 120–21) In general, the USA must promote a world order conducive to American interests and defend against any threat to that order. Iraq is a case in point. In his 2002 State of the Union address, George W. Bush, President of the United States, said that America’s goal was to prevent regimes that sponsored terror from threatening the USA or its allies with weapons of mass destruction – the cases being North Korea, Iran and Iraq. The President said: States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic … The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons … History has called America and our allies to action, and it is both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom’s fight. (Bush 2002)