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‘Neo’ means new and different. And ‘imperialism’ has long meant the geopolitical expansion of national power. By ‘neo-imperialism’, however, I mean something different from, say, the British, French and other European imperialisms of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the nineteenth century, the aim of imperialism was territorial conquest, including permanent, physical occupation of foreign spaces, with strict control over their peoples exercised by colonial state authorities directed from London, Paris and the other capitals in Europe. American neo-imperialism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries certainly uses overwhelming physical might to conquer territories, and militaristic terror to control reluctant peoples, as with the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and the occupation of Iraq in 2003. But the long-term aim of US neo-imperialism does not envision long-run, direct control by the State Department in quite the same way as the British did through their Colonial Office. Rather the aim is control of spaces, resources and peoples indirectly via multinational corporations, global governance institutions, policy imposition and foreign investment. American neo-imperialism has the confidence to control, in the long term, after the shock and awe of the bombing, by setting the ideals that people strive for, rather than controlling bodies through violent intimidation. Control the way people think, control their economic, political and cultural objectives, and there is no need for direct control over people physically. The aim of US neo-imperialism is to control global space by conquering the political and economic imaginaries of the world’s peoples … by having them ‘share the American dream’. Neo-imperialism takes the form of the expansion of American ideals like freedom, democracy, equality of opportunity, consumption. Neo-imperialism American-style makes the excuses for British imperialism (‘bringing civilization to the world’) look utterly out of date and hopelessly deficient. American neo-imperialism means spreading consumption, lifestyle, media, voting and all the good things that people everywhere have already shown that they urgently, deeply want! Neo-imperialism is cast as the latest act in a continuing drama of human liberation. Neo-imperialism as sociocultural and political control is justified as right, and defended as good, by rationalizations so sophisticated that their perpetrators do not know that they speak in ideological tongues. As I have explained, ideology basically entails spreading persuasive ideas in the interests of dominant institutions of power. That power is usually accumulated geographically, in a hegemonic country, such as Britain previously, or the USA today, and concentrated socially, in a class of people, an ethnic group or a gender – such as white, rich, Anglo-American males. Putting the case bluntly, my argument is that US neo-imperialism is supported by ideologies of democracy, freedom and consumptive happiness in the interests of what I have called ‘global finance capital’. Obviously the case is more complicated than this – for example, pension funds are now heavily involved in global investment, black Americans willingly participate, women occasionally head up state agencies like the US State Department. Even so, I think I have shown, convincingly except for those who have too much to lose from realizing the truth, that the spread of Americanism, geopolitically, geo-economically, geoculturally, is not some innocent or inevitable diffusion of the technically superior or the inherently good. Instead, the spread of sophisticated ideologies during neo-imperialistic expansion is in the interests of concentrated, committed and coercive power – and by ‘concentrated’ we mean a few hundred thousand people at most, living in a tiny fraction of world space, and within this group a few thousand super-rich ‘investors’.

Power means control, by a person or an institution, over the minds, livelihoods and beliefs of others. Power accumulates into systems. With the term ‘geography of power’ I refer to the concentration of power in a few spaces that control a world of distant others. My argument is that a new kind of economic power system has arrived on the world scene. Power has increasingly been accumulated at the global level by governance institutions – the G7/G8, the European Union, the Bretton Woods Institutions and the United Nations. These institutions control the economies and livelihoods of people the world over through policy devices like structural adjustment, the ‘conditionalities’ accompanying loans or debt relief, annual inspections by teams of experts, and other similar strategies. This book looks at types of power accumulation – economic, ideological, political – and the forms taken by power in global space. And the book examines popular resistance to concentrated power by alternatives constructed by social movements and organic intellectuals. Let me begin by dissecting the term ‘global governance institution’. ‘Global’ implies that governance power transcends national commitment in favour of some kind of ‘universal interest’. On the surface, this interest is humanitarian concern about global poverty. Yet global institutions condition ‘aid to poor countries’ on their adopting a set of neoliberal policies. These insist on an exaggeratedly market-organized, export-oriented economy. Such an economy is said to produce the economic growth that creates jobs and reduces poverty. Yet these policies also favour free enterprise, private capital investment and the extraction of profit from poor countries. Global governance institutions therefore act, at least in part, in the interests of global capital. Humanitarian governance has a class bias. It favours private investment and global financial integration. And, while ‘global’ in their sphere of operations, governance institutions cluster their headquarters in relatively few places. The resulting centres of global power are exclusively cities in Western capitalist countries: either the capitals of leading national powers, overwhelmingly New York (for example, the United Nations) and Washington, DC (the International Monetary Fund and World Bank), or definitely Western, but officially neutral, political spaces, as with Geneva, Switzerland (the World Trade Organization and many UN agencies). So in terms of its geography, ‘global’ has come to mean the spatial expansion of the field of the exercise of power accompanied by the spatial concentration of control in a few Western cities. In the twin terms of class and space, a few thousand people, clustered in a small space, control the lives of billions of others, the world over. In this light too, ‘governance’ in the above phrase (‘global governance’) means regulation, management and control of national economic policy by institutions that are, at best, indirectly elected (i.e. through governments). In this undemocratic context, policy is legitimized as true and correct more by science and expert opinion than by electoral consent. This may sound fine – a kind of global Plato’s Republic, wisely directed by modern-scientific, rather than classicalphilosopher, kings. More critically, scientific, humanitarian governance may be read as a new, kindly faced version of Western imperialism. Global governance and expert-designed economic policy have a powergeography in two of main senses of this originally Foucauldian term. First, the world cities where governance institutions congregate, and experts co-mingle, display landscapes imbued with the trappings of Western power – locating the headquarters, and much of the bureaucracy, in such centres lends the policies they prescribe the aura of Western authority. Second, this ambient content is released as ‘power effects’ as policies extend over space, from power centres to dependent peripheries, and are adopted, under varying conditions of compulsion, in capital cities all over the world. The two power-geographies, place and space, reinforce each other in symbiotic embrace. As a result, the main international financial institutions (IFIs), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, have become powerful institutions indeed. This book describes the geography of the power system formed from the undemocratic concentration of power over others in a few small spaces. Understanding the sources, mechanisms and relations of power with any degree of adequacy requires a set of analytical concepts. My idea, in this book, is to resuscitate some existing concepts, reorient others and add new versions of still more. But as Marx may once almost have said, new theoretical approaches are sought not to further knowledge for ‘its own sake’, whatever that might be. Rather, the objective is to develop concepts whose logic, style and passion are so appealing, at least to people of conscience, that merely encountering them is an inspiration to resistance.

The arrival of the United States as a dominant power in the international system signaled an innovation in global rule-making. The key problem for explanatory theories in International Political Economy is that the territorial reach of political power is limited, and that in order to secure the survival of a territorial unit, access to resources, markets, and manpower abroad is needed. This can be achieved through conquest, competition, or cooperation. The United States devised a particularly ingenious solution to this dilemma. Instead of pursuing an outright imperial strategy of occupation, the United States supported the juridical sovereignty of states, but within international institutions that are mostly controlled by the United States. These developed common rules to which states more or less voluntarily adhered—since in part they participated in their making, and the rules provided some benefits. Elite socialization then cemented these global institutions at the national level (Ikenberry and Kupchan 1990). Writing from a critical political economy perspective, Robert Cox (1981) summarized this development as the internationalization of the state. This phenomenon is now acknowledged even by Realist authors (Drezner 2008). Four institutions are central in this context: The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the more recently created World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Bank for International Settlement. The US dominates these organizations either through its controlling share of votes (IMF, World Bank) or through its market power (WTO). According to Cox (1981), these organizations represent a “machinery of surveillance” that institutionalizes a mechanism for the “harmonisation of national policies” (p. 145), not only for developing countries but also for advanced industrialized countries.

The EU climate-development policies further a specific set of identities both for the EU itself and for the target countries, which is directly connected to the visibility of climate change as a global risk with mostly local impacts. At its core is the dichotomy between locally-bound, vulnerable Southern populations and the climate savvy and internationally well connected actors from the Global North – here predominantly represented by the EU. This differentiation is connected to both governmental and disciplinary power. Here, once again normation i.e. the differentiation between the artificially created ideal typical norm (climate resilient citizens of the Global North) and the deviation (vulnerable, Southern populations) and normalisation come into play. Both of these concepts ultimately constitute the EU as the active, powerful and knowledgeable actor who belongs to the global elite, while local populations become passive, and in relation to climate change and its risks, not sufficiently educated and adapted victims. Thus, the analysed documents agree that climate change will hit the poorest countries and people first and hardest (EU Commission 2010: 6; GCCA 2012: 2, 5; GCCA+ 2015: 6). This diagnosis is based both on geographical location (GCCA+ 2015: 3) but, more importantly, also on insufficient coping capacity and resilience of people in developing countries, which goes back to inadequate political and economic development (GCCA 2012: 2, 5, 13, 30). This is even more true for the LDCs and SIDS, which, according to the GCCA ‘often have fragile economies and face a range of different challenges with limited capacities to address them.’ (GCCA 2012: 13). Moreover, it rests on a lack of crucial knowledge and technologies to identify and withstand climate risks: ‘But even developing countries with more diversified economies are vulnerable, since the lack of financial resources, adequate technology and effective institutions limits their capacity to adapt to the consequences of climate change’ (European Commission 2010: 6). Against this depiction of developing countries, the EU is constituted as a climate ‘leader’ (GCCA 2012: 5) and ideal saviour that embodies and implements the international support (GCCA+ 2015: 10) for the countries and people in need (EU Commission 2010: 4, 5): The EU is in a unique position to help developing countries respond to the effects of climate change, given its leading role in development, global climate policy, the wide array of tools and instruments at its disposal, and its extensive presence in the developing world. This narrative is underlined by mentioning that the EU is already spending large amounts of money on climate development aid e.g. in the context of the Fast Start Finance and is the world’s biggest provider of Official Development Assistance (ODA) (EU Commission 2010: 5). Thus, it becomes very clear who has the agency and knowledge and who has to be transformed. At the same time, while occasionally referring to the heightened responsibility of Northern countries including the EU (EU Commission 2010: 6, 13), this identity construction does not call out the main perpetrators and damaging practices when it comes to climate change. Hence, it largely avoids mentioning that in order to tackle the root causes of the problem, the answer is neither adaptation, low emission growth in the South or development cooperation, but first of all radical change at home. This divide between the active and international EU and the passive, local development actors is reinforced by the increasingly complicated array of climate abatement measures. Thus, the deployment of the different risk management schemes, market instruments and connected emission monitoring and verification schemes necessitate a specific kind of expertise and technology. And while local knowledge plays some role in the refinement of these schemes (Council of the EU 2004: 14), this expertise is mostly to be found in the hands of ‘carbon professionals’ from the EU, international organisations and NGOs (Methmann 2011: 84). In the words of a central report on climate change and development cooperation, it is about ‘using southern based knowledge and northern innovations’ (Council of the EU 2004: 14). This differentiation in terms of who has the knowledge and who is constituted as sender/recipient of expertise can become problematic, as CDM measures such as renewable energy projects often clash with the priorities of the local population, yet due to the lead and specific form of expertise of experts from the outside, cannot be adequately adapted to these circumstances (Methmann 2011: 84).

While it has received most attention for its leadership and commitment in the international climate negotiations (Wurzel and Connelly 2011a), the EU also has become a crucial actor when it comes to tackling climate change in developing countries and emerging economies (Adelle et al. 2018b; Jerpstad 2019; Torney et al. 2018). On the one hand, the motives for stepping up its external engagement are linked to climate justice considerations and to the international climate regime. Thus, the EU from early on accepted the historical responsibility of industrialised countries for climate change (EU Commission 1991: 2; EU Commission 1988: 35) – formalised by the principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibility (CBDR) in the UNFCCC – which, besides decisive mitigation, also compelled it to support developing countries. However, especially since the mid-2000s, the EU also has increasingly began to argue for the need to overcome the clear-cut threshold between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries embodied in the CBDR. In this vein, it has emphasised the growing responsibilities of powerful emerging economies when it comes to fighting underdevelopment and mitigating climate change (Jerpstad 2019: 74–75, 77). The EU thus departed from exclusively looking at historical responsibilities and realised that climate change could hardly be fought without including the Global South and especially large emerging economies, which, however, would not act without substantive support (Adelle et al. 2018b: 82; Peskett et al. 2009: 6–7). Finally, the EU has increasingly assumed a role as mediator between industrialised and developing countries, which has led some to conceptualise it as a ‘leadiator’ (Bäckstrand and Elgström 2013), and which also has furthered its interest in cooperating with actors from the Global South (Torney and Cross 2018; Walker 2018). On the other hand, there are also less altruistic drivers for the EU’s increasing interest in climate policies in developing countries. Important examples are increased NGO pressure to ‘climate proof’ its development activities (Colebourn 2011: 6) and the desire to further exercise and showcase the EU’s normative power and to create commercial opportunities through the promotion of green economy projects in the Global South (Barnes 2011: 51; van Schaik and Schunz 2012; Wurzel and Connelly 2011b: 9). The starting point of the EU’s external climate-development policies was the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty. Together with the increasing importance of ‘sustainable development’ and the Cardiff Process (EU Commission 1998; Roeck 2018: 13), this subsequently led to an integration of environmental issues in the European Community’s Development Policy and later the 2005 Consensus on Development (Adelle et al. 2018b: 82–83; Peskett et al. 2009: 5). The issue gathered particular momentum with the 2004 Action Plan on Climate Change in the Context of Development Cooperation (Council of the EU 2004), which substantiated the EU’s activities in this sector and kick-started the mainstreaming of climate change into all EU development activities. Besides the 2007 Adaptation Green Paper (Peskett et al. 2009: 8), this process also led to a number of bilateral cooperation agreements with large emerging economies including the China, India, Brazil, South Africa, South Korea and later also Mexico (EU Commission 2010: 8–9). Another explanation for bringing together the EU’s climate and development activities was the construction of climate change as a security issue, which primarily forecasted developing countries to be affected by the security implication of climate change (Solana and EU Commission 2008: 2, 4). Key reports and developments in this area were the 2008 report on Climate Change and International Security (Solana and EU Commission 2008), the integration of climate change into the European Security Strategy, and the discussion of its security implications in the Foreign Affairs Council (EU Commission 2010: 9). Finally, the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in 2015, which explicitly included the fight against climate change (UN 2015: 5, 18), further strengthened the links between climate and development in the EU strategy (Roeck 2018: 7). Besides integrating climate change into its foreign and security policy, existing development programmes and the European Neighbourhood Policy, the EU established several thematic programmes to deal with climate change in other countries. From 2007 to 2013 these issues were partly covered by the Environment and Sustainable Management of Natural Resources including Energy Thematic Programme (ENRTP) (Adelle et al. 2018b: 87). Another key programme is the Global Public Goods and Challenge Programme (GPGC), which for the current period (2014–2020) devotes about 600 million euro to facilitate ‘resilient’, ‘low carbon societies’ (EU Commission 2014: 3) and is also linked to the Climate Change Mitigation-Supporting Low-Carbon Development Flagship Initiative (Adelle et al. 2018b: 87). In addition, although having a broader focus, some aspects of the 2009 Climate Change and Energy Package and the European Emission Trading System (ETS) are relevant for the EU’s climate development co-operation (Peskett et al. 2009: 9–10). Finally, in 2007, the EU established the Global Climate Change Alliance (GCCA). The initiative has been led by the newly created Directorate General for International Cooperation and Development (DG DEVCO) since 2011 and has become the centrepiece of the EU’s climate-development instruments. After a slow start, the GCCA added more target countries and in 2014 became a so called ‘flagship initiative’. After the Paris Agreement in 2015, it was expanded and renamed GCCA+. The GCCA+ now facilitates cooperation with over 70 countries and, since 2017, also includes mitigation projects (GCCA+ 2018a, 2018b). The core mission of the GCCA+ is to ‘support[s] those developing countries which are most vulnerable to climate change in implementing their national commitments’ (GCCA+ 2018b), which includes National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) and since the 2015 Paris Agreement also Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).

In this section, we unpack ecological imperialism, distilling its core dynamics and characteristics, to provide the theoretical framework for the kernel of our argument: mining FDI is not a force for development but rather the manifestation of ecological imperialism in Africa generally, and Ghana in particular (see Clark and Foster 2009). Ecological imperialism sheds light on the disastrous ecological implications of the exploitation of Ghana by global mining capital; an aspect of imperialism so often eclipsed by the materialist thrust of mainstream discourses of imperialism, new imperialism, and neocolonialism, espoused at various times by the likes of Vladimir Lenin, Kwame Nkrumah, Samir Amin, David Harvey, and Patrick Bond. Usually emphasized in the classical imperialism literature are economic exploitation and the inherently unfair terms of trade in the way that Africa is integrated into the capitalist global economy. To be added to these, however, are the commodification and pillage of the ecosystems of countries and communities endowed with high-value and much-sought-after natural resources such as gold, diamonds, bauxite, and cobalt. The extraction of these resources makes mining capital one of the ferocious ecological imperialist forces in Africa. Ecological imperialism is driven, shaped, and characterized by a number of interrelated, underlying dynamics. First, there is a single, expanding capitalist world/global economy that accumulates across the world and individual nation-states' boundaries. This economy is characterized by the international division of labor between the core, mainly consisting of advanced and industrialised economies producing and trading manufactured goods, and the periphery, with developing or less-developed, or relatively unindustrialised economies producing and trading in raw materials. 'The industrial economy', Martinez-Alier et al. (2016: 468) argue, "has a voracious appetite for fresh supplies; it goes to the commodity extraction frontiers to get new resources, in greater and greater quantities. And it deposits the waste anywhere it can (the atmosphere, the oceans, the rivers and soils...)" (See also Moore 2015: 158-160). The periphery is the "commodity extraction frontiers" (emphasis original). The core and periphery division may coincide with some geographical divisions, such as continents; but they do not necessarily equate to them, nor is the core/periphery division static and unchanging. Over time, this international division of labor has changed, with countries such as China, hitherto in the periphery, now in the core; producing and exporting manufactured goods to both the core and periphery. Analytically and ontologically, the core and periphery are better viewed as complementary parts of the world economy (see Hopkins and Wallerstein 1972; see also Biel 2012). Despite changes in the international division of labor, driven partly by neoliberal globalization, the core/periphery division is key to the conceptualization of ecological imperialism; especially with respect to Africa where the new international division of labor still leaves most of it in the periphery, consigned to the role of a quarry for drawing raw material to the core, with all the deleterious ecological effects. Second, and closely linked to the first, we live in a single world ecology in which we are part and parcel of, yet humans also make and remake the ecology through the processes and means by which we produce and reproduce ourselves materially and socially (Moore 2015). Karl Marx in his usual eruditeness and eloquence described the organic relationship between the re(production) of human beings and nature; Labor is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way, he simultaneously changes his own nature (Marx 1976: 283). Human beings across the world, as the work of human and anthropological ecologists illustrates (see Richardson et al. 1996; Johnson and Earle 2000), have throughout the millennia of their existence on earth appropriated the environment to produce and reproduce themselves. From simple foraging/hunting and gathering societies to more complex industrial societies, human beings have exploited the resources of the nonhuman environment in which they live for their survival. Ecological imperialism, as discussed below, is spawned by a specific mode of appropriating the ecology, not for survival, but for money. Third, the sustainability of the world ecology that we live in varies with the imperatives and modes of our production and reproduction; that is whether we appropriate the ecology, as we must do, to sustain livelihoods or as a commodity saleable for profit. The former is socialized appropriation, a necessity of life, the dynamics and characteristics of which are more ecologically sustainable than the latter, capitalist appropriation. This is an avaricious appropriation, the logics and mechanisms of which are inherently destructive to the ecology (Biel 2012; Moore 2015). Socialized appropriation, as observed above, is natural and engaged by humankind across time and space, capitalist appropriation is specific to the capitalist mode of production. Since its emergence in England in the eighteenth century, capitalism is inherently contradictory to the sustainable appropriation of the ecology by humankind. It is "largely indifferent to the complexity and continuity of ecological and social structures, and how they may be governed by different rhythms, seasons and social relations from those associated with the capitalist market system" (Gill 2018: 248). Capital sees nature not as a livelihood resource to be appropriated sustainably, but as something to be capitalized; namely, to be commodified and converted to more and more cash (Moore 2015: 160-161). It is not only in normal times that the accumulation imperative and mechanisms of capital are inherently damaging to the ecology. They are even worse during its inherent cyclical crises. In its effort to reinvent itself out of these crises, capital becomes more and more voracious in its "appetite for new frontiers of appropriation" (Moore 2015: 161; see also Biel 2012); thus, engineering ecological imperialism. The last point is that capital's indifference to the sustainability of the ecology – and the pillage of the ecology that accompanies it – neither distributes the benefits and losses of capitalist accumulation equally between the periphery and the core of the capitalist economy, nor does it do so between classes in both the core and the periphery. So, in addition to the exploitative economic terms by which some regions in the periphery are integrated into the global economy is the unequal ecological exchange between them and those in the core. Both in normal times of accumulation and during its cyclical crises, capital engenders disastrous ecological effects in the periphery: it extracts massive resources from the periphery to the core, and in the process wreaks havoc on the ecosystem through extractive mechanisms such as mining. In addition, the negative effects of its accumulation mechanisms in the core spreads to the periphery through natural forces, or are deliberately channelled there by the deliberate actions of the forces of capitalism, such as the dumping of waste, including e-waste in the periphery. "The Global South countries", Oulu (2016: 447) argues, "thus tend to serve as a source of raw materials and sink for waste products for industrialized countries… Such unequal material-ecological exchanges perpetuate global inequalities and uneven environmental impacts which disproportionately harm the people in developing countries but enhance the productive capacity of the developed." (See also Clark and Foster 2009: 311-312; Martinez-Alier et al. 2016: 468). All the preceding dynamics of the capitalist global economy interact to configure and drive ecological imperialism; the motor that has driven (and continues to drive) capitalist accumulation since its origins. Even though capitalism emerged in and engendered industrialization in the Western industrialized countries, these developments needed the appropriation of ecosystems outside their spatial confines. They needed land, labor, minerals (silver and gold), food, and other raw materials from Africa, the New World, and beyond. The exploitation of these natural resources, just as the exploitation of minerals and oil in Africa today, wrought implacable ecological destruction. From the onset, therefore, ecological imperialism was critical to capitalism and capitalist development in the core centers of the capitalist world system (Crosby 2004; Moore 2015; Pomeranz 2000). The extent to which capital's appropriation of the ecology of Africa and the New World influenced the development of the core capitalist countries is debatable, but the influence itself is not. As correctly noted by Pomeranz (2000), the pillaging of the ecology of Africa and the New World was not the sole motor of European development, but it provided some of the essential land-intensive resources that Europe lacked but needed to drive its industrial revolution. Britain, the cradle of the industrial revolution, took advantage of the core-periphery relationship of the capitalist world-system to gain "access to some of the landintensive products that all the major Eurasian cores were, by the late eighteenth century, finding it difficult to secure enough of (Pomeranz 2000: 185-86). Africa has served and continues to serve as part of the 'cheap Nature' that capital appropriates on a world scale for the accumulation of wealth and for reinventing itself out of its cyclical crises (Moore 2015). It seems, therefore, that ecological imperialism – in the way that it is central to capitalist accumulation – will be with Africa for a long time. Large-scale mining by foreign companies represents one of the ligaments of continuity through the history of ecological imperialism in Africa. It is this present-day ecological imperialism in Ghana that we turn to below.

We must avoid defining the passage to Empire in purely negative terms, in terms of what it is not, as for example is done when one says: the new paradigm is defined by the definitive decline of the sovereign nation-states, by the deregulation of international markets, by the end of antagonistic conflict among state subjects, and so forth. If the new paradigm were to consist simply in this, then its consequences would be truly anarchic. Power, however—and Michel Foucault was not the only one to teach us this—fears and despises a vacuum. The new paradigm functions already in completely positive terms—and it could not be otherwise. The new paradigm is both system and hierarchy, centralized construction of norms and far-reaching production of legitimacy, spread out over world space. It is configured ab initio as a dynamic and flexible systemic structure that is articulated horizontally. We conceive the structure in a kind of intellectual shorthand as a hybrid of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory and John Rawls’s theory of justice.20 Some call this situation ‘‘governance without government’’ to indicate the structural logic, at times imperceptible but always and increasingly effective, that sweeps all actors within the order of the whole.21 The systemic totality has a dominant position in the global order, breaking resolutely with every previous dialectic and developing an integration of actors that seems linear and spontaneous. At the same time, however, the effectiveness of the consensus under a supreme authority of the ordering appears ever more clearly. All conflicts, all crises, and all dissensions effectively push forward the process of integration and by the same measure call for more central authority. Peace, equilibrium, and the cessation of conflict are the values toward which everything is directed. The development of the global system (and of imperial right in the first place) seems to be the development of a machine that imposes procedures of continual contractualization that lead to systemic equilibria—a machine that creates a continuous call for authority. The machine seems to predetermine the exercise of authority and action across the entire social space. Every movement is fixed and can seek its own designated place only within the system itself, in the hierarchical relationship accorded to it. This preconstituted movement defines the reality of the process of the imperial constitutionalization of world order—the new paradigm. This imperial paradigm is qualitatively different from the various attempts in the period of transition to define a project of international order.22 Whereas the previous, transitional perspectives focused attention on the legitimating dynamics that would lead toward the new order, in the new paradigm it is as if the new order were already constituted. The conceptual inseparability of the title and exercise of power is affirmed from the outset, as the effective a priori of the system. The imperfect coincidence, or better the ever-present temporal and spatial disjunctions between the new central power and the field of application of its regulation, do not lead to crises or paralysis but merely force the system to minimize and overcome them. In short, the paradigm shift is defined, at least initially, by the recognition that only an established power, overdetermined with respect to and relatively autonomous from the sovereign nation-states, is capable of functioning as the center of the new world order, exercising over it an effective regulation and, when necessary, coercion. It follows that, as Kelsen wanted, but only as a paradoxical effect of his utopia, a sort of juridical positivism also dominates the formation of a new juridical ordering.23 The capacity to form a system is, in effect, presupposed by the real process of its formation. Moreover, the process of formation, and the subjects that act in it, are attracted in advance toward the positively defined vortex of the center, and this attraction becomes irresistible, not only in the name of the capacity of the center to exercise force, but also in the name of the formal power, which resides in the center, to frame and systematize the totality. Once again we find a hybrid of Luhmann and Rawls, but even before them we have Kelsen, that utopian and thus involuntary and contradictory discoverer of the soul of imperial right! Once again, the ancient notions of Empire help us articulate better the nature of this world order in formation. As Thucydides, Livy, and Tacitus all teach us (along with Machiavelli commenting on their work), Empire is formed not on the basis of force itself but on the basis of the capacity to present force as being in the service of right and peace. All interventions of the imperial armies are solicited by one or more of the parties involved in an already existing conflict. Empire is not born of its own will but rather it is called into being and constituted on the basis of its capacity to resolve conflicts. Empire is formed and its intervention becomes juridically legitimate only when it is already inserted into the chain of international consensuses aimed at resolving existing conflicts. To return to Machiavelli, the expansion of Empire is rooted in the internal trajectory of the conflicts it is meant to resolve.24 The first task of Empire, then, is to enlarge the realm of the consensuses that support its own power. The ancient model gives us a first approximation, but we need to go well beyond it to articulate the terms of the global model of authority operating today. Juridical positivism and natural right theories, contractualism and institutional realism, formalism and systematism can each describe some aspect of it. Juridical positivism can emphasize the necessity for a strong power to exist at the center of the normative process; natural right theories can highlight the values of peace and equilibrium that the imperial process offers; contractualism can foreground the formation of consensus; realism can bring to light the formative processes of the institutions adequate to the new dimensions of consensus and authority; and formalism can give logical support to what systematism justifies and organizes functionally, emphasizing the totalizing character of the process. What juridical model, however, grasps all these characteristics of the new supranational order? In first attempting a definition, we would do well to recognize that the dynamics and articulations of the new supranational juridical order correspond strongly to the new characteristics that have come to define internal orderings in the passage from modernity to postmodernity.25 We should recognize this correspondence (perhaps in Kelsen’s manner, and certainly in a realistic mode) not so much as a ‘‘domestic analogy’’ for the international system, but rather as a ‘‘supranational analogy’’ for the domestic legal system. The primary characteristics of both systems involve hegemony over juridical practices, such as procedure, prevention, and address. Normativity, sanction, and repression follow from these and are formed within the procedural developments. The reason for the relative (but effective) coincidence of the new functioning of domestic law and supranational law derives first of all from the fact that they operate on the same terrain, namely, the terrain of crisis. As Carl Schmitt has taught us, however, crisis on the terrain of the application of law should focus our attention on the ‘‘exception’’ operative in the moment of its production.26 Domestic and supranational law are both defined by their exceptionality. The function of exception here is very important. In order to take control of and dominate such a completely fluid situation, it is necessary to grant the intervening authority (1) the capacity to define, every time in an exceptional way, the demands of intervention; and (2) the capacity to set in motion the forces and instruments that in various ways can be applied to the diversity and the plurality of the arrangements in crisis. Here, therefore, is born, in the name of the exceptionality of the intervention, a form of right that is really a right of the police. The formation of a new right is inscribed in the deployment of prevention, repression, and rhetorical force aimed at the reconstruction of social equilibrium: all this is proper to the activity of the police. We can thus recognize the initial and implicit source of imperial right in terms of police action and the capacity of the police to create and maintain order. The legitimacy of the imperial ordering supports the exercise of police power, while at the same time the activity of global police force demonstrates the real effectiveness of the imperial ordering. The juridical power to rule over the exception and the capacity to deploy police force are thus two initial coordinates that define the imperial model of authority. Universal Values We might well ask at this point, however, should we still use the juridical term ‘‘right’’ in this context? How can we call right (and specifically imperial right) a series of techniques that, founded on a state of permanent exception and the power of the police, reduces right and law to a question of pure effectiveness? In order to address these questions, we should first look more closely at the process of imperial constitution that we are witnessing today. We should emphasize from the start that its reality is demonstrated not only by the transformations of international law it brings about, but also by the changes it effects in the administrative law of individual societies and nation-states, or really in the administrative law of cosmopolitical society.27 Through its contemporary transformation of supranational law, the imperial process of constitution tends either directly or indirectly to penetrate and reconfigure the domestic law of the nation-states, and thus supranational law powerfully overdetermines domestic law. Perhaps the most significant symptom of this transformation is the development of the so-called right of intervention.28 This is commonly conceived as the right or duty of the dominant subjects of the world order to intervene in the territories of other subjects in the interest of preventing or resolving humanitarian problems, guaranteeing accords, and imposing peace. The right of intervention figured prominently among the panoply of instruments accorded the United Nations by its Charter for maintaining international order, but the contemporary reconfiguration of this right represents a qualitative leap. No longer, as under the old international ordering, do individual sovereign states or the supranational (U.N.) power intervene only to ensure or impose the application of voluntarily engaged international accords. Now supranational subjects that are legitimated not by right but by consensus intervene in the name of any type of emergency and superior ethical principles. What stands behind this intervention is not just a permanent state of emergency and exception, but a permanent state of emergency and exception justified by the appeal to essential values of justice. In other words, the right of the police is legitimated by universal values.29

Evidence suggests seismic shifts may be taking place in the political as well as technological landscapes of the world today the likes of which have not been witnessed since the 17th and 18th centuries. Although it is foolish to try to predict the outcome of such changes, democratic societies founded on universal suffrage, human rights, and the rule of law definitely appear to be under threat (Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018; Rich 2017; MacLean 2017). In the shadow of these economic, political, and technological developments, the physical environment is itself becoming less hospitable to biological life and this trend looks likely to intensify as the present millenium progresses. In the context of global climate change, it is gradually becoming accepted that the very survival of humanity may actually be at stake although most writers, scientists and activists understandably choose to focus on the prospects of retrieving the situation before it is too late (Flannery 2010; Gibson, Rose & Fincher 2015; Kaku 2018; Akhavan 2017; Oreskes & Conway 2014).xxxvii Current debates concerning sapiens’ relationships with the natural world are many, however, and undercut many anthropocentric assumptions about the world that have consistently been pedalled by humans to justify our actions throughout history. What can definitely be agreed, at least for the moment, is that planet Earth is the only home humans – as well as every other life form that we know – have. It would be presumptuous to suggest that all life on Earth will cease as a result of human impact, but it is nevertheless reasonable to conclude that dramatic changes will significantly alter the planet’s capacity to maintain a sprawling human population of more than seven billion people as well as sustain the habitats of the vast majority of other living creatures. In the context of political and economic developments, the last century has seen the central role of the Nation-State appear to have been both reworked and eroded. For if at the end of the 19th century, the role of collectively representing individual as well as collective human interests had been assumed by the Nation-State, by the beginning of the 21st century, the interlocked relationship between State and Nation have become significantly weakened and the position of individuals and society as a whole no longer appear to be the primary focus. This is evident in war events and the rise of civilian targets as well as in the evolution of general economic, tax, social welfare, labour and corporate regulation. The instrumental power of the State now appears to privilege the interests of global capital and the large multinational corporations that articulate it rather than “the people’s”. In this emerging scenario, the needs and necessities of “the people”, as can be said also of the needs and necessities of the biosphere in general, are subsumed to the interests and logics of capital. This, however, is only the latest elaboration of the underlying philosophy enshrining “star” fixated economic liberalism (Das 2015:15) that Western culture has doggedly pursued throughout modernity. At national level, the “rugged individualism” of liberalism has realised enormous economic and technological development and innovation but it has come at the expense of ever greater concentrations of wealth and power, environmental and human exploitation. As well as entrenching systemic inequality, economic liberalism has maintain an outward appearance of a broad commitment to the betterment and freedom of humanity in general through the individual. Compounding this, the regulatory systems established for globalisation allows corporations to run up enormous debt in the pursuit of profit but then enables them to shed such debt onto society when the things go sour. The shedding of privately accumulated debt as collective responsibility during times of recession has become an unavoidable consequence of capitalism’s boom/bust cycles and is usually justified by statements that the consequences of allowing such large corporations to go bankrupt are worse than the cost of bailing them out. With privately oriented liberal economics adopted as social policy, communities bear the risks while profits are disbursed to corporate stakeholders, or as Veroufakis puts it, sharing the burden of venture capital at the same time as enabling “public investments” to prop up or become a part of ever growing corporate empires (Veroufakis 2017). The healthy profits private interests accumulate then encourages further risktaking ‘innovations’ and so the cycle continues until such innovations overstep the mark and stock exchange credibility disappears thus unleashing the next crash. Encouraging individual enterprise and greed is, according to Adam Smith and other liberal thinkers, the most efficient way to improve the economic well-being of the community. So large and very large corporations have become the beneficiaries of collective largesse as corporate welfare (though not general social security) has become more prevalent. In practice this means that average taxpayers help line the pockets of the already rich and powerful, bringing into higher relief the fact that many multinational corporations often pay no or negligible rates of tax on income. The global trend towards lower company tax contrasts with the rising tax burden ordinary individuals are being asked to bear in terms of health, education, and social welfare. This exacerbates the shift in tax regimes from income to consumption taxes which obscures how those earning on lower incomes end up paying higher proportions of their salaries on indirect consumption taxes because taxes on goods and services are charged at the same rate irrespective of how much one earns. Add to that the generous allowances and subventions National governments avail to corporations in contrast to the stringent tax enforcement regimes individuals are subjected to, and the imbalance between people and corporate’ tax burdens is even more apparent. Now lets concede that rich corporations and wealthy individuals are best positioned to take advantage of tax avoidance and minimisation accounting practices (West 2019xxxviii) and even the most partial commentator cannot avoid the honest conclusion that inequality is embedded in global regulation that promotes the growing gap between those who have and those who have not.

Before I suggest a way of thinking about global responsibility during these times of war, I want. to distance myself from some mistaken ways of approchmg the problem. Those, for instance, who wage war in the name of the common good, those who kill in the name of democracy or security, those who make incursio~s into the sovereign lands of others in the name of sovereIgnty-all consider themselves to be "acting globally" and even to be executing a certain "global responsibility." In the US we have heard in recent years about "bringing democracy" to countries where it is apparently lacking; we have heard, too about "installing democracy." In such moments we 'have to ask what democracy means if it is not based on popular decision and majority rule. Can one power "bring" or "install" democracy on a people ~ve.r whom it has no jurisdiction? If a form of power IS Imposed upon a people who do not choose that form of power, then that is, by definition, an undemocratic process. If the form of power imposed is called "democracy" then we have an even larger problem: can "democracy" be the name of a form of political power that is undemocratically imposed? Democracy has to name the means through which political power is achieved as well as the result of that process. And this creates something of a bind, since a majority can certainly vote in an undemocratic form of power (as the Germans did when electing Hitler in 1933), but military powers can also seek to "install" democracy through overriding or suspending elections and other expressions of the popular will, and by means that are patently undemocratic. In both cases, democracy fails. How do these brief reflections on the perils of democracy affect our way of thinking about global responsibility in times of war? First, we must be wary of invocations of "global responsibility" which assume that one country has a distinctive responsibility to bring democracy to countries. I am sure that there are cases in which intervention is important-to forestall genocide, for instance. But such an intervention with a global mission or, indeed, with an arrogant politics in which forms of government are forcibly implemented that are in the political and economic interests of the military power responsible for that very implementation. In such cases, we probably want to say-or at least I want to say that this form of global responsibility is irresponsible, if not openly contradictory. We could say that in such instances the word "responsibility" is simply misused or abused. And I would tend to agree. But that may not be enough, since historical circumstances demand that we give new meanings to the notion of "responsibility." Indeed, there is a challenge before us to rethink and reformulate a conception of global responsibility that would counter this imperialist appropriation and its politics of imposition. imperialist appropriation and its politics of imposition. To that end, I want to return to the question of the "we" and think first about what happens to this "we" during times of war. Whose lives are regarded as lives worth saving and defending, and whose are not? Second, I want to ask how we might rethink the "we" in global terms in ways that counter the politics of imposition. Lastly, and in the chapters to come, I want to consider why the opposition to torture is obligatory, and how we might derive an important sense of global responsibility from a politics that opposes the use of torture in any and all of its forms. 2

Climate intervention: Imperialism, the capitalist state, and SAI The “classical” notion of liberalism as an excoriation of servility and domination in the name of individual liberty has always been predicated upon and sustained by its opposite. In Domenico Losurdo’s apposite conception, the liberal project constructs a “community of the free” which rules over those condemned to its constitutive outside through three forms of “dictatorship”: “civilized” peoples over “barbarians” in the colonies; suppression of popular subversion in the metropolis; and capacity to limit political change via reform from above (Losurdo, 2011: 256). The liberal “community of the free” cannot be widened indefinitely as its hegemony is (re)produced by the dictatorships through which it rules. Indeed, forms of primitive accumulation, expropriation, exploitation, and exclusion construct and define the severely restricted realm of “the political” in liberal-capitalism, as the power of the capitalist class is predicated upon the formal separation of “the economic” from the “the political.” This is a fiction, but nonetheless materially operative—a “real abstraction” (Thomas, 2009; Toscano, 2008)—imposing limits on the capacity for political intervention into realms deemed private or governed by “nature” (Losurdo, 2011: 192–193; see also Poulantzas, 2000; Wood, 1981). Hence, while the economic and the political are interdependent, the state can only “intervene” in the capitalist economy, and the language of “intervention” is presupposed by the formal separation of these two realms. As Poulantzas argues (2000: 190–191, original emphasis): The limits to state intervention in the economy are consubstantial with the relative separation under capitalism of the political state-space and that of the economy … the State exists if and only if the hard core of capitalist relations of production is guaranteed, thereby ensuring the exploitation of the working class … the capitalist State is constituted by a negative general limit to its intervention—that is to say, by specific non-intervention in the “hard core” of capitalist relations of production … within a global strategy of hegemony, state activity is constituted as ad-hoc tinkering with conditions already laid down by the process of valorization of capital. That process is not susceptible to mastery by the State. Capital’s solipsistic drive for accumulation cannot be mastered, merely managed in an “ad hoc” fashion within a global strategy of hegemony whereby the state does not direct the capitalist economy, but structures the political conditions that undergird and enable its expansionary drives (Panitch and Gindin, 2005; Wood, 2005). As Wood argues, the drive for accumulation cannot be realized “unless and until the ‘laws’ of the capitalist economy are themselves extended—and this is something that needs extra-economic help, both in domestic class relations and in imperial domination” (2005: 20). This interplay leads David Harvey (2003) and Giovanni Arrighi (2010) to define capitalist imperialism as a dialectic of “capitalist and territorial logics of power.”5 For Harvey, capitalist imperialism is a contradictory fusion of “‘the politics of state and empire’ … and ‘the molecular processes of capital accumulation in space and time’” (Harvey, 2003: 26). The latter aim to exploit “asymmetries” in capital accumulation (unequal exchange, monopoly rents, extortionate practices, etc.), with the former working to “preserve that pattern of asymmetries … to its own advantage” (Harvey, 2003: 31–32). Thus, for Arrighi, capitalism as an imperial world-system is predicated upon finding systemic resolutions to the tension between “the endless accumulation of capital and a comparatively stable organization of political space” (Arrighi, 2010: 34). Such resolutions have historically emerged in hegemonic states capable of expanding the spatio-organizational capacities of capital accumulation by “widening (or deepening) the functional and spatial scope of the capitalist world economy” (Arrighi, 2010: 225). Hence British hegemony enfolded settler states into the orbit of capitalism via colonial-territorial control and “free-trade imperialism,” and post-Second World War U.S. hegemony absorbed decolonizing states via formal sovereignty and market rule. Indeed, under U.S. hegemony the imperial scope of liberal-capitalism extended to a truly world-scale (Arrighi, 2010: 76). Yet, as U.S. hegemony is potentially in decline, prospects for a renewed era of expanded accumulation are in doubt, requiring a “territorial” strategy of spatio-organizational expansion beyond the world-scale instituted by the U.S., and the capacity to “internalize the costs of reproducing both human life and nature, which the U.S. regime has tended to externalize” (Arrighi, 2010: 379). The necessity of such “internalization” turns on the fact that molecular processes of capital accumulation are running up against a series of ecological and climatic limits. Myriad socio-ecological fixes are being deployed to circumvent, overcome, and indeed internalize these limits under the guise of “green capitalism” (Büscher and Fletcher, 2015; Mann and Wainwright, 2018; McCarthy, 2015; Prudham, 2009; Sapinski, 2016a; Wanner, 2015; Nelson, 2015). Yet climate change portends a systemic underproduction crisis—the “second contradiction of capitalism”—whereby exhaustion of key socio-ecological relations that underpin the creation of capitalist value can engender crises via rising costs, loss and damage, depreciation of assets, onerous regulation, and unproductive expenditures that restrict the capacity to generate surplus-value, and thus inhibit expanded accumulation (O’Connor, 1988; see also Ekers and Prudham, 2017; Fraser, 2014; Moore, 2015). Such a crisis looms in the increasing rate of climatic change, and finance capital’s inability to respond (Channell, 2015; Christophers, 2017; Dafermos et al., 2018; Dietz et al., 2016; Smith et al., 2015). SAI potentially offers a singularly unique spatio-temporal fix for climate-driven accumulation crises, amounting to a “territorial” imperial tactic. Modifying planetary albedo by altering stratospheric chemistry can effectively expand the atmospheric waste sink, allowing for greater carbon dioxide absorption without attendant warming. This artificial production of atmospheric space can slow the rate of climatic change and thus drastically reduce both potential loss and damage and the immediate financial burdens of rapid decarbonization. SAI deployment would thus constitute an intervention into the climate system to maintain (however temporarily) the value of existing energy infrastructure and forestall the rising costs associated with climate change, in effect expanding—via planetary management—the spatio-organizational scope of capital accumulation otherwise running up against climatic limits (see Surprise (2018) for detailed elaboration). Firmly rooted in the logics of capital, this imperial tactic is nevertheless proceeding under the auspices of humanitarian universalism—SAI for the poor, in the name of humanity. This ideological aspect is my central focus here. That is, the separation of “the economic” and “the political” that structures the contours of the capitalist imperialism also structures its limits. HSGRP researchers acknowledge that the technological capacity exists to keep global temperature rise below 1.5℃, yet its global scale implementation would require “draconian social measures incompatible with market economies” (Horton et al., 2016: 3). Moreover, they concede that global redistribution of wealth for adaptation is “theoretically possible,” but highly unlikely (Horton and Keith, 2016: 82). Effectuating a rapid transition to equitable, low-carbon societies is possible, but would require measures that fundamentally challenge hegemony of capital. If accumulation is threatened by climatic limits, and the capitalist economy cannot be fundamentally altered, the climate system itself must be managed, altered, and artificially expanded. Thus, my aim is to demonstrate—counter to the narrative of necessity—that SAI is a fundamentally political choice, and one decidedly on the side of capital and liberal-capitalist elites.

The Environmentalism of the Rich, Or, Why the Popular Anthropocene Is Part of the Problem The Popular Anthropocene has studiously avoided these questions.61 As we have begun to see, there are two Anthropocenes. One is the Geological Anthropocene. This is the scholarly conversation about planetary history, centering on so- called “golden spikes” in the geological record. The other, the Popular Anthropocene, is a conversation over the historical causes of – and the proposed institutional, market, and technical solutions to – our deepening climate crisis. The line between the two Anthropocenes is fuzzy and porous. This is not accidental. Rather, it concerns how scholarly and media gatekeepers license “natural scientists” to speak freely about matters of policy and world history. The powers-that-be can sleep easily at night knowing that leading climate scientists will rarely upset the ideological apple cart and identify the capitalist class and capitalogenic climate crisis as the core of the problem. None of this is new. The 1968 birth of the Environmentalism of the Rich was in part a creation of a mass media apparatus desperate to manufacture consent at a moment of profound legitimation crisis.62 One could scarcely pick up a newspaper or magazine in the year before the first Earth Day (April 22, 1970) without reading about “the” environmental crisis. When Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, he was greeted with fawning media coverage – in stark contrast to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring six years earlier.63 Carson had attacked herbicide and pesticide manufacturers; Ehrlich demonized poor Indians allegedly unable or unwilling to limit their fertility. Carson’s science led her audience to identify corporations as a political problem; Ehrlich’s populationism identified the Third World as the problem. Just as The Population Bomb appeared, Garrett Hardin published “The Tragedy of the Commons.”64 It’s the most influential Environmentalist article ever published. Hardin, a biologist, was also a well‑ known eugenicist. His worldview resonated deeply with Malthus’s thinking two centuries earlier. The danger, he wrote in 1969, was that “poor women” might “outbreed the rich.” If “poverty is even in part genetically caused (as it surely must be) … class discrimination in the availability of … birth control must have a dysgenic effect.”65 Published in Science, the world’s leading scientific journal along with Nature, “The Tragedy of the Commons” purported to explain the environmental crisis by recourse to an avaricious and anti‑social human nature. In 1968 – Wallerstein called it a “world revolution”66 – the subtext was clear. The selfish and irrational savages of the Third World must be subdued, their appetite checked by imperial coercion: a word that appears thirteen times in a five‑ page article! It’s worth underlining an undisputed fact: Hardin knew nothing about actually existing commons. Such arrangements are amongst human history’s elemental socio‑ ecological relations – and even at the time, they were well known in the story of England’s early modern enclosure movements. His historical ignorance did not, however, prevent the editors of Science from publishing the article, or countless other scholars from reproducing its statements as ontological fact. Here is the violence of Good Science as ideology: it enables the most ideologically charged premises of human nature to present themselves as “natural laws.” So it is with leading earth- system scientists today. Many are happy to dispense their wisdom on the geohistorical drivers of the climate crisis: population, technology, urbanization, and so on. When figures like Johan Rockström tell us that “bankers and executives” are necessary to solve the climate crisis, virtually everyone in the mass media, and nearly all academics, are happy to give them a pass.67 (No matter that Rockström is the Chief Scientist for Conservation International, a billionaire- funded NGO deeply complicit in corporate greenwashing and the financialization of nature.68) This reminds us of the flexible boundary between the Geological and Popular Anthropocenes – and that this flexibility is neither innocent nor accidental. Ruling strata favor the Popular because it does not question the relations of power, re/production, and thought that created the climate crisis. The Anthropocene reduces these relations to technological, technocratic, and market‑ oriented fixes. Here, the Popular Anthropocene is revealed as an “anti‑politics machine.”69 Like most Environmentalism, it converts political questions of inequality and injustice into technical and scientific problems to be “solved” and “managed.”70 To appreciate the Popular Anthropocene’s flight from world history, let us consider one of its iconic representations: Felix Müller’s widely circulated figure that accompanies the planetary boundaries argument of Rockström and his colleagues (Figure 1).71 It makes a strong point. The boundaries of major earth- system processes are now being crossed. Extremely serious, non‑linear shifts beckon. What’s causing this epochal transgression of planetary boundaries? For Rockström and virtually all earth‑ system scientists, there’s a simple answer: Humanity. The “human enterprise” – what a deliciously neoliberal phrase! – is drawing the curtain on the Holocene.72 If that phrase, human enterprise, sounds familiar, it’s for good reason. It comes from the authors of the twentieth century’s definitive Malthusian screed, The Population Bomb.73 And just when does this human enterprise start to cause serious trouble for the biosphere? The “logical” and “reasonable” beginning is 1800 74 – even though the major uptick in atmospheric carbonization doesn’t appear until the later nineteenth century, during the “second” industrial revolution, and the origins of modern fossil fuel extraction go back to the early sixteenth century! Two aspects of Müller’s image stand out. One is the assumption that planetary crisis is the creation of the Anthropos: the human enterprise. In this scheme of things, the climate and biodiversity crises have anthropogenic causes. The planetary boundaries image does not invoke change over time, but it is associated with another assumption that does. This is the claim that the origins of planetary crisis are found in the century after 1800, commonly narrated as “the” Industrial Revolution. The formula is simple, comfortable, and therefore tempting: coal plus steam power equals global warming. These two assumptions – turning on anthropogenic change and the 1800 boundary line – have been pivotal to a half‑ century of Green Thought.75 They contribute mightily to a hegemonic imaginary of planetary crisis as the doing of all members of the human [FIGURE 1 OMMITTED] species. And they sustain a historical imagination that presents modernity’s long history of global inequality and violence as secondary to securing “our common future.”76 These assumptions and their ideological basis are frequently explained away. Here’s a recent headline in The Conversation: “The term ‘Anthropocene’ isn’t perfect – but it shows us the scale of the environmental crisis we’ve caused.”77 Replete with references to colonialism and historical transitions, such formulas endorse the imperial bourgeois vision of planetary crisis. Gone from such accounts is the history of capitalism and its class dynamics. Colonialism is – like globalization two decades ago – cleansed of its class character. So too with extractivism, climate apartheid, speciesism, and other environmental bads: they are all generally deployed as academic detergents to wipe our thinking clean from the muck of class analysis.78 This Environmentalist language often sounds radical. In practice, it amounts to little more than professional- managerial- class virtue signaling.79 Such class‑ denialist conceptions of historical process are but a stone’s throw away from the Environmentalism of the Rich and its Malthusian vista, transforming the class dynamics of inequality into anodyne “distributional” questions of the rich and powerful.80 (In what follows, I will abbreviate this Environmentalism with an emphatically uppercase “E.” The counter- tendency is expressed by working class and anti- imperialist environmentalism, often shorthanded as environmental justice.) Such arguments typically redefine the Capitalocene thesis in economic terms – ignoring how Malm and I, our differences notwithstanding, offer critiques of economic reductionism! Simply put, the climate crisis is not merely about distributional consequences; it is about class power in the biosphere. It is extremely dubious to claim that the Popular Anthropocene raises awareness. (So does advertising the latest electric car!) The Environmentalism of the Rich has been telling us that we are living in End Times since 1968.81 If there was a high tide of environmental awareness before the present, it was in the early 1970s.82 The outcome was hardly an ecological revolution. Instead, everywhere in the imperialist countries, Environmentalism readily made its peace with neoliberalism; testimony to the Environmental Imaginary’s Janus‑ faced character.83 The crucial question is the character of the awareness and its willingness to break with capitalism’s business as usual. Figures as diverse as Audre Lorde and Albert Einstein underline the essential idea: the ideas and tools of the ruling class will not solve the problems they have created. The Environmentalism of the Rich and its Popular Anthropocene shapes popular consciousness in ways that are consonant with techno‑scientific authoritarianism.84 Eco‑catastrophism is altogether compatible with Green authoritarianism – a point argued since Environmentalism’s origins in 1968, and already a reality across the Global South.85 This Environmentalism imagines the biosphere – and even regional environments – as somehow outside relations of power, re/production, and inequality. It excises questions of financialization, of homelessness, of precariousness, of hunger, of poverty, of climate apartheid, climate patriarchy and the climate class divide. In short, it presents a political imaginary of planetary crisis that designates questions of democracy as unnecessary. Consider something like the Sixth Extinction.86 This is usually discussed as the “biodiversity crisis.” What is rarely pointed out in these discussions is that the Sixth Extinction isn’t anything like the five previous extinctions on Planet Earth. It’s not the work of an asteroid. It’s not the work of bad technology or inefficient markets or the “imperial mode of living.”87 It’s the work of capital. It is a capitalogenic process – co‑ produced through modernity’s relations of capital, power, and nature. It is not anthropogenic – even if figures like Ehrlich continue to insist that it’s all driven by human overpopulation.88 Overpopulation. That must be a bitter pill to swallow for descendants of the fifty million Native Americans who died in the aftermath of 1492 – a slaving‑ induced movement of genocide that contributed to capitalism’s first great climate crisis in the “long, cold seventeenth century.”89 To underline the point: it was not a disembodied European colonialism that propelled these killing fields; it was an emergent capitalist order hungry for Cheap Labor. The ideology of Cheapness was manifest from the start, expressed in the Prometheanism of the Civilizing Project and its redefinition of indigenous, Celtic, African, female, Slavic, and other populations as “savage.”90 The Popular Anthropocene’s cosmology is built on a simple opposition: Man versus Nature. The conflict, we are told, can be navigated by Enlightened Civilizers endowed with the scientific expertise and institutional‑coercive power to enforce something euphemistically called “earth-system governance.”91 This binary frame is the common sense of planetary crisis today: humans are now threatening to cause planetary breakdown. Such claims might sound innocent enough; they are anything but. The mainstream discussion of anthropogenic climate change short-circuits the conversation we need if we want to envision a politics of planetary sustainability that is also a politics of planetary justice. Let’s walk through the three big questions of today’s planetary crisis. Who and what caused this? When and where did this begin? And how did we get here? This might sound banal, but how we answer these questions decides our politics. The Environmentalism of the Rich, as it coalesced after 1968, delivered a straightforward message: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” The cartoonist Walt Kelly’s iconic 1970 Earth Day poster crystallized that sensibility (see Figure 2). That same year, Richard Nixon sounded a strongly environmentalist theme in his second State of the Union Address: “Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions. It has become a common cause of all the people of this country.”92 When I say that the Anthropocene is an anti‑politics machine, that’s hardly new – as Nixon’s 1970 speech suggests. Before the Anthropocene, there was Spaceship Earth: old wine, new bottle.93 Both speak to a quintessentially modern cosmology of Man vs. Nature, a conflict that can be “realistically” managed with the appropriate technology and rational governance. That cosmology has nourished Environmentalism’s [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] philosophical and historical premises: “we’re all in this together,” and “we created the environmental crisis together.” Like any hegemonic mythology, that cosmology blends truth and illusion. The insistence that we are all connected through webs of life – “On Spaceship Earth … everybody is a member of the crew” – has a kernel of truth.94 But the reality is very different, and no one seriously disputes it. Spaceship Earth has a command structure. Most of us are packed into steerage, and following orders.95 If a metaphorical Spaceship Earth evokes a fanciful sci‑fi space communism, the actual Earth in recent history resembles a Slaveship, not the starship Human Enterprise.96 No doubt Environmentalism’s popular appeal owes much to the specifically capitalist forms of alienation that humans experience – from their work, and from their sense of connection to the rest of life. Environmentalism serves up a lot of comforting language about oneness, reconnection, and healing. But soothing language without revolutionary strategy in an era of climate crisis is not a good thing. We should not be comfortable – but neither should we be terrified. Needed is disconcerting language and unconventional thinking that strikes at the heart of capitalism’s fetishisms: Humanity, Civilization, and Nature above all. The Popular Anthropocene’s claim that the mythical entity, Humanity, is now “overwhelming the great forces of nature” is hardly a value-neutral statement.97 Spreading blame for the trajectory of Slaveship Earth is tantamount to blaming slaves and immigrant workers for imperialism. Saying Humanity has caused planetary crisis is a bit like saying Humanity is responsible for the New World genocide after 1492 – or that Humanity is responsible for the modern slave trade, world wars, or neoliberalism’s Washington Consensus of finance‑driven dispossession. Anyone uttering the phrase “anthropogenic genocide” would be laughed out of the room! Because of course specific relations – of empire, capital, and class – created these disasters. Calling the planetary crisis anthropogenic is a non-explanation. This is worse than a failure of interpretation. Humanity, Civilization, and Nature are not merely words floating in the ether. They are ruling abstractions, reinvented since 1492. The geocultural boundary between Humanity and Nature was central to the New World genocides, to the African slave trade, to modern patriarchy, which defined the rise of capitalism and its Civilizing Project. Indigenous Peoples, Africans, and women – all were cast out of Civilization and into a very different realm, Nature.98 Their lives were rendered expendable, and their labor became cheap, on the reasoned grounds that they were not – or not fully, or not yet – Human. The question of who is – and who is not – Human is therefore at the core of the climate crisis. It’s fundamental to how modern power is structured and legitimated. This is not merely a question of language – although language is important. It’s a question of civilizational praxis in which dominant “material” forces are dialectically bound to “ruling intellectual forces.”99 At the core of that praxis is a knowledge factory that frames reality as a series of binary and hierarchical oppositions: Humanity/Nature, Man/Woman, White/Not-White, Europe/America, and so forth.100 These ruling intellectual forces are real abstractions that not only reflect material relations, but are the necessary symbolic moment of these material relations. When I say that the language of Humanity/Nature has been saturated with profound violence, I don’t just mean symbolic violence. I mean the blood and violence of capitalist development, of colonialism, of domination and exploitation. For good reason, then, the policing of the Humanity/Nature line – through violence, markets, and culture – has been a recurrent feature of capitalist development, from Columbus to the present. And this policing – and sometimes the line itself – has been fiercely contested all along. When movements for justice on questions of sexuality, gender, and race self‑identify as civil or human rights struggles, they register this world-historical boundary between Civilization and Nature. In one way or another, class struggles and boundary struggles are always tightly linked.101 This explains why the language of the Popular Anthropocene is so dangerous. Its premise is a strict divide between Humanity and Nature, a binary code at the heart of the modern exercise of power, production, and profit. The Anthropocene – and the Environmentalism of the Rich – embodies the very system of thought that has created the planetary crisis. It is a unique form of magical thinking to believe that the system of thought, power, and production that created the crisis will solve it.

As has been theorized by cultural studies scholars, discourse— or ways of speaking about the world—constrains and limits the way that knowledge is constructed. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall defines discourse as “a group of statements which provide a language for talking about—i.e. a way of representing—a particular kind of knowledge about a topic. When statements about a topic are made within a particular discourse, the discourse makes it possible to construct the topic in a certain way. It also limits the other ways in which the topic can be constructed” (Hall 1992, 291). Dominant discourse marginalizes explanations—in this case the culpability of white masculinity—that do not fit its dictates. Discourse is connected to power: knowledge production promotes some power arrangements over others. Again I cite Hall, who draws on social theorist Michel Foucault to explain the connection between thought and action, between language and Introduction 3 practice: “Discourse is about the production of knowledge through language. But it is itself produced by a practice: ‘discursive practice’— the practice of producing meaning. Since all social practices entail meaning, all practices have a discursive aspect. So discourse enters into and influences all social practices” (Hall 1992, 291). Discourse, then, has material effects; it is in fact formative of the material. Failure to problematize white masculinity in the anthrax case supported existing arrangements keeping white men in power—in the high-level U.S. biodefense industry, and at the helm of the U.S. national security apparatus more generally.8 Discourse surrounding the anthrax mailings not only marginalized the culpability of white masculinity; it also carefully bounded discussions about the vast research industry from which the anthrax came. The biodefense research apparatus spanned government, university, and industry labs, where bioscientists, mainly microbiologists, toil away on dangerous pathogens—in the name of national security. Over the course of the nearly nine-year anthrax investigation, the mass news media brought attention to the industry’s ongoing lab accidents—accidental exposures, lab leakages, and unintentional shipments of live germs instead of dead ones. Media attention peaked in 2006, when several lab workers at Texas A&M University were exposed to and infected with Q fever and brucellosis, resulting in the lab’s temporary suspension of activities. In response, federal officials insisted that the gains for national security outweighed the costs; security pundits concentrated on better training for scientists to reduce accidents. Absent among the proposed solutions, however, was a deeper questioning of the merits of the industry itself: What purpose does an active U.S. biodefense program serve?

The focus on Al Qaeda and Iraq during the anthrax investigation highlights the role of the racial Other in dominant national security discourse. The end of the Cold War saw the U.S.-USSR axis, and the concomitant capitalism-communism binary,9 give way to the geopolitical and military supremacy of the United States, and the unprecedented acceleration of neoliberal capitalism and U.S.- led globalization (Masco 1999). The new lone superpower shifted its attention from the Soviet Union and nuclear stalemate to an increasingly visible number of smaller enemies—“terrorists”10 and “rogue states”—and their possible acquisition of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), which include weapons of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear warfare. Foreswearing de-escalation and disarmament, the United States turned to the platform of counterterrorism, most notably intervening in the Middle East. U.S. involvement in the Middle East resulted in the targeting of Arabs and Muslims in the region as well as domestically. The United States passed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing perpetrated by U.S. white male Timothy McVeigh and two others, resulting in the deaths of 168 people and injuring over 800 in April 1995. Despite the domestic origins of the perpetrators, AEDPA focused heavily on “international terrorism” and “alien terrorists,” and in practice was used to apprehend Arabs and Muslims. It authorized the secretary of state to designate “foreign terrorist organizations” that the United States could sanction. About half were Muslim or Arab groups (Whidden 2001).11 As Arab American studies scholars have demonstrated, the U.S. state justified these actions by mobilizing trenchant U.S. racial discourses villainizing Arabs and Muslims as uncivilized, violent Others12 (Cainkar 2008; Naber 2000). By the time of the September 11 incident, the specter of Arab/ Muslim13 terror had been firmly entrenched, serving as the lynchpin for a new iteration of U.S. empire. The war on terror entailed Introduction 5 the brutal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to maintain U.S. oil interests and a foothold in the Middle East.14 In President George W. Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, he called for military action that would begin with Al Qaeda and continue “until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated” (Bush 2001a). The war’s boundless scope was in part enabled through the larger shift in governmental power during the war on terror—what social theorist Brian Massumi (2010) has called “preemptive power.” This anticipatory mode of governance enhanced the U.S. state’s ability to act upon security threats of indeterminate potential in the name of preserving life. Preemptive state power was, moreover, yoked to the language of freedom and civilization. In his September 20 speech, Bush justified military action as necessary to “defend freedom” and invoked “civilization” as the war’s protagonist: “This is civilization’s fight” (Bush 2001a). Narratives of the United States as freedom-loving, democratic, just, and other markers of “civilized” can be traced to long-standing Orientalist discourse that positions the West as beacon of progress and opposes it to the Arab /Muslim Other. These discursive practices began in the late eighteenth century, when European narratives of the “East” extolled the superiority of the “West” in order to rationalize colonial endeavors in the Middle East (Said 1978). Critical race and ethnic studies scholar Sylvia Chan-Malik discusses how this Orientalist narrative has functioned in relation to U.S. aggression in the Middle East: as “the liberal vision of a free, feminist, and multicultural nation as a fundamental necessary counterpart to the decidedly unfree, antifeminist, and antidemocratic ideology of Islamic Terror” (2011, 134). In other words, the construction of Arabs and Muslims as a racialized enemy Other helped inculcate a national imaginary of the United States as progressive vis-à-vis feminism and multiculturalism.15 Bush’s speech on September 20 included numerous nods to multicultural tolerance, such as “The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends” (Bush 2001a). This rhetoric belied the fact that the war clearly targeted Arabs, Muslims, and the Middle East. Bush’s speech also touched on the plight of women in Afghanistan: “Women are not allowed to attend school” (Bush 2001a). Arab American feminist studies scholars have thoroughly described the construction of Arab and Muslim women as always and everywhere oppressed, wherein regional distinctions are flattened, and women are seen solely as victims of a patriarchal culture. These scholars have demonstrated how this image has propped up the war on terror—the war’s proponents articulate the war as an attempt to liberate oppressed Arab and Muslim women (Moallem 2002; Nayak 2006). In fact, Chan-Malik’s discussion of the role feminism has played in exceptionalist constructions of the United States illustrates a dialectic in which the oppressed Arab /Muslim woman is the counterpoint to the liberated Western woman, further bolstering an image of U.S. progressivism despite U.S. imperial aggression. Gender has in fact served as a nimble tool in the narratives of the war on terror. U.S. political theorist Alyson Cole (2007) describes, for example, the metaphor of sexual conquest that many public commentators used to describe the September 11 attacks: September 11 as the day the United States lost its virginity, or the attacks on the United States as akin to sexual assault. The metaphor of womanhood reinforced the notion of the United States as innocent victim of the violent masculine Arab /Muslim Other. Queer theorist Jasbir Puar dissects U.S. popular culture depictions of Osama bin Laden that pathologized him through the theme of deviant sexuality—images of bin Laden being penetrated anally or descriptions of him as possessing a kind of queer vanity (2007a, 38). These queer overtones in the portrayals of bin Laden served to construct him as what Puar calls “monster-terrorist-fag,” the ultimate reviled, dangerous Other to justify the war on terror. In the war’s turn to bioterrorism, popular narratives similarly mobilized gendered discourses of an Arab/Muslim Other. Alongside investigator focus on Al Qaeda and Iraq during the anthrax Introduction 7 case, mass culture producers depicted the anthrax perpetrator as a crazed, violent Arab /Muslim male—even though this image was totally unmoored from any basis in a real person or suspect. In chapter 1, I examine more closely the trope of the masculine Arab/ Muslim Other in discourses on bioterrorism; further, I explore a notable departure from the ubiquitous trope of the oppressed Arab/ Muslim woman: U.S. depictions of Iraqi female scientists apprehended by the United States during the Iraq War as devious and dangerous Arab /Muslim female terrorists.

Given the greed of today, the poor political climate worldwide, the investment in war by the richer countries like the United States and its allies even the „egalitarian states of the advanced economies such as Germany, Denmark and Sweden the rich-poor gap is now a reality and the welfare gap is growing to perhaps to a point of break point. Tandon (2014) states that “there is no possibility of a „distributive solution‟ within the present system, which is structurally engineered to produce inequality.” There is no doubt and observation throughout the world and amongst weak and strong nations, rich and poor countries the political and social forces are in a state of flux, shambles and are weakening in relation to the power exerted by global corporations together with the reality of global bankruptcy and bankocracy. As concerns the role of so called development Aid Yash Tandon (2014) states that “it is totally misunderstood or deliberately misrepresented and that such aid is corruption and asks why? His answer to this is that such aid corrupts government policy and therefore African governments are obliged to surrender policy space to the „donors‟ and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and says, what can be more corrupt than that”? What in actual fact does this aid do? It corrupts good governance, creates a dependency syndrome, it brings about a false sense of security, impoverishes African nations, makes the predatory elite more corrupt, reinforces poverty and exacerbates the plight of the poor. It is nothing but money capital or a credit line which involves production and marketing knowhow and technology and, is not provided on the basis of any philanthropy or deal with the manifest challenges and problems of development within African countries. Foreign Direct Investment has to be negotiated by governments with the owners of capital. This is negotiated by the hawks such as the World Bank and other lending agencies and large corporations at a price and the complexities of financial and legal Jargon, couched in a manner that locks in governments This is disempowering and sooner or later developing countries are in trouble. This is basically selling their countries to these capitalist hounds, with the sanction of local political leadership and the predatory elites of African countries. Yash Tandon (2014) states that “that a strong country like China with a huge domestic market can use its power to negotiate a useful FDI package but Africa is nowhere near China and India in leveraging such deals because most of them are hostages to the global corporate owners of capital and technology.” It has to be clearly understood, analyzed and appreciated that global corporations do not act alone on the all embracing reality that they have the ability to secure the power of their mega-states to support such negotiations and that investments are technically and generally made within the framework of Bilateral Investment Treaties (BIT’s). It must therefore be appreciated and fully understood that BIT’s are now recognized by many countries by government bureaucracies that, they are an exercise in undermining the independence and sovereignty of receiving FDI states and countries. What do BIT’s achieve? They achieve the trampling upon poorly resourced countries, exploitation, extra-territorial rights and gains for the owners of capital and secures that their interests are not in any way expropriated, the free transfer of vulgar profits and excessive royalties for protracted periods. It secures litigation in terms of international arbitration. For example, Uganda, according to Yash Tandon is “being subjected to immense and tremendous pressure by the United States of America to secure a bit agreement with it and there is no doubt that, if signed, it will effectively undermine the sovereign rights of the Ugandan nation, stymie development and hold the country hostage and in bondage by these capitalist forces through a process of vulgar and hegemonistic policies of subjugation.” Given this nefarious and untenable situation that has unfolded in particularly “Third World” countries and the recent Africa Conference of African political leaders called by United President Barak Obama in the United States and committing an amount of $33 billion dollars for African development is not being undertaken on the basis of any philanthropy; but in reality that the US has lost economic ground to China and is a ploy to attempt to undermine the BRICS initiatives; and moreover an attempt to placate African leaders to understand that the United States is friendly towards Africa. This friendliness and economic input in the form of aid to Africa, in reality is setting the pace to further subjugate African leadership on the continent to toe the line and play into the hands of capitalist forces. It should be understood that, all of this has to lead to a way forward for African countries to counter this capitalist onslaught. In other words, Yash Tandon says that “at the global level there needs to be a structural adjustment of redistribution for purposes of global justice that requires systemic and systematic transformation; that legal and institutional reform is insufficient and for all intents and purposes misguided, because reform of the existing system can never achieve more than marginal redistribution. This is the reality on the basis that structural and social class inequality is an intrinsic of the existing capitalist order.” Thus the notion of investment needs to be redefined urgently and be led away from the capitalist market logic and domination that keeps people and nations poor on the African continent.

For the advocates of human rights, for the sake of maintaining the integrity of the international law principle of the sovereign equality of nations, and for the goal of building a humane and inclusive global order, the only viable alternative to another American Century is the vision and promise of a rising Global Community. Throughout this book, I argue that the best strategy for realizing a rising Global Community would have to be one that was dedicated to abandoning neoliberal economic models, building strong South-South regional alliances, and incorporating the people power of social movements into a national/international counterhegemonic alliance to the US Global Empire. Indeed, the power of a rising Global Community would be most dramatically and effectively manifested as the product of an emerging national/international counter-hegemonic alliance to the US Global Empire (see: Chapter 6, Claiming A “Right of Peace”—Moving Beyond the “Empire Syndrome”). In what could easily be the most succinct preamble for any document announcing the nature of this counter-hegemonic alliance, Boaventura de Sousa Santos observes: Although neo-liberal globalization—the current version of global capitalism— is by far the dominant form of globalization, it is not the only one. Parallel to it and, to a great extent, as a reaction to it, another globalization is emerging. It consists of transnational networks and alliances among social movements, social struggles, and non-governmental organizations. From the four corners of the globe, all these initiatives have mobilized to fight against the social exclusion, destruction of the environment and biodiversity, unemployment, human rights violations, pandemics, and inter-ethnic hatreds, directly or indirectly caused by neo-liberal globalization.28 In short, there are two globalizations at work in our age. The first type of globalization is supportive of the US Global Empire and the imperial project. The second type of globalization is a reaction against the US Global Empire and supportive of a variety of constituencies and issues that make possible the realization of Global Community. To comprehend the difference between these two alternative paths of globalization is to begin to understand the core thesis of this book. The main theme of my book—finding an exodus from empire—follows the general outline of analysis (as set forth above) by Santos. That is because our research and our perspective converge on how to define, conceptualize, and analyze the nature of the worldwide system of the US Global Empire. Additionally, we concur that another globalization is emerging—one that is accountable to human rights and human needs within a rising Global Community. Being able to grasp the role converging social movements in opposition to neoliberal capitalism makes it possible for us to recognize the reality that neoliberal globalization has come into open conflict with the agenda of emerging transnational networks and alliances. Throughout the global South, the poor, the unemployed, the disenfranchised and excluded are demanding that the sovereign equality of their nation within the Global Community be respected. It is no longer tolerable for the US Global Empire, the IMF and World Bank, or the WTO to dictate what their respective developmental paths will be in the absence of effective democratic representation. This view embodies a recognition that is increasingly common among progressive thinkers around the globe. For example, Anne Orford has noted: “Economic globalization has made the fictitious nature of state sovereignty apparent to all but the most myopic observer of international relations and international law.”29 If state sovereignty is not an effective barrier to imperial intervention, then the entire world is simply left open to exploitation by the best-armed Superpower. In Chapter 6, I detail how the financial axis of the empire, such as the IMF, World Bank, and WTO, operate in conjunction with the Washington/Wall-Street Alliance. I demonstrate how the purpose and conduct of these institutions is designed to facilitate the flow of wealth and resources out of the nations of the global South. As a consequence, the resulting collateral damage done by these institutions is to leave billions of people worse off than they were prior to the imposition of the neoliberal model and the destruction of their sovereignty. The IMF and World Bank have had a significant impact on the policies of governments in those states seeking to make use of their resources in two ways. First, the IMF and World Bank influence government policy through the imposition of conditions on access to credits and loans.30 Second, the IMF and World Bank do not comply with the obligation to ensure that the model of development adopted by states is one in which all human rights and freedoms can be fully realized.31 Given this disempowerment of states, I outline a strategy for states, throughout the global South, to renew and remake their governments and societies in accordance with a model of governance that I have labeled the Inclusionary State (IS) (see: Chapter 6). The importance of the IS model is that the leadership of social movements, and all the major groups and classes within civil society, can finally be accorded a formal place at the table of decision making.32 My advocacy of an inclusionary state may be seen as a key component of an exit strategy from the US Global Empire and its institutions of exploitation. That is because the effect of World Bank and IMF policies is to strip the state of most of its functions, except for maintaining law and order while, at the same time, facilitating private investment. When a state becomes stripped of its power to engage in protecting the rights of its citizens, as well as the course and direction of its own economy, it then becomes transformed into what I have called the “exclusionary state” (ES).33 It excludes the majority of classes and groups within the nation because the leadership of an ES state appears to address only the interests of international economic institutions and corporate investors. That is the bad news. The good news is that as the effects of this kind of limited representation of interests becomes clear to labor unions, the unemployed, the victims of human rights abuses, and social movements in opposition to the neoliberal model, a transnational counter-hegemonic alliance against the US Global Empire is beginning to emerge. That is because the vulnerability, insecurity, and frustration of the people increases and with these symptoms of exploitation and a recognition of their ultimate cause. With rising levels of discontent comes a tide of global opposition in the form of violent protests, political destabilization, and the growth of populist nationalism. These are the societal consequences that emerge when ES in the global South appear to be accountable to only foreign investors, the IMF, and the World Bank. Throughout this book, when I speak of an exodus from empire, I am also speaking of the need for the nations of the global South to embark upon an exodus from the influence, pressures, and coercion of both the IMF and the World Bank. Despite the fact that the 1997 World Development Report spoke of the need to bring the state closer to the people, the reality was that there was no significant shift in the World Bank’s commitment to policies of privatization and state restructuring based on a narrow model of economic development that continued to exclude the needs of the poor and human rights concerns. The situation is one that remains much the same as it was in the late 1990s when John Gray noted: “At the global level, as at that of the nation-state, the free market does not promote stability or democracy. Global democratic capitalism is as unrealizable a condition as worldwide communism.”34

If only we could just balance the negativity and the melancholia—it can be ‘and/and’ rather than ‘either/or’—with a dose of feminist relational ethics. Admittedly, that’d be sobering, like a vaccination or an immunity shot, and probably unwelcome, but it would be what we call critical theory as a clinical practice, detoxing us from negativity. We have to keep in mind that, as academics, we are civil servants balancing potestas—managing what we have—with potentia—inspiring what’s possible. That’s the balance everyone has to find for themselves, rather than sink into a listless depression. There is a job to be done here to inject a visionary, imaginative but not utopian energy into the world with words, texts, concepts, festivals and public engagements. We need to send out counter-codes. My Deleuze seminar this year is on fascism, and I pointed out to the students that not one of them had asked me why I had chosen that topic. They laughed, which was an example of Nietzsche’s tragic laughter. It was just too self-evident. We hope to generate work on micro-fascisms, and we’ve already managed to get people activated. The seminar works as a transformative switch to give students and teachers alike a purpose and a sense of what is possible. We cultivate together an affirmative, transformative ethics, so that it can get injected as an antidote and self-implemented in the world, in response to the successive attempts at devastation. A nomadic approach demands a great effort of self-analysis, especially when it encounters feminism, which emphasizes the politics of location and immanence. You have to start from where you are at and acknowledge that you’re part of the problem, and then read the situation from there to become part of the solution. The left thinks this feminist politics of locations is cultural and not political, because for them politics is the dialectics of negativity. Too bad that the Marxist subject is still a transcendental entity that coincides with rational consciousness—a subject that knows exactly where history is going, waiting for the revolutionary break. That is completely different from what we’re saying in nomad thought. We first need to compose a subject, a missing ‘we’. That’s why critical Spinozism, read with Deleuze, goes so well with nomadic feminism, with consciousness-raising and with understanding that all ethics is relational and the personal is political. Brexit is personal. It impeaches movement at an ideological and physical level, so we need to start from there and not from the fog of inadequate understanding. It’s all there in Spinoza—and in George Eliot!

Empowerment has also been linked to results-based instrumentalist research agendas that seek to show how empowerment delivers specific development outcomes. An example of such a (TBF) research agenda is the “Third Billion Index” developed in 2010 by Strategy& (formerly Booz & Co., which is part of the global PwC group). This index ranks countries in terms of “how effectively they are empowering women as economic agents in the marketplace”. Women's economic participation is then correlated to countries' general economic growth and well-being, mainly in the areas of health, early childhood development, security and freedom. In a recent report—for which Cherie Blair wrote an introduction—it is noted that women's empowerment is no longer only the business of governments and NGOs, but also the responsibility of the private sector, which is coming to realize that “women's full participation in the world of work is not merely a social good but an economic necessity”. The private sector has a role to play in, among other areas, supporting female entrepreneurs and financing women-owned business. The Third Billion Index draws some of its inspiration from the World Economic Forum's (WEF) Global Gender Gap Index. The purpose of the index is to identify the gap between men and women in the areas of (1) economic participation and opportunity, (2) educational attainment, (3) health and survival and (4) political empowerment. These gaps are then mapped onto the WEF's Global Competitiveness Report and various measurements of GDP. Although its focus is wider than women's economic participation, the WEF (which is a private, business-led international organization) similarly claims that there is a “strong correlation between a country's gender gap and its national competitiveness”. This means that those countries with the smallest gender gaps, namely in the areas of political and economic participation, health and education, are also the most competitive countries globally. According to the WEF, “[a] country's competitiveness depends on its human talent—the skills, education and productivity of its workforce. Because women account for one-half of a country's potential talent base, a nation's competitiveness in the long term depends significantly on whether and how it educates and utilizes its women”. Drawing on the first theoretical premise established above, it is a rather bitter irony that while these indexes do recognize the importance of a healthy and educated workforce for the functioning of economies, they fail to acknowledge the work that is involved in these forms of biological and social reproduction. Rather, reproductive labour as a whole is obscured, as the index fails to account for household and domestic-related phenomena, including unpaid work. According to Chant and Brickell, the same can be said for the Third Billion Index, the OECD's Social Institutions and Gender Index and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)'s Gender Inequality Index While unpaid reproductive labour is systematically ignored, women—or more specifically, women's bodily capacities—are produced as “marketizable and exploitable commodities”.

A decolonial approach seeks out the spaces between the lines of universalism and relativism, recognising socio-historical specificities and the role played by global power structures, but also working towards transnational feminist solidarities. Relatedly, one might ask why I use the work of Chicana and Queer of Colour feminists like Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga to explore work by women in such a different cultural context. Tellingly, this question is not usually asked when we use Fanon or Foucault. Again, women who are “perceived as Other” are also often permitted to function only within a very limited cultural specificity. The aim of the decolonial feminist process is to recognise the specificity of individual experiences but also to be able to map these onto a wider collective project of decoloniality. The work of “undoing and doing differently” (Bacchetta 2010: 181) required by decolonial feminisms is best enabled when its agents are permitted to communicate across borders, and it is my contention that creating genealogies of women writers who can speak to and with one another is one way towards what Chandra Mohanty calls feminism without borders. Perhaps, ultimately, the term we use matters less than the work that we do. We may all understand and employ these terms differently, just as we may use them interchangeably in different settings and with different groups of people. The important thing is that we do engage with them and with each other in order to forge meaningful connections which challenge colonialities of power transnationally. As Loomba (2015: 265) asserts, “Postcolonial critique, however we interpret the term, can be meaningful only in conversation with scholarship and activism across the globe that strives to achieve a truly postcolonial world.”

In liberal democracies a woman's relationship to the state is mediated by her husband, who is seen to contribute directly to society through his paid work. Despite recognition at the level of discourse of women's "vital unpaid service" to the nation, this service is still treated as if it were but a personal one to her husband. A new model of citizenship needs to explicitly recognize the importance of the "sexual contract." In addition, it must recognize the social changes in personal relationships and intimate/sexual lives. Janet Finch (1989) points out that historical evidence shows that when the state's notion of family obligation is out of line with individual ideas of appropriateness, policies can have the opposite effect to that intended. Both Finch (1989) and Weston (1991) emphasize that individuals tend to see family as a last resort for assistance. This is in direct contrast to the state's assumptions, enshrined in social security policies, that the (nuclear) family should be a first resort. Several authors have proposed concepts that attempt to account for this. Julia O'Connor's insistence on the importance of personal autonomy, as "insulation from personal and public dependence," seems to us a promising direction (O'Connor 1993, 515). Lister's concept of "defamilialization" performs a similar role (1994; see also the discussion in Lister 1995, 29-30). In our opinion, welfare policies need to be disengaged from a particular model of the family— worker-citizen + wife-mother + children—if women are to achieve personal autonomy and a direct relationship to the state. The implications of family change and sexual citizenship for policy are that policies should be based on personal autonomy and enable a variety of supportive relationships. This involves a radical rethinking of the relationship between family and citizenship, a relationship with significant implications for the construction of gender. In an apparently paradoxical fashion, the best way to support families may be to treat people as individuals in social security policies. The privileging of marriage (even if broadened to include cohabiting heterosexual couples and even lesbian or gay couples) is part and parcel of constituting women as "second-class" citizens. Equal citizenship rights involve recognizing the dependence of the "social contract" on the "sexual contract" and devising new ways of organizing the various types of work that need to be done. As Judith Stacey has argued: "The family" is not "here to stay." Nor should we wish it were. On the contrary, I believe that all democratic people, whatever their kinship preferences, should work to hasten its demise. An ideological concept that imposes

I had an abusive boyfriend once. He lured me in with promises of provision and vindication. But he was a perfidious son of a gun, because the initial half of his Janus face was insidiously torn aside, to reveal his deft capacity for creating insecurity, isolation and intellectual dissonance. My boyfriend, my great, devastating, intoxicating love, was prostitution. Yes, like any other lover of an abuser, I was hooked in by his exaggerated claims of support and potential for actualisation — “I will empower you! I will make you free!” — smoke screening an undercurrent of exploitative tendencies. For me, for others, by the time we understand this, we have become trapped. Some people may wince at my comparing prostitution to abuse. I have been usefully informed, on a number of occasions, that it is a simply a job as any other. That it is not sexual exploitation, because women choose to enter into it freely. But even if that were so, what if the same women can’t manage to leave when they decide they have had enough? How many times, after that point, must they be utilised for sex effectively against their true will, before it becomes a violation? Being trapped in prostitution, relationship violence and cycles of survival sex can indeed be crushing to a person’s sense of capacity and the “outside” world can look increasingly hostile and difficult to negotiate. Coercive control, which often operates in these situations, is manipulative and extremely sophisticated. It tells you that you are not capable of surviving — let alone thriving — in any other way, just as it depletes you. It is like living with a blade at your throat, but being told it is for your own protection. What does all this have to do with Universal Basic Income (UBI)? Because as with all of the most effective manipulations, it contains a kernel of truth. If a woman is told by her abuser or her pimp — or by the propaganda of living in prostitution — that she could not survive without them, that voice is solidified by the material experience of structural inequality that poor women suffer. The crossroads between class and sex-based oppression is, indeed, best exemplified by a woman having to make a daily decision between sexual or domestic abuse, and poverty. So if our toxic situation has been the source of our “income” — in exchange for domestic, reproductive or sexual labour — what do we do if we want to leave? Refuge recommends that women escaping abusive or exploitative situations should seek out emergency accommodation from friends or family, but often abuse victims have been systematically disenfranchised from such social support and, as with high numbers of women in prostitution, have come through the care system, many didn’t have it in the first place. Women’s refuges are suffering from closures and on average 155 women are turned away each day, according to Women’s Aid. Shockingly, women escaping domestic violence are not automatically considered in priority need for social housing. That is even before you even get to prostitutes; an even less likely group to be considered a “worthy” cause. Indeed, our current welfare system is based on nebulous arbitrations of “need” and “worthiness,” which are often further gunned through the dubious prism of abstract bureaucracy. The Conservative government has seemingly decided that it cannot trust the word of doctors in assessing someone’s capacity for work and so subject often extremely vulnerable people to further “assessments.” Women who have been in prostitution or domestic violence often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other psychological fragilities. For them these processes can be intimidating, due to the fear of being judged, blamed and dismissed as “undeserving.” This is even before we even get to the trials of unemployment benefit, not available to anyone whose partner works more than 24 hours per week — not much good if said partner has a predilection for controlling every aspect of your life. And if you’re under 35 and have no children you cannot suddenly decide to no longer submit to unwanted sex with men you don’t know, because you are not eligible for housing benefit contributions for your apartment. Or because you cannot find another job, due to your lack of experience or your anxiety, or both. Yes, I’ve seen many a woman make her Great Escape from abuse only to find her road blocked at every turn. Back she goes, to her hard fisted boyfriend or her brothel pimp — now more vulnerable and more convinced of the absolutenesses of her “destiny.” What is the first thing a woman escaping violence needs? To not have to “explain herself” to society — to beg even — to get the ticket out of her situation. Because asking such people to make the case for their right to freedom from abuse is an extension of that abuse. She has already had to try to explain to her “lover” why he should allow her to sleep safe that night, or to her pimp why she cannot work because her vagina has become torn and bruised. The idea behind UBI is that every member of society gets a basic monthly amount, irrespective of their social circumstances or their assumed worthiness. I am not going to make a more general case for UBI, as those arguments can be found elsewhere. However, it has instigated the twitching of my feminist ear because as a policy it has, under the right conditions, the potential to give victims of domestic violence and sexual exploitation a slightly easier out. In the 1970s there were a lot of debates about whether or not women should receive wages for housework, but many feminists felt that this would crystallise the idea that domesticity was women’s work. UBI on the other hand is a basic economic sustenance that is paid to a woman by virtue of her humanity, not her femininity, which is in any case a social imposition demanding of her submissive agreeableness. Of course UBI