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Similar to later arguments about ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ and ‘ecological debt’ (Dorninger et al., 2021; Martinez-Alier, 2002), Bunker (1985, 22) insists that ‘modern’ social formations ‘can only emerge in regions where industrial modes of production derive large amounts of energy and matter from subordinate modes of extraction [...] [that] create unequal exchange’. In thermodynamic terms, the extraction of energy and materials from regions creates entropic peripheries if no equivalent amount of energy and/or materials is returned (Leff, 2021). As detailed in section 2 of this chapter, such subordination is associated with political, economic and social inequalities. Following Arboleda, Mezzadra and Neilson, and Dunlap and Jakobsen, these dynamics cannot be captured in meta-geographical categories of interstate, centre/periphery and global North/South dynamics. Instead, these asymmetric socioecological relations cut across nations, incorporating and excluding population strata according to class, gender and race inequalities. This generates emergent and relational supra- and subnational centre–periphery dynamics that sustain the social metabolism of ‘the imperial mode of living’. Brand and Wissen (2021, 39–40, emphasis in the original) conceive of ‘the imperial mode of living’ (in the singular) to describe how ‘everyday life in the capitalist centres is essentially made possible by shaping social relations and society–nature relations elsewhere, i.e. by means of (in principle) unlimited access to labour power, natural resources and sinks’. The adjective ‘imperial’ denotes that the IML is ‘based on exclusivity’ and can be sustained ‘only as long as an “outside”’—which can be geographically near or far—exists to extract from and externalise socioecological destruction towards (Brand and Wissen, 2021, 7). The IML thus ‘presupposes an imperialist world order […] [and] creates asymmetric interdependencies between various places and territories […] in a way in which the mechanisms of reproduction in one part pose severe restrictions for the practices of a majority of people in other parts’ (Brand and Wissen, 2022, 76). Whereas the concepts of ‘global labour arbitrage’, ‘labour aristocracy’ and ‘super-exploitation’ describe the IML’s organising effect on labour processes (Cope, 2019; Marini, 1991; Smith, 2016), I propose that extractivisms denote the IML’s organising effect on the socioecological relations that ensure access to energy and materials. In line with Arboleda’s, Mezzadra and Neilson’s, and Dunlap and Jakobsen’s joint attention to the scales of planetary relationships and everyday life, the IML ‘points towards the norms of production, distribution, and consumption built into the political, economic, and cultural structures of everyday life for the populations of the global North […] [and] increasingly in the countries with “emerging” economies of the global South’ (Brand and Wissen, 2021, 41). In contrast to Dunlap and Jakobsen, Brand and Wissen (2021, 42) propose that the IML represents ‘an essential moment in the reproduction of [a] capitalist society’ whose norms have their origins in Eurocentric conceptions of progress, modernity and development that emerged with the colonial encounter and capitalist world market. While ‘initially limited to furnishing the upper classes with luxury goods’ (Brand and Wissen, 2021, 83), the IML progressively incorporated larger bourgeois strata of the global population, becoming entrenched in the nineteenth century through discourses of progress, modernity and development. Historically, populations that resisted being enrolled in the MoEs, MoAs and MoPs undergirding the IML were ruthlessly oppressed and violently dominated. Successful socio-economic struggles have often culminated in the (re)integration of peoples into an extended and consolidated IML. In this way, ever-larger sections of the global population have been persuasively enticed with imperial privileges. This progressive incorporation of populations into the IML constitutes a ‘kind of compromise between the interests of those in power and the demands and desires of their subalterns’ (Brand and Wissen, 2021, 70). Building on Gramsci’s approach to hegemony, Foucault’s understanding of critique and subjectivation, and Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and lifestyle, Brand and Wissen highlight the intimate link between everyday practices and subjectivity. The IML’s lived everyday practices co-produce subjects who internalise its norms, developing psycho-emotional attachments that make them desire enrolling or remaining in it. In addition, the IML provides ‘conditions for income-generating production, just as the acquisition of products (home appliances, industrialized food, cars, smartphones) makes everyday life easier’ by lowering the cost of social reproduction. These conditions also ‘broaden the spectrum of leisure activities and possible travel goals’ while creating a sense of security in crisis situations (Brand and Wissen, 2021, 53). For many, the IML thus entails ‘the opportunity to have a subjectively fulfilled […] [and] materially more comfortable life’ (Brand and Wissen, 2021, 117). The IML is not universally experienced in the same manner. Its hegemony is ‘secured through complex spatial strategies that reproduce highly uneven social structures’ stratified along class, gender, race and other dimensions (Brand and Wissen, 2022, 77). The IML only became hegemonic in the global North under Fordism through the ‘generalisation’ and ‘universalisation’ of ‘modern’ or ‘Western’ consumption norms. During this period, many middle classes in ‘non-Western’ societies came to adopt similar modes of living as those in the capitalist centres, constituting ‘a peripheral IML’ that equally relied on ‘access to cheap labour power and nature elsewhere for the production of commodities for the world market, as well as for internal use’ (Brand and Wissen, 2022, 80). From the 1970s onward, ‘neoliberal globalisation’ deepened the IML in the global North and expanded it to the planetary scale ‘due to the rise of emerging economies […] [where] it is becoming the dominant model of prosperity, even for those who have not yet been integrated into the imperial mode of living’ (Brand and Wissen, 2021, 114). Brand and Wissen point to OECD, UNDP and ILO statistics to indicate that around 1.9 billion people could be designated as living a middle-class life in 2010, often implying the IML. However, rather than classifying some absolute category of individuals as falling within or outside the IML, it is a relational concept describing emergent supra- and subnational centre–periphery dynamics that link victims and beneficiaries, contenders and collaborators. These ‘relations of dominance and subordination’ give rise to an ‘articulated hierarchy’ that cannot be abstractly deduced but that is historically specific and constructed as part of the analysis (Hall, 2018, 196–202). With due respect to Dunlap and Jakobsen, who trace extractivisms to ‘civilisation itself’, I prefer Brand and Wissen’s more restrictive temporal range from the colonial moment onwards for two reasons. First, while hierarchies and domination certainly existed before and will last beyond the capitalist horizon, the historical co-constitution of colonialism and the capitalist world market marks significant differences in the prevalent modes of living and MoEs. According to Fraser (2014), this inaugurated a novel ‘institutionalised social order’ that structurally differentiated a) production from social reproduction, b) humanity from ‘nature’, c) the political from the economic, d) public from private power, and e) the ‘domestic’ from the ‘inter-national’ in a Westphalian system of states. Concomitantly, an ‘epochal shift’ occurred ‘in what was valued […], from land productivity under conditions of seigneurial power to labour productivity under the hegemony of the modern world market’ (Moore, 2017, 610; emphasis in the original). Together, these changes occasioned a cascading series of technological inventions and a set of technics that unleashed spatio-temporal dynamics through which ‘everything moved faster – a lot faster’, including the extraction of materials and energy. I therefore concur with Durante Kröger and LaFluer (2021, 20–24), who locate the ontological roots of extractivisms in ancient Greek natural law and Roman property law, yet argue that ‘what differentiates the ancient deforestations and other extractions from the past 500 years of extractivism[s] is the scale, and the greater domination of certain mindsets, by the advancement of modern technology alongside political and military power’. Second, this more restricted temporal application does not normalise extractivisms as inherent to civilisation, which makes it difficult to conceive of alternative post-extractivist modes of living suited to large-scale social formations. While critical scholarship and praxis should strive toward the dissolution of all kinds of hierarchies between human and non-human beings, lumping together all historical forms of domination and inequality mythologises the past, obscuring more than it reveals (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021). I nevertheless acknowledge that imperial modes of living (in the plural) could be repurposed to analyse continuities and differences in the strategic relationships shaping everyday life and the extraction of materials and energy along Dunlap and Jakobsen’s civilisational time frame, which would be an interesting but separate research agenda. The coupling of an undisputedly imperial mode of living in the Aztec Triple Alliance with certain MoEs described above points in this direction. Future modes of living could also be structurally organised in non-capitalist ways without becoming less imperial. Regardless of the IML and extractivisms’ precise historical origins, maintaining and deepening the IML and extractivisms has become a contemporary ‘imperative’ for governments as this functions as the societal pact stabilising the contradictions inherent in relying on in principle unlimited labour, resources, and sinks. The powerful psycho-emotional attachment of dominators and dominated alike to the IML in part explains this persistence in the face of overwhelming socioecological destruction. Nevertheless, the IML is not a total system of domination and is always challenged by alternative modes of living and counter-hegemonic subjectivities. In fact, the socioecological destruction of extractivisms provokes counter-hegemonic proposals and ‘insubordinate’ subjects that point to the possibility of transitioning to post-imperial solidarity modes of living. Let me conclude with brief reflections on such transitions and highlight

Extractivismo, as extractive capitalism is known in the Américas, indicates an economic system that engages in thefts, borrowings, and forced removals, violently reorganizing social life as well as the land by thieving resources from Indigenous and Afro-descendent territories. As I attend to in the introduction, a burgeoning literature on extractivismo has emerged in South America that describes the claim to resources by global capital in the face of increased protests about the importance of local resource sovereignty. Since dense genetic plant life and natural resource regions often overlap with Indigenous territories, then we must work to analyze how Native peoples are both constructed by the state and corporate entities as obstructions to the expansion of extractive capitalism and literally block its reach. The Sioux and trans-confederation struggle contesting the Dakota pipeline is only one example of continual Indigenous land defense in the Américas. Therefore, throughout this book I show how the embodied activities that reject colonialism continue to alter and expand how we see and what we know about Indigenous spaces especially within the extractive zone. While racial capitalism refers to the processes that historically subordinated African and Indigenous populations, extractivism references the dramatic material change to social and ecological life that underpin this arrangement.7 Furthermore, the racial logics of South American states are expanded through new forms of extractive capitalism.8 Even as new progressive states such as those in Ecuador and Bolivia propose policies to legalize Native peoples’ rights, they enable and normalize resource exploitation that ends up perpetuating anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism. Further, as The Feminist Constitution that I examine in chapter five makes apparent, redistributive states that do not broadly consider intersectional histories fail to address the needs and perspectives of female, gender-nonconforming, working class, and “cuir” populations even despite new legislative gains.9 I address how extractive capitalism dramatically divides nature and culture through new forms of race, gender, and sexual exclusions.10 One of today’s central modes of perpetuating racial capitalism in the Global South, in addition to expanding prisons and security regimes, is in fact mega-extractive projects, such as large dams and mines, which re- quire huge technological and resource feats as well as what Enrique Dussel refers to as the “developmentalist fallacy,” or the imposition of modernity as a universalized mode of governance.11 State and corporate-designed mega-development projects operate through an economic rationale without calibrating for the life forms that exist beneath the gaze of such grand schemes. Extractivism functions within what Anibal Quijano first coined as the colonial matrix of power,12 where corporate entities and states are indistinguishable in their economic interests and activities; states act on behalf of corporations, and corporate entities hire security forces to control and suppress anti-extractivist organizing. Extractive capitalism, then, violently reorganizes territories as well as continually perpetuates dramatic social and economic inequalities that delimit Indigenous sovereignty and national autonomy. As the Uruguayan economist and executive secretary of the Latin American Center for Social Ecology, Eduardo Gudynas, explains, “Under neo-extractivism, the objective of national development, as ‘endogenous development,’ is lost; autonomy in relation to global markets vanishes. National industries do not recover, in some cases they are reduced.”13 Gudynas rightly identifies how developmentalism continues to set the agenda and structure conditions of South America’s place within a colonial world system, further diminishing the possibility of state independence in relation to the global economy. Yet we must also critique the world system that reproduces nationalism at the expense of the sovereignty of Indigenous territories. Genealogies of critical theories from the South (including dependency theory and decolonial theory) have importantly attended to the persistence of this colonial condition that produces regional asymmetries and an uneven distribution of resource control. My project builds on these insights to unpack a dual analysis of power: I analyze extractive capitalism’s techniques of domination, showing how it expands through a series of legal, rhetorical, economic, and political contortions that both draw from and erase Indigenous peoples in their territories. The material and affective production of extractive capitalism crushes vernacular life and its embodiment, enclosing it within the leveling technologies of globalization. In relation to schemes of mega-development, large-scale extractivism assaults peripheral spaces, inflicting uneven pain upon regions where Indigenous majority communities continue to organize life and proliferate it, even in sites of extreme pressure and violence. This book lifts and names these sub- merged social ecologies. And the “extractive zone” names the violence that capitalism does to reduce, constrain, and convert life into commodities, as well as the epistemological violence of training our academic vision to reduce life to systems. Nonindigenous scholars have cautioned against “romanticizing native peoples,”14 however, some of that work does not centrally engage with the current dangers in the reduction of biodiversity and the genocidal practices that Native peoples face. In the case studies that I elaborate upon, all take place in the so-called peripheries of late capitalist activity, and Indigenous peoples are directly affected by neoliberal, economic, and cultural conditions that predetermine these spaces as colonial contact zones.15 It is often in the heart of resource-rich territories that Indigenous peoples exist in complex tension with extractive capitalism and land defense. In these geographies, Indigenous peoples often multiply rather than reduce life possibilities, protecting land and each other at often extremely high personal and communal cost. For instance, a global map of recent ecocides, or the murder of land defenders, shows an acute rise in Latin America and the Asian Pacific, geographies that overlap with new social movements that organize against extractive encroachment.16 The organization Global Witness documents a three hundred percent increase in the murders of ordinary people defending natural resources from mining, hydroelectric dams, conservation, and pollution. Throughout the world, Indigenous peoples are also often at the forefront of defending lands in regions that are continually extracted for their biodiversity.17 In the Américas, we see the complicity among state, police, and corporate actors in their attempts to violently shut down these land defenders, such as the case of attack dogs and pepper spray used against Indigenous protestors and their allies as they blocked the Dakota oil pipe. In resource-rich Ecuador, anti-extractive activists report that their emails are regularly hacked, that they are followed and intimidated, and, most notably, that the police and military rove Indigenous territories, facilitating the work of national and multinational capitalist enterprises.18 Lenca activist Berta Cáceres, who was murdered in 2014, founded the Council of Indigenous peoples in part to oppose mega-projects and resource extraction in Honduras.19 As critical Indigenous studies have shown, colonial capitalism often expands its control over Native territories by legitimizing the neoliberal multicultural state.20 And it is here that the exercise of autonomy matters. In each chapter, I ask, how can we differently apprehend not only the experience of and resistance to extractive colonialism, but also its generative capacity to see and activate beyond the colonial divide? As I elaborate, Indigenous territories often overlap with the geographies that constitute the Earth’s highest biodiversity, and which extractive capitalism continually earmarks and occupies for commodity conversion, mapped through increasingly fine-tuned technologies. In zones of continual extractivism, what responses, engagements, and viewpoints emerge that do not exhaust difference but instead proliferate it?21 How do Native and African-descendent populations have perspectives on the natural world that engage it, rather than just take from it? And, to reach further into the work of decolonization, can feminist and queer interventions pose a challenge to patriarchal logics, monoculture, and extractive capitalism? Can we differently attend to Andean, Amazonian, Native life and the complex of senses never fully subsumed within the European colonial order? What cultural and intellectual production makes us see, hear, and intimate the land differently? What do we really know about the invisible, the inanimate, and the nonhuman forms that creatively reside as afterlives of the colonial encounter? The map I produce is not connected through linear histories or Eurocentric expeditions, nor do I enter the colonial archive to read alongside it, even while I have learned much from some of these methodologies.22 Instead, the map I draw is one of Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous spaces across the Andes, Southern Chile, and into the Andean Amazonia as continually occupied, either by colonists, settlers, or multinational corporations, where histories of decolonization arise within the violent condition of extractive capitalism. A disciplinary rationale inevitably fails for all the sites, texts, and geographies that I transverse with epistemological excess. In other words, rather than pursue one disciplinary frame, I engage standpoint and decolonial theory, regional histories, and relational critique to attend to several scenes of extractivism within South America. A decolonial entry into the extractive zone, then, reveals a differently perceivable world, an intangible space of emergence, where rivers converge into the flow and the muck of life otherwise.

An important subset of literature expanding the political and conceptual lens of extractivism has been that within feminist political economy and ecofeminist critique, delineating the various gendered effects of resource extractivism (Elodie Behzadi, 2019; Lahiri-Dutt, 2022; Ukeje, 2005; Endeley, 2010) and unpacking the gendering of extractive geographies within ongoing practices of coloniality and neo-imperial geopolitics (Murrey and Jackson, 2020). This scholarship builds from the experiences of the people most directly impacted by extractivist paradigms, including Indigenous, Black, working class, rural women and more to show that ‘the impacts of extractivism-based development are deeply sex-gendered ones’ (Hargreaves, 2019, p. 63). Emphasising the mutually constitutive nature of oppressions, Lugones (2007) critiques the ‘modern/colonial system of gender’, arguing the modern/colonial analytical matrix of male-dominated decolonial studies fails to sufficiently grapple with the way power operates via gender norms and discriminations (Lugones, 2007). For Lugones, enduring racial/gendered colonial subjectifications are continuously transformed, yet obscured and ignored within colonial epistemologies (Mack & Na'puti, 2019). Extractivism, racism and sexism are often mutually sustaining and reinforcing within the same geopolitical context. Indeed, Voyles (2015, p. 15) argues that racism and extractivism are ‘conceptual intimates’. Work in the political economies of racial and patriarchal capitalism exposes the relationship between capitalism and racism, including the ways in which neoliberal capitalism heralded new forms of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2007) which have been predicated upon colonial (racial and gendered) logics. Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007, p. 28) writes, ‘Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, in distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies’. Extractive dispossessions and socio-environmental processes of dehumanisation coincide (i.e., toxins on the body, racial/gender discrimination, and sex work and servitude) and each are acutely racialised and gendered. The coloniality of being would initiate a dual annihilation and negation ‘of both nature and natives’ (Rinaldi et al., 2022, p. 828); extractive logics reproduce these dynamics by directly refusing the full humanity of Black, brown and Indigenous people. A significant conceptual turn has been the emergence of work on cuerpo-territorio/bodies–lands (Cabnal, 2015), crucially stressing how land (meanings within, access to and the power/politics that determine these) are constitutive of Indigenous women's capacities for self- and community-caring (Zaragocin, 2019; Zaragocin & Caretta, 2021). Sweet and Ortiz Escalante (2016, p. 594) explain that cuerpo-territorio importantly works against Western epistemes that separate bodies from lands; this ‘helps to decenter the public-private divide, which is an important obstacle to eliminating violence against women’. This concept links women's struggles for territorial and embodied defence ‘against extractivist resource exploitation with the struggle against intersectional discrimination, racism, and the historic violation of their bodies’ (Habersang, 2021, p. 169; see also Sakshi, 2021). Senanayake (2020, p. 1577) conceives of ‘sensuous perplexity’ to make sense of the ways in which embodied forms of community knowing and witnessing can ‘(re)produce ambivalence and uncertainty about what harms and what heals’ within toxic and polluted geographies. In their analysis of the ‘noxious metropolis’ of Aamjiwnaag, a First Nation reserve where some 40 per cent of Canada's toxi-petrochemical industries are located, Jen Bagelman and Sarah Weibe (Bagelman & Wiebe, 2017, p. 79) argue for a focus on the intimate as a ‘prism through which the realities of global extractivis[m] … may be viscerally revealed, and felt’. By interweaving Indigenous ‘body maps’ that mark where and how on the body toxicity is experienced, and people's anxieties and connections with their land, Bagelman and Weibe argue that both places and people are ‘intimately colonised’ through extractivism. In this way, embodied knowledges reveal significant features of how socio-environmental harm are lived and resisted. With attention to the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic and other global health crises, geographers have focused on the complex spatial and political ways in which bodies are governed (Fernando, 2020; Sparke & Anguelov, 2020). While responses to viruses can often be framed as ‘mere infrastructural failings’, critical health geographers have unpacked their techno-political and racialised roots. In Puerto Rico, for example, the differential value attributed to Black and brown bodies influenced global health responses to Zika virus (Patchin, 2020). In the use of a decision tree analysis, women's lives were reduced to their ‘economic imprint’ and potential deductions from the capitalist system (Patchin, 2020). Elsewhere, in an eastern province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Kivu, 1.9 per cent of the population is HIV positive (Taylor, 2020). Yet, antiretroviral treatment (ART) for HIV has experienced severe regional stock-outs, significantly slowing treatment and recovery rates (Taylor, 2020). These stock-outs are framed as unfortunate logistical, professional and technical deficiencies (Taylor, 2020). Yet, the allocation and denial of resources are arranged along hierarchies of class, gender, race and nationality – their supply and denial have been weaponised (Taylor, 2020). We draw on this important geographical work critiquing the uneven, racialised and gendered ways in which bodies are commodified as economic equations (Patchin, 2020); are exposed to toxicity (Coyle, 2004), disease and medical neglect via infrastructural and political deficiencies (Taylor, 2020); and whose bodies bear the auxiliary labour burdens of capitalism and extraction (Hausermann et al., 2020).

Extractivism extends beyond the moment of removal, beyond the territory of the ‘extractive zone’ (Gómez-Barris, 2017), to a system's logics and, ultimately, is marked upon lands, waters, food pathways, bodies and knowledges. Extractivism relies on multiple and changing modes of domination, compelling decolonial scholar-activists to seek out decolonial liminalities (Murrey & Jackson, 2020; Sakshi, 2021). Such liminalities are deliberately situated ways of knowing that emerge from experiences and knowledge of the violence of extractivism, but cannot yet comprehend totalising or closed resolutions, nor the end of the colonial-extractive story because these dynamics must be known in praxis; they are unravelled through living, and they are extricated through struggle. Drawing upon anti-colonial modes of relationality, decolonial liminalities can incubate ways of knowing and praxis for land–body decolonisation (Cabnal, 2015; Sweet & Ortiz Escalante, 2017; Zaragocin, 2019). Decolonial liminalities resist colonial mechanisms of power, but this defiance is coupled with an awareness of both the longevity and the temporality of ongoing colonial modes of being (Daley & Murrey, 2022; Lugones, 2007). As such, anti-colonial liminalities do not foreclose possibilities for intellectual solidarity by maintaining that this project will be immediate, straightforward or painless.1 Liminality is important as a component of these socio-political and ecological processes as it opens up cracks in the temporal foundation of modernity/coloniality, exposing the potentials of the in-between, bordering spaces in which radical transition, futurity and decolonial pluriversality are thinkable. In this article, we analyse the concrete and embodied consequences of ‘extractive logics’ shaping life and death in two quite different developmental contexts. Drawing from original fieldwork on tourism and sexual exploitation in the archipelago of Bocas del Toro, located on the Caribbean coast of Panama, we demonstrate how the intersection of land and body creates extractive landscapes that involve far more than just mineral extraction. Next, drawing on more recent fieldwork in Central Africa along the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline (see Figure 1), we examine how development plans discounted HIV burdens as a justifiable trade-off of capitalist growth. In both contexts, we mobilise a conception of ‘extractive logics’ to name the unnamed, unquestioned and often contradictory epistemic frameworks that allow extractivist relations of removal and destruction to persist despite damage and death for those on the frontlines of development (see also Murrey et al., 2023). We see that the logics behind extractivism are more than simply capitalist. We argue that the political ecologies and political economies of survival for people living in extractive zones are embodied matters. Neoliberal expropriations of land and other wealth inscribes itself on women's bodies, even as they seek means to maintain lives of dignity. Extractive logics ensnare women's bodies in particular racialised and gendered fashion. The logics which underpin extraction – what Kathryn Yusoff (2018, p. 59) calls the ‘geologics’ of extraction – establish ‘particular bodies and subject positions … as disposable in the shadow economy of extraction’. Along the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline, we show how engineered disposability was compounded by neoliberal programme logics in which the corporate extractive industries were mobilised to address the very virus that their operations had aggravated. Through subsequent oil consortium- and state-led activities, illnesses were addressed individually, as if reflecting ‘poor choices’ of the person. These atomised understandings of and management of the virus impeded possibilities for collective resistances. Entities within the ‘oil complex’ (Watts, 2005) laud their own institutional responses to predicted rising rates of HIV in ways that would further preserve rather than challenge the fundamental falsehood of extractive logics: the myth of resource extraction as development. The active processes which expose women's bodies to illness, sexual violence and harm are folded back into extractivism's self-celebratory narratives. At the same time, economic techniques and technocratic language would render the concrete and material violence done through these practices as illegible. Positioning our document analysis alongside people's experiences in communities along the pipeline right-of-way reveals women's resilience, dignity and capacities to hustle in times of distress and deprivation, despite hostile, racist and sexualised extractive logics. We find inspiration in Gargi Bhattacharyya's (2018, p. xi) provocation to look ‘in the shadows where capital meets other histories of dispossession’. These ‘shadows’ are explicit in the extraction-attendant violence writ upon people's bodies, and Black and Indigenous women's bodies in particular. Building on decolonial feminist scholarship between and across political economy and political ecology, we supplement scholarly work on eco-territoriality. This includes important work on land–body relations and attention to how extractive logics and processes simultaneously harm land, ecologies and human bodies in continuous, fluctuating and overlapping ways. By scaling up from the body, we more fully conceptualise the scope and range of extractivisms, and direct our analysis towards the political possibilities of consciousness-raising around shared grievances and experiences. This provides an important counterbalance to the methodological nationalism of much of the scholarship on extraction. Methodological nationalism – or the practice of restricting our analysis to certain nation states or regions – can be analytically debilitating because it obfuscates ‘how deeply intertwined global supply chains … are in the sociometabolic production and reproduction’ of extractivist paradigms (Arboleda, 2020, p. 5). We move away from methodological nationalism by seeking new avenues of cross-fertilisation between what have been discrete scholarly endeavours (i.e., tourism and oil extraction) and regimented world regions (i.e., against the tendency for extractive scholarship to reproduce regional and sub-regional specialisms; see also Caretta et al., 2020). Our work seeks to embrace these conceptual provocations and methodological challenges while pushing the dial up further, as we focus on women's experiences of embodied violence. To do so, we work within decolonial feminist scholarship on land–body entanglements building upon the work of Mayan Q'eqchi'-xinka feminist Lorena Cabnal's concept of territorio cuerpo-tierra or cuerpo-territorio (2015), the coloniality of gender (Lugones, 2007), and critiques of the intersections of racial violence and extractivism (Butler, 2015; Davis, 2019; Yusoff, 2018). We nourish the necessary project of emphasising the centrality of survival and people's bodies, particularly Black women's bodies, in understanding what extractive logics actually and concretely do. And, by extension, we seek to speak to the magnitude of extraction not through generalisation or theoretical abstraction but through grounded considerations of situated lives and the basic material and moments that constitute people's agency, survival, redress and repair in geographies of extraction (Noxolo, 2022).

Falsehood 1: China poses the most serious long-term challenge to the international order and is undermining it. The US will defend the international law, agreements, principles, and institutions that maintain peace and security, and protect the rights of individuals and sovereign nations. Reality Check: What the US has constantly vowed to preserve is a so-called international order designed to serve the US’s own interests and perpetuate its hegemony. The US itself is the largest source of disruption to the actual world order. China has been and always will be a defender of the international order. China is a founding member of the United Nations (UN) and the first country to put its signature on the UN Charter. China is committed to upholding the UN-centered international system, the international order underpinned by international law, and the basic norms governing international relations built on the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence jointly championed by China, India and Myanmar have been widely recognized by the international community and have become the basic norms guiding state-to-state relations. China upholds true multilateralism and global strategic stability. China is the largest contributor of peacekeepers among the permanent members of the UN Security Council and the second largest contributor among all countries to the UN peacekeeping budget. China has taken an active part in international arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation processes. It has signed or acceded to more than 20 multilateral arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation treaties, including the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). China is against arms race. In the wake of the international financial crisis of 2008, China adopted a responsible macro policy, remained a “stabilizer” for the world economy and made important contribution to global recovery. China actively provides international public goods to various countries, and has signed BRI cooperation agreements with 149 countries and 32 international organizations. In recent years, President Xi Jinping’s vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind has been warmly received by the international community. It has been written into multiple important documents issued by the UN, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and other multilateral institutions. UN Secretary-General António Guterres hailed China as an important pillar for multilateralism, noting that the purpose for practicing multilateralism is to build a community with a shared future for mankind. Peter Thomson, president of the 71st Session of the UN General Assembly, said the vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind advocated by China is the only future for humanity on this planet. In response to various new global challenges, President Xi Jinping put forward the Global Development Initiative (GDI) and the Global Security Initiative (GSI). They represent China’s proposals for making the global governance system fairer and more equitable, and have received positive response and wide support from the international community. The US has blatantly violated the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and the norms governing international relations. With its military might, the US has launched wars in numerous parts of the world, stoking divisions and conflicts and bringing huge turmoil and disaster to the world. Throughout the 240-plus-year history of the US, there were only 16 years in which the US was not at war. The US might as well be called the most belligerent country in the history of the world. US magazine The National Interest quoted Dakota Wood, senior research fellow for defense programs at the Heritage Foundation, who wrote that the US consistently needed to deploy military force every 15 years or so. Since the end of World War II, the United States has either launched or participated in many wars overseas, including the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Afghan War and the Iraq War. Those wars caused extremely severe civilian casualties and property losses, and lead to colossal humanitarian disasters. Since 2001, US wars and military operations in the name of counterterrorism have killed more than 900,000 people, about 335,000 of whom were civilians, injured millions and displaced tens of millions. The US habitually puts its domestic law above the international law, and selectively applies international rules as it sees fit. Since the 1980s, the US had once withdrawn from 17 international organizations and treaties, including the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Paris Agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the Treaty on Open Skies. Although the current US administration declared that “America is back” and the US has rejoined some international organizations and agreements, the administration has in essence not abandoned the “America First” policy, and is advancing “selective multilateralism”. The current administration has stayed out of institutions and agreements considered harmful to US interests such as the Treaty on Open Skies. European media have described it as “America First 2.0”. The US has abused its financial hegemony and technological clout and engaged in economic coercion in the name of protecting national security. The US has enacted some domestic laws, such as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act and the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, and issued a series of executive orders to target and sanction specific countries, entities or individuals. The ambiguous rules contained in these acts and executive orders, such as the “minimum contacts principle” and “doctrine of effects”, are a willful expansion of the jurisdiction of US domestic laws. The US also abuses its domestic channels of prosecution to exercise long-arm jurisdiction over entities and individuals in other countries. For more than 60 years, in total disregard of the many resolutions of the UN General Assembly, the US has continued its comprehensive blockade against Cuba based on its embargo policies and domestic laws such as the Torricelli Act and the Helms-Burton Act. The Cuba blockade is the longest and cruelest systemic trade embargo, economic blockade and financial sanctions in modern history. The blockade has been gravely detrimental to Cuba’s economic and social development, causing over 100 billion US dollars of direct losses to Cuba’s economy. The US has carried out blockade and sanctions against Iran since late 1970s. In May 2018, the US government announced its unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA, and soon after resumed and expanded sanctions against Iran. Many countries and relevant entities have been forced to give up their cooperation with Iran. A large number of foreign oil enterprises left the country. Iran’s manufacturing industry can hardly sustain normal operation. The country has suffered economic slowdown, coupled with heightened inflation and massive currency depreciation. The US has imposed unilateral sanctions on Belarus, Syria and Zimbabwe, among others, over the years, and ratcheted up “maximum pressure” against the DPRK, Venezuela, etc. Statistics show that the previous US administration had imposed over 3,900 sanction measures, which means it wielded its “big stick” three times a day on average. As of fiscal year 2021, the entities and individuals on US sanction lists topped 9,421, which was 933 percent higher compared to the fiscal year 2000. The US’s illegal unilateral sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction have gravely undermined the sovereignty and security of other countries and severely impacted their economic development and people’s wellbeing. The sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction also constitute a gross violation of international law and basic norms of international relations. In an article published in the September/October 2021 issue of Foreign Affairs, Daniel Drezner, Professor at Tufts University and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, criticizes successive US administrations for using “sanctions as the go-to solution for nearly every foreign policy problem.” He notes that sanctions not only are ineffective, but also “exert a humanitarian toll”, and that the United States of America has become the “United States of Sanctions”. The “rules-based international order” championed by the US is in fact another version of power politics. This is an attempt to impose one’s own will and standards on others, and to replace the commonly accepted international laws and norms with the house rules of a few countries. In the world, there is only one international system, i.e. the international system with the UN at its core. There is only one international order, i.e. the international order underpinned by international law. And there is only one set of rules, i.e. the basic norms governing international relations underpinned by the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. Before wanting to discuss rules and order, the US should first pay up its arrears of one billion US dollars for the UN’s regular budget and 1.4 billion US dollars peacekeeping assessments, ratify in a timely manner the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, stop single-handedly blocking the negotiations on a verification protocol under the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), lift illegal unilateral sanctions, earnestly fulfill its international obligations and set a good example for others in respecting laws and norms.

Figure 3.2 visually summarizes this dynamic interaction between racial and international hierarchies as applied to the case of contemporary Sino-American relations: As far as the U.S.-led global order has at least partly been shaped and sustained by white-dominant racial hierarchy, China’s rise as a hegemonic challenger would activate deep-seated anti-Asian sentiments within the United States, which can significantly shape American foreign policy views and responses (also see Búzás 2021). Racialized views toward Asians, therefore, may work as a powerful heuristic or cognitive short-cut in shaping how Americans interpret and respond to threats from China. As scholars of Asian American politics have pointed out, ordinary Americans tend to subscribe to an essentialist view of Asians as a homogeneous racial group regardless of their nationality – the process of ‘racial lumping’ that further facilitates the translation of racial attitudes to views toward foreign Asian countries such as China (Kim 1999; Wu 2002). In the United States, one key dimension of anti-Asian sentiments revolves around the view of Asians as “perpetual foreigners” perceived as “both unfit for and uninterested in the American way of life” (Kim 1999, 112). Dating back to the 19th century portrayal of “Chinamen” in the mysterious and cunning image of Fu Manchu (Mayer 2013; Tchen and Yeats 2014), Asians have been regarded as generally inscrutable and suspicious outsiders. This image has been rendered 55 even more threatening by the second, complementary dimension of anti-Asian racial resentment: the perception of Asians as “unbeatable competitors” (Smith 1993). Since the days of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 19th century, as Smith (1993) notes, the presumed relative economic superiority and competence of Asians have been a major source of anti-Asian racial fear and animosity. Such entrenched racial resentment held by the American public should therefore trigger more alarmist views about the economic and military rise of China, induce the inference of hostile Chinese intensions, and lead accordingly to higher levels of mass support for hawkish foreign policy responses. Based on the discussion thus far, I derive the following testable hypotheses: Hypothesis 1 (H1): Higher levels of anti-Asian sentiments will be positively associated with higher levels of support for hawkish China policies. Hypothesis 2 (H2): The racial attitude effects will be mediated by heightened threat perceptions.

To explain the racialization of American opinion on China requires a deeper understanding of how race and racism figure in the dynamics of international politics in general and great power relations in particular. Recent studies on international hierarchy in IR have opened the door for theorizing race as a prominent force that shapes and sustains inter-state relations that are often hierarchical in nature (Freeman, Kim, and Lake 2022). In world politics, many powerful states have succeeded in translating their superior material capabilities into inter-state hierarchies, defined as an ordered ranking of states “organized into vertical relations of super- and subordination” (Zarakol 2017, 1). As with any form of political authority, however, inter-state hierarchy demands legitimacy (Lake 2010) and as Freeman, Kim, and Lake (2022) point out, racial norms have frequently served to justify such an unequal order as a rightful rule of one superior race over the other. Dominant actors in international politics, in other words, tend to perceive the subordinate state as racially inferior yet potentially dangerous – a view that legitimates and thus helps maintain a hierarchical international order at any given time. These notions of deficiency and hostility of racial others, therefore, straddle a key feature of racialized inter-state hierarchy and can have lasting effects on how dominant states perceive and ultimately respond to subordinate states (Freeman, Kim, and Lake 2022). In IR, a few studies have demonstrated the far-reaching foreign policy implications of such racialized views: Maass (2020), for example, shows that the limited American territorial expansion in Mexico in the 19th century was due primarily to American perception of the native population as racially inferior, hostile, and therefore inherently ineligible for republican governance. Similarly, Hemmer and Katzenstein (2002) explain the absence of a NATO-like multilateral security community in Asia with the beliefs of postwar American foreign policy elites [believe] that Asians are both racially inferior and 53 untrustworthy, better suited for bilateral alliances instead. Racial hierarchy, in short, can shape foreign policies by conditioning how dominant actors conceive of their interests, interpret the identity and interests of racial others, and act accordingly.

Fighting a monolithic communist enemy abroad also boomeranged in the form of racism and xenophobia against immigrants at home. The 1950 Internal Security Act, which required Communist Party members to register with the federal government, allowed U.S. authorities to deport naturalized immigrants suspected of “disloyalty.” After the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, Chinese immigrants during the Cold War were compelled to “confess” their illegal immigration status—even if they had broken no laws when they came to the United States—to earn their citizenship rights. Such policies reflected the anticommunist hysteria of McCarthyism that lasted well into the 1960s. Even when Democrats finally took up the cause of civil rights, as the historian Mary Dudziak has explained, it was in a stunted, narrow way that had been delayed decades by the earlier destruction of a previously unified Progressive movement that was the first organized champion for political and economic equality in America. That coalition was undone by anticommunist liberals—including Democrats and Republicans—whose visions for change were shortened by defining their politics against an enemy rather than for their own theory of democracy.

Just as racism and ethnically motivated violence was part of the Cold War experience, so too has it become the most visible and immediate price of today’s showdown with China and Russia. In the past few months alone, xenophobic attacks against Russians and Chinese immigrants have escalated in the United States. Incidents of hate crimes toward Asian Americans have increased 339 percent since 2021, including a mass shooting in Atlanta in March 2021 that killed six Asian American women. Following the Ukraine invasion, Russian businesses in the United States have been boycotted, and Disney paused its new film releases in Russia. Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell even went so far as to recommend “kicking every Russian student out of the United States.” This is a disturbing echo of Cold War exclusionism.

“Yellow peril,” a derogative ideology invented by European imperialists during the 19th century, pathologizes Asian people as an existential threat to Western civilization and justifies the colonization of Asian nations (Tchen & Yeats, 2014). This idea became popular in the United States as many Chinese male laborers arrived on the West Coast in the mid-19th century. Their lifestyles and work ethics challenged working-class Whites’ financial security and the idea of “White purity” (Takaki, 1998). When the smallpox epidemic broke out in San Francisco in 1876, local health officials depicted Chinese immigrants as contagious diseases and Chinatown as the main site of urban decay (Shah, 2001). The fear-mongering led to the lynching of Chinese immigrants during the 1870s and the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, restricting the number of Chinese immigrants and denying them U.S. citizenship. When Japan’s Imperial Army bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 that authorized the incarceration of Japanese Americans and cast them as perilous to national loyalty. In the next three decades, the U.S. military bombarded Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. These imperial wars resulted in the massive death of Asian people and racialized them as “yellow perils” who needed to be contained and annihilated (Hamamoto, 1994). “Model minority,” another prejudicial term coined by a White male American sociologist during the 1960s, exoticizes Asian Americans’ ability to transcend historical racial antagonism, overcome systemic barriers, and achieve mainstream success (Wu, 2013). During the Cold War (1945–1991), this ideology targeted Asian Americans for civil inclusion on the premise of pledging allegiance to U.S. imperialist aggressions in Asia (E. Lee, 2015). In so doing, this insidious belief covers the yellow peril trope, essentializes Asian Americans as achievers of the American dream, renders Asian Americans politically passive, pits Asian Americans against other people of Color, and upholds White supremacy in the United States (Hartlep, 2021; Wu, 2002). However, “yellow peril” and “model minority” are two sides of the same racist coin, and Whites possess the institutional power to flip it as needed. This is evident as the Trump administration reignited the “yellow peril” pathology during the COVID-19 pandemic to diverge U.S. anxiety on the trade war and competition for technology supremacy by demonizing China as a threat to humanity and posing the U.S. empire as a savior to the world (Siu & Chun, 2020). Consequently, this rhetoric intensified anti-Asian xenophobia in the United States. Yet little is known about how this shifting social climate may manifest in U.S. K–12 schools.

The “Genocide Machine” theory has rattled and revived genocide studies. When PatrickWolfe24writes: “invasion is a structure not an event,” the Genocide Machine is the 1973theoretical assertion supporting this claim. Undoubtedly inspired by anti-colonialism25 and Sartre’s (1968) indictment of the Vietnam War as Genocide,26the theory of the Geno-cide Machines remains a notable contribution to the understanding of colonialism, neoco-lonialism and systematic patterns of degradation and extermination.27“In the aftermath of the Second World War,”Davis and Zannis contend,28“colonialism has absorbed a geno-cide through detached technological means.” They continue to define The Genocide Machine as: An extension of traditional colonialist genocide with new modes of operation. It is character-ized by a pervasive, repressed fear that corrodes the values and sanity of subject peoples and colonial powers alike. This fear acts to advance a super colonialism based entirely on economic considerations which respect no territorial boundaries and victimizes the people of even the great colonial powers.29While we can see shortcomings and strengths to this statement in different times and con-texts, Davis and Zannis recognize the limitations of identity boundaries by including “the people of even the great colonial powers.” The genocide machines recognizes the total character of techno-capitalist development and how genocidal processes are increasingly implicated within industrial and computational technologies. “[C]olonialism has absorbed a genocide through detached technological means,” writes Davis and Zannis, further con-tending that: “Automated technology does the work of maintaining colonial power.”30Think-ing of the study of material cultures, “genocidal values”31have been embedded into technological systems. Achille Mbembe contends that ideas of natural selection are coded into computational technologies, such as algorithms, but specifically applications of genetic and evolutionary algorithms.32Jaques Ellul’s (1954) notion of technique might also approximate these genocidal values. Sharing a psychoanalytical element with Davis and Zannis, Ellul defines technique as “man’s concern to master things by means of reason to account for what is subconscious, make quantitative what is qualitative, make clear and precise the outlines of nature, take hold of chaos and put order into it.”Said differently: “technique is nothing more than means and the ensemble of means.”33Ellul’s exposition of technique resonates with early observations of the Nazi state appar-atus,34but also more recent conversations around automotive warfare and drones that manufacture the “[i]ndustrial production of compartmentalized psyches, immunized against any possibility of reflecting upon their own violence.”35Echoing Ellul, Davis and Zannis’ assertion that “[s]pecialization and bureaucratization …allow the control and administration of a genocidally-oriented system”and remains controlled by “a handful of leaders.”36The level of control exercised by a “handful of leaders” today remains ques-tionable, as highlighted by the World eater hypothesis that views the colonial process as viral and out of control.37Undeniable, however, are the exploitative capabilities created by technology; the dependence, deskilling and reskilling of humans; as well as widespread technophilia that contribute to serious collective psychosocial changes and disorders,38which do not account for the rates of natural resource extraction necessary to create them.39In sum, the concentration of wealth and the spread of industrial, cybernetic and computational technologies40reinforce a structure of conquest organized around a politi-cal economy that, despite its undeniable allure, convenience and (contested) develop-mental benefits, underpins and reinforces ecological catastrophe and climate change. The Genocide Machine recognizes a shift in modality –the economization of extreme coercive power –and locates capitalism or, more acutely, the global techno-capitalist system, as a structure of perpetual conquest. Recognizing the “political economy of gen-ocide”41and genocide-ecocide nexus dynamic within The Genocide Machine, Davis and Zannis advocate for the term “environmental genocide” to be distinguished from “insipid elements of the ecology movement.”42Linking human and environmental factors was the first step towards restoring Lemkin’s vision after post-War international legal negotiations and the “colonial clause” that exempted colonial territories from the Genocide Convention’s protections.43The perpetrators are “mainly a corporate interna-tionalism which must do everything in its power to discourage ‘unstable’ national move-ments that disrupt markets and endanger profits.”44Developing and sustaining structures of capital accumulation and, by extension, natural resources remain essential to the techno-capitalist Genocide Machine that absorbs resources, vitality and now “murder[s] only when they are forced to by resistance.”45Following Hanna Arendt, we might say that the Genocide Machine’s central commonality with the Nazi Holocaust is further institutionalizing and normalizing the “banality of evil,” becoming strategic, as opposed to indiscriminate in its violence. This evil is organized around the fetishization of efficiency, technological development, rule of law, capital accumulation and power. It is organized by leaders and carried out by people that are “neither perverted nor sadistic, [but]were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”46Terrifyingly normal people who in all likelihood are trying to gain social status and material comfort within industrial society.

Let us recapitulate the argument about race and capital. This essay has argued globalization is based on racial capitalism as brought about by slavery and genocide, but partially overcoming them through the Industrial Revolution. If colonization was essential to the emergence of capitalism, today’s retrospection allows us to identify a “proto-racist” sense of privilege to others’ ecosystems and cultures that inflected the colonial projects (Saldanha, 2013). Liberal and conservative historians argue it was mutual competition, supposedly an inevitable fact amongst all human groups, that drove Western European powers to expand (Crosby, 1986; Jones, 1981). The discords of early modernity are undeniable, of course, but the question is how Europeans could transpose their conflicts anywhere they wanted on the globe, starting with the Crusades and the Treaty of Tordesillas. One can only imagine if competition between China, Japan, and India were to be played out by carving out Europe as Europe did Africa. The aggressive usurpation of land, labor, and resources that colonial capitalism necessarily consists of corresponds with annihilating anthropogenic ecologies that had developed over generations. Following critical race scholars (Wynter, 2013), such annihilation cannot but be termed racist, as it was and is based on the certainty that some people, somehow, have a divine, legal, or rational “right” to appropriate other social formations and landscapes for the enrichment of their fatherland. Public discourse is changing. Carbon inequality and climate justice are becoming mainstream progressive terms. Even lifestyle magazines like Essence now decry the structural racism inherent in the climate denialism of tycoons like Donald Trump (Sanders, 2017). Indeed, Trump embodies, in however contradictory a fashion, the coming-together of reactionary forces that had been accruing for decades, or rather centuries. As evinced by the spread of the word “Trumpocene,” the president’s cynical selfishness is likely to become more prevalent in the Anthropocene than humanitarian interventionism and the erstwhile calls for universal human rights and cooperation (see Kaplan, 2016; Myer, 2016). When Trump designates countries in the Global South as “shitholes,” attacks brown and black Congresswomen, and refuses to criticize white fascists, he provides a lucid formulation of the logic of racial capitalism: the material positionality of a power elite obsessed with self-enrichment, a denial about the US’s own catastrophic levels of gun violence and plutocracy, and a paranoia about immigration from the areas of poverty this elite causes elsewhere, as a kind of excrement of the capitalist system. With the election of Jair Bolsonaro, Trumpism has been replicated in Brazil, its president openly imagining exterminating Indigenous Amazonians to make room for export beef. From Europe’s far-right parties to corrupt elites in the Global South, the global growth of Trumpism will no doubt deepen the racialized dimensions of capitalism. One should not be blinded[distracted], however, by the abrasiveness of authoritarians like Trump and Bolsonaro: they are the condensation of a liberal-democratic order in crisis. An irony of Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” is that just when the most openly racist and sexist US president ever comes to lead the last white-supremacist empire—which, though crumbling, or perhaps because of that, has been most responsible for the world’s catastrophic state—he accelerates that empire’s decline and nefarious effects with as much bravado as ineptitude. The desperate anti-environmentalism and heteronormativity of the US Republicans and Bolsonaro must be seen as part and parcel of a fascist turn which, as history show, accompanies states of profound collective malaise. With the Industrial Revolution, the formal abolition of slavery, the welfare state, mass consumption, neoliberalism, and now a crypto-fascist turn, capital requires drastic axiomatic transformations for its own survival. Trump and Bolsonaro show that Nick Mirzoeff (2016) has a point in calling the Anthropocene “the White-Supremacy-Scene,” but racial capitalism operates through more than violence, and its start date is the late 18th century not the 16th. The global system of race constantly has to restabilize itself across the centuries and across locations and scales. This article revisited processes whereby capital aggressively remade the earth in its own image and hence posited the white bourgeoisie as explicit standard for the entire species. But capital is a force uncontainable by any one racial or ruling class. If by the year 2120 on a viciously hot planet China turns out to be the dominant superpower, Arab city-states have successfully navigated peak oil, Europe is riven with separatist warfare, and US cities are burnt-out and flooded wastelands, inequalities in life expectancy will most probably still be indexed on phenotypical differences. Sinocentric or Arab-centric versions of structural racism and ecological destruction might be less genocidal than the white-supremacist ones—indeed, the truculent policies of the “emerging economies” often justify themselves as different from Europe’s arrogance even while they import the same methods—but that could render them more effective. Even if in this scenario white supremacy is superseded, it is certain the inhuman vortex of capital would continue to wreak havoc on racialized others, animals, and ecosystems. As a broadening coalition of activists, theorists, and scientists is showing, the time is now for conceiving and struggling for an Anthropocene freed from capital’s axiomatic of growth. Whenever the Anthropocene started, whether it engenders collapse, slow degradation, or a different system altogether is a political question of unprecedented magnitude.

The Biden administration’s rhetoric and policy toward China have featured an imbalance between these two impulses, favoring restrictive and exclusionary measures at the expense of both competitive and cooperative opportunities for mutual gain. Washington’s orientation toward China is not so much about engaging in competition as about cutting off competition. That sends a signal to Chinese leaders that the world the United States seeks has no room for China’s success. This strengthens the hand of those in China arguing for more confrontational responses and exacerbates popular nationalism in China. At the same time, it sends a signal to the American public that constructive relations with China are impossible, bolstering those voices in U.S. politics calling for more extreme forms of China exclusion and strengthening nativist currents that feed off the image of nefarious foreigners. These escalatory dynamics in both countries now threaten to harden zero–sum pressures in the global system into a permanent structure of hostility, in which each country would organize its own society and international partners to undermine the other, dramatically increasing the likelihood of violent conflict. The tentative diplomatic exchanges that in recent months have temporarily cooled overheated rhetoric on both sides will ultimately be overwhelmed by the now deep–seated logic of exclusion and confrontation — unless officials on both sides sharply reorient toward a shared project of revitalizing the global system around an inclusive common good. …. It also poses, in Xi Jinping’s words, “challenges of unprecedented severity to the country’s development.” Since the global financial crisis, Chinese growth, government revenue, and regular people’s strategies for establishing their families and saving for retirement have all been based on a huge real estate bubble. The leadership has been trying to find a way to deflate the bubble without setting off a crisis for a decade. But that requires a different source of growth to replace the bubble, and Chinese leaders have concluded — like U.S. leaders thinking about problems in the U.S. economy — that the solution is developing high–tech sectors while modestly reducing domestic economic inequality to increase consumer demand and political legitimacy. Exclusionary U.S. policies thus threaten to cut off the Chinese economy’s escape route from the danger of financial collapse.

When I arrived at the Pentagon in 2009, the Obama administration was just getting its footing as caretakers of the War on Terror. Our focus then was truly global dominion. That meant, yes, killing and capturing whatever the intelligence process coughed up as bad guys no matter who they were or where they were. But also, technologically, our fixation was on “prompt global strike”—the idea that the US should be able to reliably put warheads on foreheads anywhere at anytime without constraint. I don’t know what to say about that other than that it sounds much crazier when I say it out loud. But by the time I left the Pentagon in late 2014, the five-sided imagination had shifted entirely to “competition,” which signaled, among other things, that prompt global strike was not enough. In its place came great-power competition. Strategic competition. Long-term strategic competition. “Competitive strategy.” All the buzzwords filling the acronym-addled mind reflected zero-sum repertoires of war-making toward China and, secondarily, Russia. Those adversaries promised a high-technology “future of war.” I say with some degree of remorse that I was one of the pioneers of this conceptual shift toward both high-technology war fighting and competition. On some level, I’ve been making amends ever since. In this context, it’s really important to understand four related things about the national security state’s fixation on China: It predated the Trump administration. It originated from the Pentagon, and if you want to get really deep in the origins, the Office of Net Assessment. It found expression in the concept of “competition.” It is re-expressing, almost beat for beat, how America approached Japan in the ‘80s, which only abated because of Japan’s prolonged recession starting in 1990. These indisputable historical facts—which I stress in Pacific Power Paradox—seem largely lost in today’s policy conversation. The reason I bring it all up is that I initially (circa 2012) saw an intrinsic appeal in the logic of competition. The national security state still does. And it’s worth denaturalizing that appeal—questioning its merits—because it’s more affective and habit-based than logical. What I mean is, anyone who’s wended their way through strategic studies in grad school has been acculturated to competition as a bedrock (and unquestioned) assumption, and is therefore primed to find “competition” attractive. For a certain kind of realist, competition is of course the inevitable state of things. And, if you’re a national security bro, as I once was, or have ever worn the uniform, as I once did, you’ve been conditioned in your everyday life to think of competition as a virtuous thing. But that’s not right. There’s something seductive (yet wrong) about analogizing international relations to competition—contests in which a winner means a loser and there is no way to avoid being one or the other. Here’s what I think is true, and it comes as much from my time as a competitor in combat sports and growing up around gang culture as it does from my study of international relations. Competition does not bring out the best in you—it reveals what you’re really about. The submerged self that maybe you can’t access or discover otherwise. And what emerges can be disappointing. What that means is that if your decisions rest on biases of any kind (racial or otherwise), that will be exposed. If you lack impulse control, you’ll be found out. If you’re a sadist, your sadism will be exposed once you gain a position of advantage or control. What you value most/least will no doubt be exposed. And if you are ruthless and unsparing toward others, competition will reveal whether you discipline yourself that way or whether you only impose it on others. All of that is what competition will really mean in the context of international politics. That is what the Cold War presented us with over and over. And that is what we’re revealing about ourselves on the global stage today. Competition will not make America better in any respect—it will expose in a rawer way what the American national security state is about, and as any honest historian acknowledges, that’s not a pretty picture. Thomas Schelling, game theorists, and certain realists formalized our knowledge of deterrence, compellence, and brute force as analogous to various games in which we were engaged in competitive pursuits against others. Invariably, the image these analogies conveyed were transactional and zero-sum—two teenagers playing a game of chicken, the prisoner’s dilemma, boxers facing off in a ring. But these images are not synecdoches of real life; they are snapshots of extreme outlier moments. Do you play a game of chicken every day of your life? No. When the fighter hears the bell ring, he is relieved—he doesn’t carry the fight with him into the locker room or to his hotel. He doesn’t have to fill himself with adrenaline and hyperfocus. What kind of person walks around thinking he’s fighting 24/7? A fascist. To extrapolate strategy insights from the context of the fighter in the cage is to miss everything that is important about what put that fighter in that cage. As I wrote in the Duck of Minerva a while back:if you take fighting analogies too seriously, your perception of reality will be massively warped…World politics is obviously a mixed valence enterprise. Some interactions are zero sum, but most are not…The idea that you should ignore the messiness of reality in favor of a view that the world is about domination and nothing else at best presents you a dilemma. You might even call it a security dilemma…Competition displaces many things for the sake of one thing; it reorients our priorities. It is a selective—and, if your life is well lived, rare—venture. International relations, by contrast, is an everyday thing. It is the whole of life, on an ongoing basis. Collapsing your reality (and the reality of those around you) into status-chasing or preparation for a “great” war that need not come to pass is nonsensical. Selfish. Unfulfilling. Worse, it forecloses on better futures. From a strategy perspective, relating to other actors in a competitive way leads you to focus on a narrow band of choices—competitive ones, obviously. Doing so obscures context. The circumstances and conditions that give rise to the competitive impulse, and that frame competitive choices, are what matters. So if the aim of confronting China is to protect democracy, undermining democracy—whether at home or abroad—makes no sense. It is power stripped of purpose. The competition metaphor only sporadically fits international relations, and when it does, you must ask the classic question: Is the game even worth the candle?

The China Initiative’s Sinophobia reflects American use of intellectual property rights talk, a term I introduce as a play on Mary Ann Glendon’s notion of “rights talk,” as a means of explicitly and implicitly deploying racist and sexist dog whistles to justify inequitable knowledge production, ownership, and circulation policies grounded in white and masculine theories of rights.13 The desire to protect American intellectual property rights is so intense that it spills over into nearby areas of law—here theft of trade secrets via cyberespionage14—and encourages aggressive and imprecise prosecutions in the name of national security.15 The concept of intellectual property rights talk is a useful entrée into understanding how “relational racialization,” racial bias that operates across racial groups, operates to produce durable forms of gendered racism.16 In this case, the China Initiative, a reflection of the white nationalist ideologies that became tools of Sinophobic populist incitement during the Trump Administration, invoked and reproduced anti-Asianness.17 This is partly because it privileged intellectual property rights over intellectual property responsibilities, specifically about whether US demands were fair and just and what obligations might come with the US legal conceptions of trade secret infringement, especially with respect to legal issues such as cybercrime, around which there is little international consensus.18 A wealth of literature already compellingly makes the case that imposing intellectual property standards on other nations reenacts (neo)colonial power relations, especially when done without regard for the histories and economies of those places.19 This chapter compares the laws imposed and punishments enforced against China with those laws imposed and punishments enforced against Russia, another nation engaged in the theft of trade secrets via cyberespionage, in order to show how (neo)colonialism emerges in international arenas, vis-à-vis disparate raced and gendered treatment in geopolitical dealings. While Chinese nationals have been historically and contemporarily singled out for acting as what I have previously described as “bad intellectual property citizens,”20 Russian nationals have been treated with near impunity despite creating similarly alarming threats to political and economic stability.21 Reading US engagements with these nations in relation to one another reveals a lack of racial evenhandedness in economic espionage policy that reinforces global racial and gender hierarchies of intellectual property. Greater focus on intellectual property rights responsibilities and the ethical obligations that flow from them with respect to race, gender, and nation can help to create more equitable forms of policymaking. This chapter also complicates the binary of good intellectual property citizenship/bad intellectual property citizenship that I have previously proposed by showing that groups do not merely comply with or violate intellectual property laws. Rather, intellectual property rights talk constantly defines and redefines 78 Ownership × Feminism “intellectual property” and “infringement” in response to real and perceived threats, frequently by employing rhetorics of race, gender, and nation to justify expansive and inequitable definitions of both. For instance, China becomes a worse intellectual property citizen and Russia becomes a better bad intellectual property citizen when Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions declares: “Perhaps this threat [from China] has been overshadowed in the press by threats from Russia or radical Islamic terrorism. But while it has been in the shadows, the threat has only grown more dangerous.”22 By positioning the two nations in relation to one another, in a hierarchy anchored by terrorism, he amplifies the Chinese threat. Here, I consider three recurring racist and sexist representations of China as populated by individuals (1) who are devious and suspect, loyal only to their nation of origin; (2) whose way of being is effeminate and weak; and (3) who engage in economic espionage via cybercrime that threatens the United States. I maintain that the United States is comparatively soft on comparable or worse Russian violations partly due to their shared commitments to white supremacy. Geopolitically speaking, this casts Russia not as Edward Said’s Orientalized Other but as Richard Dyer’s “bad white.”23 The bad white is without a doubt a villain—but one that is familiar and sympathetic enough to allow “good whites” to position themselves as morally superior heroes among their own kind. Russia exemplifies a racial and moral gray area that breaks with ideal (colonial) foreign policy but facilitates the maintenance of white supremacy and aggressive masculinity. I show this by detailing how multiple stakeholders describe Russian saboteurs with (1) more generous attribution of motive, (2) more respect for raced and gendered strongman and mafioso behavior, and (3) more technological awe at infringing behaviors as compared to their Chinese counterparts. Chinese infringement is presented as uniquely threatening to global legal orders. My argument proceeds in three parts. Part I outlines two theoretical frameworks for examining how racialization unfolds in the context of economic espionage specifically and intellectual property law generally: Critical Race Intellectual Property (CRTIP) and Third World Studies (TWS). CRTIP applies the intersectional insights of Critical Race Theory (CRT) to intellectual property to understand how race operates in the laws of copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, unfair competition, and rights of publicity. TWS decenters the United States by considering how global liberation theories might approach the problems of racial and gender hierarchy in knowledge governance regimes. Intellectual property scholars relatedly speak of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) as a lens for thinking about the international inequities produced by Euroamerican knowledge ownership regimes.24 Part II examines how China is racially represented and geopolitically managed in conversations about cybercrime and espionage in the larger context of histories and formations of Asianness. Part III considers how Russia is racially represented and geopolitically managed in conversations about hacking and disinformation in the larger context of the histories and formations Chinese and Russian Cybercrime 79 of whiteness. The conclusion posits that drawing upon feminist cyberlaw’s articulations of ethics and fairness can help build equitable global racial orders of intellectual property that divest from whiteness. RACE AND GLOBAL GEOPOLITICS CRTIP is a term that Deidré Keller and I use to organize and describe a body of race and gender progressive intellectual property scholarship and activism from the past three decades that is largely authored by people of color.25 We maintain that bringing CRT, the current racial boogeyman of the fascist right, together with intellectual property encourages intentional consideration of race as an organizing concept in a wide range of legal contexts. As we understand it, CRTIP functions as a set of questions that aid in drawing nuanced intersectional conclusions about the cultural and political superstructures of intellectual property regimes.26 Like CRT, a set of principles and praxes for understanding how race remains entrenched in facially race neutral laws and addressing that embedded inequity, CRTIP focuses on where and how intellectual property law fails to produce racially just and racially equitable outcomes. As a theoretical lens, CRTIP is not confined to analyses of the United States or race. Asking questions about transnational intellectual property regimes and how they are deployed in the service of larger systems of colonialism can illuminate when and how punishment for violation of intellectual property norms is actually punishment for deviation from Euroamerican norms— for example, an implicit form of “intellectual property imperialism.”27 By making these interventions intersectionally, CRTIP can invoke and complement feminist cyberlaw’s theorizations of fairness and equity. Gary Y. Okihiro explains TWS as an interdisciplinary movement centered on finding commonality in the struggle for liberation.28 Unlike Ethnic Studies and its progeny, which he maintains can produce divisive forms of identity politics, TWS is grounded in global solidarities.29 I am interested in how TWS offers a path to reimagining knowledge governance regimes, around a wide range of transformative cultural values. I embrace the phrase “Third World” alongside “Global South” in this chapter as a means of calling upon histories of radical racial activism rooted in 1960s era frameworks of alliance in liberation,30 as well as invoking the ideological and methodological imperatives of TWAIL.31 James Gathii, who is interested in transformative justice approaches to international law, proposes that “there is an opportunity for learning, sharing, and collaboration between CRT and TWAIL scholars” that emphasizes both colonial extraction and white supremacy as meaningful analytics.32 J. Janewa Osei-Tutu has compellingly applied TWAIL to intellectual property law by highlighting the need to decenter American epistemologies while focusing on equitable ownership and egalitarian access to knowledge across the globe.33 This chapter draws upon the often intersecting approaches of CRTIP, TWS, and TWAIL scholars in intersectionally examining intellectual property’s 80 Ownership × Feminism racial orders, the logics of which implicitly and explicitly structure rhetorics around Russian and Chinese theft of trade secrets via cyberespionage. THE FEMINIZED ASIANNESS OF CHINESE CYBERCRIME In a recent article for the South China Morning Post, Leo Yu observed that ongoing Congressional investigations into Tik Tok as spying technology are rooted not in fact but in the “original sin” of Chinese ownership.34 During the hearings, Republican Jay Obernolte asked accusatorily: “How could looking at the algorithm confirm that [Tik Tok is] free from foreign influence?”35 while confrontationally informing CEO Shou Zi Chew “you are not trusted here.”36 Reasonable people may disagree about the nature and scope of the privacy issues associated with Tik Tok but the evidence that Chinese-owned companies are held to higher and racialized standards than white-owned ones is difficult to deny. A bipartisan majority of US policymakers appear committed to the narrative of China as a nation of disloyal spies, who mobilize new technologies in the service of global political and economic domination. Their prejudices are evident in the long history of actions intended to rein in Chinese trade secret theft that the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC), among other US government agencies, has characterized as “active and persistent.”37 While the NCSC’s conclusion has its kernel of truth, the assumptions upon which it is based are troubling and hypocritical. Multiple independent analyses of the China Initiative characterize it as a racist policy that targeted Chinese researchers for “relatively minor errors and omissions in grant applications, rather than spies stealing national security secrets or proprietary technology at the direction of the Chinese government.”38 A recent Brennan Center report historicizes the program, observing that “the FBI and Justice Department tendency to stretch facts and jump to conclusions in Chinese espionage cases pre-dated the China Initiative.”39 For instance, FBI counterintelligence training materials otherize those of Asian descent.40 And earlier policies and actions, including the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 (EEA), reflect similar racial animus. The EEA, which turned theft of trade secrets into a federal crime,41 marked an uptick in criminalizing previously accepted forms of competitive behavior, with an eye to Asia.42 In 2022, the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions noted that “[a] significant increase in the number of cases charging EEA-related offenses against suspects of Chinese heritage began in 2009 under the Obama administration.”43 The report goes on to propose that this is a symptom of disproportionate and racist targeting of Chinese people.44 In a detailed review of the EEA, Andrew Chongseh Kim finds “significant disparities in the rates at which people of Asian descent are prosecuted for espionage and the outcomes of those prosecutions.”45 He concludes that “Chinese and other Asian defendants are twice as likely to be innocent as those of other races.”46 Chinese and Russian Cybercrime 81 This, of course, reinforces Del Visco’s argument, that Sinophobic logics are reflexive in American political culture, including among Democrats.47 CRT scholars and activists have long argued that “yellow peril” and “model minority” stereotypes organize American thinking about Asianness.48 Within this binary, East Asians are presented as dangerous and disloyal “forever foreigners,” who threaten to overrun the nation.49 All too often, Asianness is also feminized, for instance through the association of spying with gossip and the association of disloyalty with weakness.50 Such gendered tropes are evident in representations of the Chinese government as an all-powerful regime and Chinese citizens as eternally committed ideologues. Consider, for instance, the FBI’s semi-fictional propaganda film, The Company Man (2015), which promotes yellow perilism by telling a story that contrasts a loyal American businessman with two disloyal Chinese cybercriminals in search of trade secrets. Circulated as a both an agency training video and public awareness campaign, The Company Man encourages multiple audiences to embrace American exceptionalism and Sinophobic paranoia.51 The film tells a gendered, as well as raced, tale in which the dishonorable Chinese men, who shamelessly sneak around industrial spaces and offer exorbitant bribes, fail to live up to the honorable white masculinity of their American target.52 As evident in the short film, representations of yellow perils and forever foreigners often feminize and emasculate East Asians,53 representing them as obedient and cowardly automatons, dishonestly and submissively slinking through the shadows while sabotaging others and destroying relationships.54 Techno-Orientalism, Betsy Huang argues, emerged in the 1880s with descriptions of Asians as mechanistic alien bots without emotions.55 In a longer history of the Asian as “model machine,” a feminized robotic model of race, Long Bui highlights the many ways that US public culture consistently expresses ambivalence, specifically hate and reverence, about Asian technological prowess.56 Though most often applied in science fiction studies, the term techno-Orientalism is useful in theorizing political rhetoric as well, specifically in highlighting how US trade, innovation, internet, and technology policy has collided with racial and gender anxieties. As Lok Sui and Claire Chun put it, “techno-orientalism . . . is the expressive vehicle . . . by which Western and Eastern nations articulate their fears, desires, and anxieties that are produced in their competitive struggle to gain technological hegemony through economic trade and scientific innovation.”57 They trace the concept of techno-Orientalism, through the work of David Morely and Kevin Robin, back to fears of Japanese technological superiority in the 1980s.58 These fears played out in the VCR Wars, a series of conflicts over Asian production of video recording technologies that became lightning rods for national security and economic downturn rhetoric.59 With respect to the former, the Supreme Court, in a decision that largely sidestepped the race and gender anxieties of the moment, held that the production and use of Betamax recorders did not constitute copyright infringement, only “time shifting” of programming that viewers 82 Ownership × Feminism could watch at the originally scheduled time.60 Still techno-Orientalism continued to rear its head, first in disputes over semiconductors and automobiles and later in disputes over cybercrime and platforms. Despite the Supreme Court’s decision, Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti doubled down on the Japanophobic sentiments of the time. In 1982, he testified before Congress, at a hearing on home recording: “The single one American-made product that the Japanese, skilled beyond all comparison in their conquest of world trade, are unable to duplicate or displace or to compete with or to clone . . . this asset, [the US film and television production industry], which is unlike steel or silicon chips or motor cars or electronics of all kinds—a piece of sardonic irony that while the Japanese are unable to duplicate the American films by flank assault, they can destroy it by this video cassette recorder.”61 This eerily familiar language expresses ambivalence about Japan, a nation “skilled beyond all comparison in the conquest of world trade,” but nonetheless incapable of competing with America’s creative moviemaking spirit. Technology operates as a tool of conquest in Valenti’s analogy, as well as an anchor for racist and sexist intellectual property rights talk. War metaphors such as “flank assault” add a militant and patriotic urgency to the fight, with Japan engaging in feminized treachery and pathologized virality. Perhaps more importantly, they transform intellectual property rights talk into a raced and gendered conversation that disparages Japanese peoples’ ability to produce artistic works and engage in war. The backhanded compliment that implicitly broadens copyright to include economic espionage, is discrimination deployed in the service of ownership rights. The Japanophobia of the 1980s is intertwined with contemporary Sinophobia because, as Stanford Lyman puts it, anti-Asian racisms are overlapping and interchangeable, despite cultural and geopolitical differences: “The yellow peril appeared first as China, then as Japan, then as China and North Korea, then as China and Vietnam, then briefly as a temporarily prosperous Japan again, and, at the moment—once again as China.”62 Moreover, both are orientalist in their demonization of the so-called Orient as a means of validating Euroamerican white supremacy and legal regimes. Over time, the yellow peril narrative of the “Chinese copy” came to be treated as bipartisan fact, with the Bush Administration and the Clinton Administration cracking down on infringement, while bashing China’s intellectual property policies. Under the Obama Administration, Biden declared: “Why have they not become [one of] the most innovative countries in the world? Why is there a need to steal our intellectual property? Why is there a need to have a business hand over its trade secrets to have access to a market of a billion, three hundred million people? Because they’re not innovating.”63 This racist and gendered intellectual property rights talk is perpetually justified through moving goalposts: when China agrees to international norms, the US demands greater compliance with its visions of knowledge ownership and economic norms.64 Copying is treated as weakness not as resilience or choice. America consistently shores up support for white supremacist intellectual property policies, including around trade secrets, through the mobilization of public emotions of fear and anger. These feelings are frequently rooted in national and geopolitical anxieties about the sustainability of the economy and whiteness.65 But, as Sara Ahmed might contend, these “racial feelings” about employment, resources, and more are dishonest projections, defensive postures that ignore how the United States built its own economy on infringement and imposes double standards on other nations.66 Indeed, good faith international intellectual property engagements require acknowledging the unique knowledge production trajectories and economic flows of nations in the Global South.67 Yet according to US racial epistemes, Chinese people are quintessential bad intellectual property citizens who constitutionally refuse to comply with global norms, and Euroamerican nations are quintessentially good intellectual property citizens who intuitively steward international norms. These heroic myths of whiteness and masculinity are further normalized through relational racialization. THE MASCULINE WHITENESS OF RUSSIAN HACKING In 2020, CNN published an article with the headline “37 Times Trump Was Soft on Russia.”68 According to the article, Trump not only urged Russia to hack more, stating: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he also proposed cybercrime cooperation with Putin.69 The NCSC, in contrast to its assessments of China’s economic espionage, describes Russia as a “sophisticated adversary,” focused on military and economic domination.70 While the Chinese threat originates in “persistence,” a trope of mechanistic overrun, the Russian threat originates in “[sophistication],” a trope of elegant wrongdoing. If US policy toward China with respect to intellectual property and economic espionage can be characterized as condescending managerialism, its Russia policy can be described as begrudging acceptance. This hands-off approach has persisted for many years in the face of egregious violations of geopolitical norms, such as invasions of sovereign nations and interference in national elections, as well as a litany of intellectual property and economic espionage transgressions. This is curious given that cybersecurity experts consistently rank Russia in the top cybercrime threats to the US, alongside China. Russian hackers are described as “sowing chaos.”71 China’s mechanistic precision is contrasted with Russia’s thuggish coldbloodedness.72 Yet the consequences for the two nations are very different. Barron’s reports that there are two primary reasons for US nonintervention in the latter issues: that Russia is careful to stay within applicable legal boundaries, here of infringement and cybercrime, and that the United States lacks the political will to enforce its policies. Vladimir Putin himself is aware that “there is 84 Ownership × Feminism little Western countries have been willing to do to stop them . . . If there was little incentive in Russia to stop cybercrime before Ukraine, there is no incentive now.73 Indeed, even when Putin declared, in March 2022, that Russian nationals would no longer be required to pay patent owners in “unfriendly countries,” the US barely responded.74 One of the few comparative studies of US treatment of Chinese and Russian infringement, a decades old essay, states what is now obvious: “In general, the United States has appeared to pursue different political, economic, and military goals in its relationships with Russia and China.”75 In practice, this means that the US has punished China for even those infractions that may fall under the gray areas of international law while permitting Russia to engage in similar acts with little more than a slap on the wrist.76 The carte blanche that the United States has offered to Russia is entangled with white supremacy. While the end of the Cold War produced détente with the US in the 1990s and 2000s, Putin’s rise to power shifted the dynamic of the bilateral relationship.77 The latter has been described as a “strongman,” a term “historically deployed to describe autocrats who rule by violence and see themselves, or want to be seen, as worthy of fear.”78 Over the past twenty years, Putin has led an increasingly aggressive Russia, invested in transnational white supremacy. Indeed, multiple white nationalist leaders, including David Duke and Richard Spencer, have identified Putin’s Russia as central to maintaining the global authority of whiteness.79 Yet despite warnings about the destabilizing effects of Russia’s white nationalism, the United States has declined to consistently condemn it.80 I posit that this is largely because Russia, a “contingently white” country, has strategically exploited its whiteness in its geopolitical dealings.81 The concept of contingent whiteness presupposes that race is produced through racialization, a process of constant change that explains “why certain groups become accepted as ‘white,’ how and why they adopt white identity claims, and what consequences those identity claims have for social relations.”82 Russia has endeavored to become whiter over time and Euroamerican nations have largely accepted this. Ian Law writes that “there have been striking changes in racial ideas, practices, exclusions and violence in Russia since the 1990s . . . the notion of a ‘civilised country’ has become a synonym for racial whiteness and Russianness a form of privileged whiteness.”83 Marina Levina observes that Russian investments in whiteness are used to reinforce what Jasbir Puar calls a “politics of debilitation”84 on racially othered peoples such as Syrians and Ukrainians.85 Russians choose whiteness because they benefit from its privileges, including relative impunity. The United States allows this because it benefits from Russia’s whiteness, including regional counterbalancing. Despite its chosen and bestowed whiteness, Russia has retained its long-standing identity as a political foil and imperial actor that requires containment. This is evident in multiple areas of friction with the United States, including discussions over NATO expansion. Conflict over intellectual property and economic espionage extends at least as far back to the Soviet Era when, as Debora Halbert observes, Chinese and Russian Cybercrime 85 national intellectual, political, and economic investments functioned as tools for proving cultural and artistic superiority.86 Yet the contemporary American refusal to hold Russia accountable for its misdeeds suggests that the ideological dispute is embedded within a larger context. I propose that, while Russians continue to operate as “bad whites”87 against whom Americans can demonstrate their global moral authority via soft power, it is also beneficial for the United States to engage in performative admonishments instead of meaningful consequences. Three racial outcomes flow from the toothless US response to Russia: (1) it normalizes the US position as the heroic “good white”88 who appears to seek justice in the global arena; (2) it allows the United States to chastise Russia while also simultaneously colluding with Putin; and (3) it positions China below Russia in a divide-andconquer style intellectual property and economic espionage racial order. US intellectual property rights talk with Russia thus supports larger architectures of white supremacy by letting the former off the hook while simultaneously deriding China for its illegal and illicit acts. It also exemplifies how realpolitik itself is constituted relationally, through categories of race and gender. Returning to EEA data with this context around Russia illustrates how the United States uses intellectual property rights talk to reinforce Sinophobic racial hierarchies through relational racialization. The Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions notes that “Chinese-named defendants were 13.2% more likely to have their [EEA] cases dismissed or acquitted compared to other defendants, and 13.5% less likely to be found guilty of EEA-related charges than defendants with nonChinese names.”89 In terms of sentencing, “Chinese-named defendants on average received 12.5 months longer jail terms compared to all other defendants and 12.4 months longer jail terms compared to defendants with Western names.90 The targeting of Chinese defendants relative to other defendants is even more stark when considered over time. The number of Western defendants has declined from 59 percent of the total of all defendants in 1996–2008 to 28 percent of the total defendants in 2016–2020.91 In comparison, approximately 50 percent of the total defendants prosecuted since 2009 have been Chinese.92 These numbers are particularly notable given that Russian actors are growing increasingly bold. “US intelligence officials do not . . . rate China as the biggest threat to the US in cyberspace. The Russians are definitely better, almost as good as we are,’ said one,” Richard Clarke and Robert Knake reported in 2010.93 The Obama Administration and Biden Administration both imposed sanctions against Russia for engaging in economic espionage via cybercrime.94 However, those sanctions were narrow and limited, especially compared to those imposed upon China.95 The racialized rhetorics that American policymakers use to talk about Russia provide some insight about why the US shows this geopolitical rival such deference. A 2009 report released by the Rand Corporation describes Russia as a literal host and harbor for cybercrime, emphasizing that infringers use Russian websites to sell pirated and counterfeited goods because they operate as 86 Ownership × Feminism “protected spaces for crime to arise.”96 Instead of being intertwined with narratives of threatening criminality like Black mafia rhetorics,97 or narratives of devious yellow perils like Asian mafia rhetorics,98 Russian mafia rhetorics suggest a worthy, masculine, strongman foe. Russian hackers are managers of the infringement world, whose ingenuity and infrastructure helps exceptional fakes to circulate. In 2008, Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey declared: “A Russian mobster selling fake handbags through a middleman in New York may also be selling pirated DVDs in London, counterfeit AIDS medication in Africa, and child pornography over the internet.”99 The “Russian mobster” is the protagonist of the story, here because he manages the sale of multiple goods. In 2006, the Los Angeles Times proclaimed, in an article entitled “Russians Able to Fake It Like No One Else,” that “if there is a world capital of audacious fabrication, it must be Moscow, where fake is never a four-letter word.”100 It went on to describe Russian copies through “the French notion of faire montrer [sic],” noting “it’s better to look like something than to be something. It’s a very Eastern way of thinking.”101 Fakes may be Eastern, but Russian fakes are exceptional, certainly better than those Made in China. This racialized rhetoric of expertise positions Russia as strong and China as weak. Invoking France moves Russia closer to Europe—and whiteness.102 This chapter has focused on how US intellectual property rights talk around economic espionage, trade secrets, and cybercrime prosecution uses comparative racialization, with gendered elements, as a means of justifying and enforcing inequitable knowledge governance policies. When speaking about China, the United States employs intellectual property rights talk that plays on fears of feminized yellow perils associated with racial deficiencies, viral replication, and overwhelming numbers. When speaking about Russia, the United States employs intellectual property rights talk that plays on respect for strongman mafiosos operating cybercrime rings to build and sell counterfeit goods. Russian hackers are imagined as deft and capable emblems of white masculinity even though, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat observes, they “are actually weak and insecure individuals but they appear [to supporters in] their countries as saviors, defenders, sex symbols at times, and other male archetypes.”103 Asian cybercriminals, unlike their white counterparts, are presented as femininely devious, thus undeserving of an empathetic counternarrative, despite their nations facing centuries of extractive colonialism. US policies toward China and Russia are anything but independent. Their race and gender contrasts amplify one another while also reinforcing whiteness, a “relatively uncharted territory that has remained invisible as it continues to influence the identity of those both within and without its domain.”104 CRTIP, TWS, and TWAIL are useful intersectional tools for deconstructing intellectual property rights talk because they make racial and gender hierarchies visible. Those using these methods would benefit from applying and deepening feminist cyberlaw’s insights about ethics and fairness in the area of theft of trade secrets via cyberespionage as part of their theoretical inquiries. Doing so will not only highlight the intersectional race issues that arise with respect to the theft of trade secrets but also aid in building more equitable knowledge governance regimes with evenhanded application of laws and policies across racial groups.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch05.htm]//ETang

Competition is the completest expression of the battle of all against all which rules in modern civil society. This battle, a battle for life, for existence, for everything, in case of need a battle of life and death, is fought not between the different classes of society only, but also between the individual members of these classes. Each is in the way of the other, and each seeks to crowd out all who are in his way, and to put himself in their place. The workers are in constant competition among themselves as are the members of the bourgeoisie among themselves. The power-loom weaver is in competition with the hand-loom weaver, the unemployed or ill-paid hand-loom weaver with him who has work or is better paid, each trying to supplant the other. But this competition of the workers among themselves is the worst side of the present state of things in its effect upon the worker, the sharpest weapon against the proletariat in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Hence the effort of the workers to nullify this competition by associations, hence the hatred of the bourgeoisie towards these associations, and its triumph in every defeat which befalls them. The proletarian is helpless; left to himself, he cannot live a single day. The bourgeoisie has gained a monopoly of all means of existence in the broadest sense of the word. What the proletarian needs, he can obtain only from this bourgeoisie, which is protected in its monopoly by the power of the state. The proletarian is, therefore, in law and in fact, the slave of the bourgeoisie, which can decree his life or death. It offers him the means of living, but only for an "equivalent", for his work. It even lets him have the appearance of acting from a free choice, of making a contract with free, unconstrained consent, as a responsible agent who has attained his majority. Fine freedom, where the proletarian has no other choice than that of either accepting the conditions which the bourgeoisie offers him, or of starving, of freezing to death, of sleeping naked among the beasts of the forests! A fine "equivalent" valued at pleasure by the bourgeoisie! And if one proletarian is such a fool as to starve rather than agree to the "equitable" propositions of the bourgeoisie, his "natural superiors", another is easily found in his place; there are proletarians enough in the world, and not all so insane as to prefer dying to living. Here we have the competition of the workers among themselves. If all the proletarians announced their determination to starve rather than work for the bourgeoisie, the latter would have to surrender its monopoly. But this is not the case – is, indeed, a rather impossible case – so that the bourgeoisie still thrives. To this competition of the workers there is but one limit; no worker will work for less than he needs to subsist. If he must starve, he will prefer to starve in idleness rather than in toil. True, this limit is relative; one needs more than another, one is accustomed to more comfort than another; the Englishman, who is still somewhat civilised, needs more than the Irishman, who goes in rags, eats potatoes, and sleeps in a pig-sty. But that does not hinder the Irishman's competing with the Englishman, and gradually forcing the rate of wages, and with it the Englishman's level of civilisation, down to the Irishman's level. Certain kinds of work require a certain grade of civilisation, and to these belong almost all forms of industrial occupation; hence the interest of the bourgeoisie requires in this case that wages should be high enough to enable the workman to keep himself upon the required plane. The newly immigrated Irishman, encamped in the first stable that offers, or turned out in the street after a week because he spends everything upon drink and cannot pay rent, would be a poor mill-hand. The mill-hand must, therefore, have wages enough to enable him to bring up his children to regular work; but no more, lest he should be able to get on without the wages of his children, and so make something else of them than mere working-men. Here, too, the limit, the minimum wage, is relative. When every member of the family works, the individual worker can get on with proportionately less, and the bourgeoisie has made the most of the opportunity of employing and making profitable the labour of women and children afforded by machine-work. Of course it is not in every family that every member can be set to work, and those in which the case is otherwise would be in a bad way if obliged to exist upon the minimum wage possible to a wholly employed family. Hence the usual wages form an average according to which a fully employed family gets on pretty well, and one which embraces few members able to work, pretty badly. But in the worst case, every working-man prefers surrendering the trifling luxury to which he was accustomed to not living at all; prefers a pig-pen to no roof, wears rags in preference to going naked, confines himself to a potato diet in preference to starvation. He contents himself with half-pay and the hope of better times rather than be driven into the street to perish before the eyes of the world, as so many have done who had no work whatever. This trifle, therefore, this something more than nothing, is the minimum of wages. And if there are more workers at hand than the bourgeoisie thinks well to employ – if at the end of the battle of competition there yet remain workers who find nothing to do, they must simply starve; for the bourgeois will hardly give them work if he cannot sell the produce of their labour at a profit. From this it is evident what the minimum of wages is. The maximum is determined by the competition of the bourgeoisie among themselves; for we have seen how they, too, must compete with each other. The bourgeois can increase his capital only in commerce and manufacture, and in both cases he needs workers. Even if he invests his capital at interest, he needs them indirectly; for without commerce and manufacture, no one would pay him interest upon his capital, no one could use it. So the bourgeois certainly needs workers, not indeed for his immediate living, for at need he could consume his capital, but as we need an article of trade or a beast of burden – as a means of profit. The proletarian produces the goods which the bourgeois sells with advantage. When, therefore, the demand for these goods increases so that all the competing working-men are employed, and a few more might perhaps be useful, the competition among the workers falls away, and the bourgeoisie begin to compete among themselves. The capitalist in search of workmen knows very well that his profits increase as prices rise in consequence of the increased demand for his goods, and pays a trifle higher wages rather than let the whole profit escape him. He sends the butter to fetch the cheese, and getting the latter, leaves the butter ungrudgingly to the workers. So one capitalist after another goes in chase of workers, and wages rise; but only as high as the increasing demand permits. If the capitalist, who willingly sacrificed a part of his extraordinary profit, runs into danger of sacrificing any part of his ordinary average profit, he takes very good care not to pay more than average wages. From this we can determine the average rate of wages. Under average circumstances, when neither workers nor capitalists have reason to compete, especially among themselves, when there are just as many workers at hand as can be employed in producing precisely the goods that are demanded, wages stand a little above the minimum. How far they rise above the minimum will depend upon the average needs and the grade of civilisation of the workers. If the workers are accustomed to eat meat several times in the week, the capitalists must reconcile themselves to paying wages enough to make this food attainable; not less, because the workers are not competing among themselves and have no occasion to content themselves with less; not more, because the capitalists, in the absence of competition among themselves, have no occasion to attract working-men by extraordinary favours. This standard of the average needs and the average civilisation of the workers has become very complicated by reason of the complications of English industry, and is different for different sorts of workers, as has been pointed out. Most industrial occupations demand a certain skill and regularity, and for these qualities, which involve a certain grade of civilisation, the rate of wages must be such as to induce the worker to acquire such skill and subject himself to such regularity. Hence it is that the average wages of industrial workers are higher than those of mere porters, day-labourers, etc., higher especially than those of agricultural labourers, a fact to which the additional cost of the necessities of life in cities contributes somewhat. In other words, the worker is, in law and in fact, the slave of the property-holding class, so effectually a slave that he is sold like a piece of goods, rises and falls in value like a commodity. If the demand for workers increases, the price of workers rises; if it falls, their price falls. If it falls so greatly that a number of them become unsaleable, if they are left in stock, they are simply left idle; and as they cannot live upon that, they die of starvation. For, to speak in the words of the economists, the expense incurred in maintaining them would not be reproduced, would be money thrown away, and to this end no man advances capital; and, so far, Malthus was perfectly right in his theory of population. The only difference as compared with the old, outspoken slavery is this, that the worker of today seems to he free because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no one owner sells him to another, but he is forced to sell himself in this way instead, being the slave of no particular person, but of the whole property- holding class. For him the matter is unchanged at bottom, and if this semblance of liberty necessarily gives him some real freedom on the one hand, it entails on the other the disadvantage that no one guarantees him a subsistence, he is in danger of being repudiated at any moment by his master, the bourgeoisie, and left to die of starvation, if the bourgeoisie ceases to have an interest in his employment, his existence. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, is far better off under the present arrangement than uncover the old slave system; it can dismiss its employees at discretion without sacrificing invested capital, and gets its work done much more cheaply than is possible with slave labour, as Adam Smith comfortingly pointed out. Hence it follows, too, that Adam Smith was perfectly right in making the assertion: "That the demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men, quickens it when it goes on too slowly, and stops it when it advances too fast." Just as in the case of any other commodity! If there are too few labourers on hand, prices, i.e., wages, rise, the workers are more prosperous, marriages multiply, more children are born and more live to grow up, until a sufficient number of labourers has been secured. If there are too many on hand, prices fall, want of work, poverty, and starvation, and consequent diseases arise, and the "surplus population" is put out of the way. And Malthus, who carried the foregoing proposition of Smith farther, was also right, in his way, in asserting that there is always a "surplus population"; that there are always too many people in the world; he is wrong only when he asserts that there are more people on hand than can be maintained from the available means of subsistence. Surplus population is engendered rather by the competition of the workers among themselves, which forces each separate worker to labour as much each day as his strength can possibly admit. If a manufacturer can employ ten hands nine hours daily, he can employ nine if each works ten hours, and the tenth goes hungry. And if a manufacturer can force the nine hands to work an extra hour daily for the same wages by threatening to discharge them at a time when the demand for hands is not very great, he discharges the tenth and saves so much wages. This is the process on a small scale, which goes on in a nation on a large one. The productiveness of each hand raised to the highest pitch by the competition of the workers among themselves, the division of labour, the introduction of machinery, the subjugation of the forces of Nature, deprive a multitude of workers of bread. These starving workers are then removed from the market, they can buy nothing, and the quantity of articles of consumption previously required by them is no longer in demand, need no longer be produced; the workers previously employed in producing them are therefore driven out of work, and are also removed from the market, and so it goes on, always the same old round, or rather, so it would go if other circumstances did not intervene. The introduction of the industrial forces already referred to for increasing production leads, in the course of time, to a reduction of prices of the articles produced and to consequent increased consumption, so that a large part of the displaced workers finally, after long suffering, find work again. If, in addition to this, the conquest of foreign markets constantly and rapidly increases the demand for manufactured goods, as has been the case in England during the past sixty years, the demand for hands increases, and, in proportion to it, the population. Thus, instead of diminishing, the population of the British Empire has increased with extraordinary rapidity, and is still increasing. Yet, in spite of the extension of industry, in spite of the demand for working-men which, in general, has increased, there is, according to the confession of all the official political parties (Tory, Whig, and Radical), permanent surplus, superfluous population; the competition among the workers is constantly greater than the competition to secure workers. Whence comes this incongruity? It lies in the nature of industrial competition and the commercial crises which arise from it. In the present unregulated production and distribution of the means of subsistence, which is carried on not directly for the sake of supplying needs, but for profit, in the system under which every one works for himself to enrich himself, disturbances inevitably arise at every moment. For example, England supplies a number of countries with most diverse goods. Now, although the manufacturer may know how much of each article is consumed in each country annually, he cannot know how much is on hand at every given moment, much less can he know how much his competitors export thither. He can only draw most uncertain inferences from the perpetual fluctuations in prices, as to the quantities on hand and the needs of the moment. He must trust to luck in exporting his goods. Everything is done blindly, as guess-work, more or less at the mercy of accident. Upon the slightest favourable report each one exports what he can, and before long such a market is glutted, sales stop, capital remains inactive, prices fall, and English manufacture has no further employment for its hands.

Because leadership in AI offers advantages both in economic competitiveness and military prowess, great powers — primarily the United States and China — are racing to develop advanced AI systems. Much ink has been spilled on the risks of the military applications of AI, which have the potential to reshape the strategic and tactical domains alike by powering autonomous weapons systems, cyberweapons, nuclear command and control, and intelligence gathering. Many politicians and defense planners in both countries believe the winner of the AI race will secure global dominance. But the consequences of such a race are potentially far more reaching than who wins global hegemony. The perception of an AI “arms race” is likely to accelerate the already-risky development of AI systems. The pressure to outpace adversaries by rapidly pushing the frontiers of a technology that we still do not fully understand or fully control — without commensurate efforts to make AI safe for humans — may well present an existential risk to humanity’s continued existence. An Arms Race? The dangers of arms races are well-established by history. Throughout the late 1950s, American policymakers began to fear that the Soviet Union was outpacing the U.S. in deployment of nuclear-capable missiles. This ostensible “missile gap” pushed the U.S. to scale up its ballistic missile development to “catch up” to the Soviets. In the early 1960s, it became clear the missile gap was a myth. The United States, in fact, led the Soviet Union in missile technology. However, just the perception of falling behind an adversary contributed to a destabilizing buildup of nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities, with all its associated dangers of accidents, miscalculations, and escalation. Missile gap logic is rearing its ugly head again today, this time with regard to artificial intelligence, which could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. China’s AI efforts are raising fears among American officials, who are concerned about falling behind. New Chinese leaps in AI inexorably produce flurries of warnings that China is on its way to dominating the field. The reality of such a purported “AI gap” is complicated. Beijing does appear to lead the U.S. in military AI innovation. China also leads the world in AI academic journal citations and commands a formidable talent base. However, when it comes to the pursuit of AGI, China seems to be the laggard. Chinese companies’ LLMs are 1-3 years behind their American counterparts, and OpenAI set the pace for generative models. Furthermore, the Biden administration’s 2022 export controls on advanced computer chips cut China off from a key hardware prerequisite for building advanced AI. Whoever is “ahead” in the AI race, however, is not the most important question. The mere perception of an “arms race” may well push companies and governments to cut corners and eschew safety research and regulation. For AI — a technology whose safety relies upon slow, steady, regulated, and collaborative development — an arms race may be catastrophically dangerous. The Alignment Problem Despite dramatic successes in AI, humans still cannot reliably predict or control its outputs and actions. While research focused on AI capabilities has produced stunning advancements, the same cannot be said for research in the field of AI alignment, which aims to ensure AI systems can be controlled by their designers and made to act in a way that is compatible with humanity’s interests. Anyone who has used ChatGPT understands this lack of human control. It is not difficult to circumvent the program’s guardrails, and it is far too easy to encourage chatbots to say offensive things. When it comes to more advanced models, even if designers are brilliant and benevolent, and even if the AI pursues only its human-chosen ultimate goals, there remains a path to catastrophe. Consider the following thought experiment about how AGI may be deployed. A human-level or superhuman intelligence is programmed by its human creators with a defined, benign goal — say, “develop a cure for Alzheimer’s,” or “increase my factory’s production of paperclips.” The AI is given access to a constrained “environment” of instruments: for instance, a medical lab or a factory. The problem with such deployment is that, while humans can program AI to pursue a chosen ultimate end, it is infeasible that each instrumental, or intermediate, subgoal that the AI will pursue — think acquiring steel before it can make paperclips — can be defined by humans. AI works through machine learning: it trains on vast amounts of data and “learns,” based on that data, how to produce desired outputs from its inputs. However, the process by which AI connects inputs to outputs — the internal calculations it performs “under the hood” — is a “black box.” Humans cannot understand precisely what an AI is learning to do. For example, an AI trained to “pick strawberries” might instead have learned to “pick the nearest red object” and, when released into a different environment, pick both strawberries and red peppers. Further examples abound. In short, an AI might do precisely what it was trained to do and still produce an unwanted outcome. The means to its programmed ends — crafted by an alien, incomprehensible intelligence — could be prejudicial to humans. The “Alzheimer’s” AI might kidnap billions of human subjects as test subjects. The “paperclip” AI might turn the entire Earth into metal to make paperclips. Because humans can neither predict every possible means AI might employ nor “teach” it to reliably perform a definite action, programming away any dangerous outcome is infeasible. If sufficiently intelligent, and capable of defeating resistant humans, an AI may well wipe out life on Earth in its single-minded pursuit of its goal. If given control of nuclear command and control — like the Skynet system in Terminator — or access to chemicals and pathogens, AI could engineer an existential catastrophe. Arms Racing or Alignment Governance? A Risky Tradeoff How does international competition come into play when discussing the technical issue of alignment? Put simply, the faster AI advances, the less time we will have to learn how to align it. The alignment problem is not yet solved, nor is it likely to be solved in time without slower and more safety-conscious development. The fear of losing a technological arms race may encourage corporations and governments to accelerate development and cut corners, deploying advanced systems before they are safe. Many top AI scientists and organizations — among them the team at safety lab Anthropic, Open Philanthropy’s Ajeya Cotra, DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — believe that gradual development is preferable to rapid development because it offers researchers more time to build safety features into new models; it is easier to align a less powerful model than a more powerful one. Furthermore, fears of China’s “catching up” may imperil efforts to enact AI governance and regulatory measures that could slow down dangerous development and speed up alignment. Altman and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt are on record warning Congress that regulation will slow down American companies to China’s benefit. A top Microsoft executive has used the language of the Soviet missile gap. The logic goes: “AGI is inevitable, so the United States should be first.” The problem is that, in the words of Paul Scharre, “AI technology poses risks not just to those who lose the race but also to those who win it.” Likewise, the perception of an arms race may preclude the development of a global governance framework on AI. A vicious cycle may emerge where an arms race prevents international agreements, which increases paranoia and accelerates that same arms race. International conventions on the nonproliferation of nuclear bombs and missiles and the multilateral ban on biological weapons were great Cold War successes that defused arms races. Similar conventions over AI could dissuade countries from rapidly deploying AI into more risky domains in an effort to increase national power. More global cooperation over AI’s deployment will reduce the risk that a misaligned AI is integrated into military — and even nuclear — applications that would give it a greater capacity to create a catastrophe for humanity. While it is currently unclear whether government regulation could meaningfully increase the chances of solving AI alignment, regulation — both domestic and multilateral — may at least encourage slower and steadier development. Fortunately, momentum for private Sino-American cooperation on AI alignment may be building. American AI executives and experts have met with their Chinese counterparts to discuss alignment research and mutual governance. Altman himself recently went on a world tour to discuss AI capabilities and regulation with world leaders. As governments are educated as to the risks of AI, the tide may be turning toward a more collaborative world. Such a shift would unquestionably be good news. However, the outlook is not all rosy: as the political salience of AI continues to increase, the questions of speed, regulation, and cooperation may become politicized into the larger American partisan debate over China. Regulation may be harder to push when “China hawks” begin to associate slowing AI with losing an arms race to China. Recent rhetoric in Congress has emphasized the AI arms race and downplayed the necessity of regulation. Whether or not it is real, the United States and China appear convinced that the AI arms race is happening — an extremely dangerous proposition for a world that does not otherwise appear to be on the verge of an alignment breakthrough. A detente on this particular technological race — however unlikely it may seem today — may be critical to humanity’s long-term flourishing.

As the applications of AI research become more lucrative, and the impacts of AI on economic, scientific and military applications more transformative, this competition can be expected to intensify. A narrative has begun to emerge, in both policy and public contexts (Simonite 2017, Allen and Husain 2017, Stewart 2017, Allen and Kania 2017, Allen and Chan 2017), framing future trajectories relating to the development of AI in terms typically associated with a race for technological superiority. The China State Council’s 2017 “A Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan” includes in its aims To seize the major strategic opportunity for the development of AI, to build China’s first-mover advantage in the development of AI The United States National Science and Technology Council’s Research and Development Strategic Plan highlights that the US no longer leads the world in numbers of deep learning-related publications. Strong public statements have been made by political and technology leaders: notable examples include Russia’s President Vladimir Putin stating that “whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world” (RT 2017) and OpenAI cofounder Elon Musk tweeting that “competition for AI superiority at national level [is the] most likely cause of WW3” (Musk 2017). These developments reflect a perception that global leadership in AI could confer scientific, infrastructural and economic advantages to frontrunners. Such comparative advantage could also be self-perpetuating, if it helps to recruit the best research talent, or leads to greater wealth and spending power, or to the accumulation of better computing and data resources, or if the application of AI to the process of scientific research itself leads to further breakthroughs. Similarly, although many breakthroughs are likely to be local in application, the perception that some fundamental advances can be applied to a broad range of research challenges further fuels the idea that a winner could take it all. Such notions of ‘winner takes all’ or the importance of technological leadership, foster the framing of AI development as a race. We will refer to this framing as that of the ‘race for technological superiority’ in AI. This kind of race is the primary concern of this paper. But at the same time, it is important to note that there are also concerns about a specifically military AI arms race. Although this is not the primary concern of this paper, there are some noteworthy interrelations with the broader race for technological superiority: most significantly, if AI fulfils its promise as a widelyapplicable and transformational technology, then general superiority in AI will to a significant degree imply also military superiority. Many aspects of AI progress are likely to have dual-use relevance to both civilian and military applications (for example, advances enabling greater autonomy and a wider range of capabilities in autonomous vehicles) not least given the deep connection between AI research and the defence community (Geist 2016). And if systems approach general intelligence or superintelligence, they are likely to confer a very significant strategic advantage that could encompass, but go well beyond, conventional weaponry, with radical implications for security and geopolitics (Allen and Chan 2017). The central concern of this paper is what might happen if the rhetoric noted above around first mover advantage or the pursuit of AI superiority becomes a widespread or even dominant framing of AI development. Our concerns arise both from use of the language of a race for technological superiority (independently of whether such a race is happening) and from such a race becoming a reality. The Dangers of an AI race for Technological Advantage: in Rhetoric and in Reality What is so bad about framing the development of AI in terms of a race for technological advantage? After all, it is widely agreed that AI brings enormous potential benefits across many sectors. One recent report estimated that it could add £232 billion by 2030 to the UK economy alone, with healthcare one of the sectors most enhanced, potentially bringing faster, better service to consumers (PwC 2017). There is a widespread belief that competition and other market forces are central to such innovation. So in as much as a race to develop AI technology means these kinds of benefit come sooner, we have reason to view it positively. But at the same time, the development of such a potentially powerful new technology will need to be steered if it is to be as beneficial as possible while minimising the risks it might pose (Crawford and Calo 2016). In the words of the Future of Life Institute’s open letter on ‘Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence’, signed by over 8,000 people including many leading figures in AI, work should focus “not only on making AI more capable, but also on maximizing the societal benefit of AI.” (Future of Life Institute, 2017a). The danger of an AI race is that it makes exactly this thoughtful steering towards broadly beneficial outcomes more difficult. Three Sets Of Risks We want to distinguish between three sets of risks: i) The dangers of an AI ‘race for technological advantage’ framing, regardless of whether the race is seriously pursued; ii) The dangers of an AI ‘race for technological advantage’ framing and an actual AI race for technological advantage, regardless of whether the race is won; iii) The dangers of an AI race for technological advantage being won. (i) Risks Posed by a Race Rhetoric Alone It is possible that the trend towards ‘race for technological advantage’ terminology in AI, including suggestions such as Vladimir Putin’s that the winner of such a race “will become the ruler of the world,” could pose risks even if the race is not pursued in earnest, let alone won. We perceive two main risks here: (i.a) The kind of thoughtful consideration of how to achieve broadly beneficial AI, as mentioned above, will require subtle, inclusive, multi-stakeholder deliberation over a prolonged period. The rhetoric of the race for technological advantage, with its implicit or explicit threat that dire consequences will follow if some other group wins that race, is not likely to be conducive to such deliberation. Indeed, rhetoric around technological superiority (such as the ‘arms race’ rhetoric used in the Cold War in the US), played into what has been called a politics of fear, or a politics of insecurity -- that is, a political climate that discourages debate in favour of unquestioning support for a prescribed agenda (Griffith 1987). In The Politics of Insecurity, Jef Huysmans argues that use of the language of security (by which he means militarised language, which would include ‘arms race’ and related rhetoric) “is a particular technique of framing policy questions in logics of survival with a capacity to mobilize politics of fear in which social relations are structured on the basis of distrust” (Huysmans 2006). (i.b) Second, if the rhetoric of a competitive, ‘winner takes all’ AI race is used in the absence of an actual race, it could contribute to sparking such a race. (ii) Risks Posed by a Race Emerging If the rhetoric of a race for technological advantage became an actual race to develop sophisticated AI, the risks increase further: (ii.a) First, there is the risk that racing to achieve powerful AI would not be conducive to taking the proper safety precautions that such technology will require (Armstrong, Bostrom, and Shulman 2016). We mentioned above the need for broad consultation about the role AI should play in the life of a community. This might help address important considerations such as avoiding biased systems, or maximising fairness. But in addition to these goals, serious attention must also be given to ensuring humans do not lose control of systems. Such considerations become particularly important if AI approaches general intelligence or superintelligence (Bostrom 2014), but also long before, particularly when AI systems are performing critical functions. The risk is that as the perceived benefit to winning the race increases, so correspondingly does the incentive to cut corners on these safety considerations. (ii.b) Second, a ‘race for technological advantage’ could increase the risk of competition in AI causing real conflict (overt or covert). Huysmans argues that militarised language such as this has “a specific capacity for fabricating and sustaining antagonistic relations between groups. In the case of the race for technological advantage, it encourages us to see competitors as threats or even enemies. The belief that a country intends in earnest to win an AI race, and that this would result in technological dominance, could, for example, prompt other countries to use aggression to prevent this (akin to the cyberattacks made against Iranian nuclear facilities attributed to the US and Israel) (Nakashima 2012), or motivate the targeting of key personnel (precedents -- though specific to their historical context -- might include Operation Paperclip, during which over 1,600 German scientists and engineers who had worked on military technology were taken to the US (Jacobsen 2014), or the apparently ongoing operations to encourage the defection of nuclear scientists between nations) (Golden 2017). Such scenarios would also increase the risk that a general race for technological superiority became increasingly a military AI arms race. (iii) Risks Posed by Race Victory The third category of risks of an AI race for technological superiority are those that would arise if a race were won. We will not explore these in detail here -- and the forms they take will anyway depend on the precise nature of the technology in question. But as an example, these risks include the concentration of power in the hands of whatever group possesses this transformative technology. If we survey the current international landscape, and consider the number of countries demonstrably willing to use force against others, as well as the speed with which political direction within a country can change, and the persistence of non-state actors such as terrorist groups, we might conclude that the number of groups we would not trust to responsibly manage an overwhelming technological advantage exceeds the number we would.

Instability and insecurity The major military powers have been redefining their national security in terms of their pursuit of superiority in the realm of AI. Many countries have already announced their national plans to do just this. The Chinese have termed the search for AI-assisted weapon systems as “intelligentized warfare,” which represents a military revolution characterized by ubiquitous data-rich networks of autonomous and sensor-based intelligent systems.11 The advent of the fourth industrial revolution creates incentives for states to include not only AI but also quantum, nanotechnology, biotechnology, and other forms of technology into their military spheres.12 The fourth industrial revolution is qualitatively differently from the preceding ones by rapidly fusing the biological, digital, and physical domains of life on Earth. The technologies that fall under the umbrella term “AI” feature prominently. Indeed, the Chinese approach to “intelligentized warfare” epitomizes the third revolution in warfare. The confluence of the fourth industrial revolution and the third revolution in warfare may create some opportunities, but also harbingers risks. The militarization and the weaponization of AI are both underway and this phenomenon will impact on international peace and security in appreciable ways. It is already creating a renewed sense of rivalry and competition that is manifesting in the quest to develop more weapon systems. The allocation of funds devoted to AI systems has also been on the rise (Chapter 1).13 Will this march toward including AI lead to a redistribution of power and a sense that world security and stability are threatened? Along with other scholars, I contend that the impact of AI will be disruptive of the prevailing, yet volatile, balance of power.14 The need to preserve strategic stability is where there may be some common ground: self-interested states always work toward maintaining their own national security. In principle, all countries want to maintain international stability to carry on commerce, trade, and other human activities. It is worth noting that “strategic stability” is a concept related to nuclear stability, the centrality of the notion of deterrence, and the absence of incentives to use nuclear weapons first. The concept then came to encompass more widely the reliance on conventional weapons, cyber security, and emerging technologies. However, it continues to be based on the idea that the international system is changeable and precarious.15 This perpetuates the view that more arms mean greater security. A more appropriate view would be to regard strategic stability as the consequence of a global security environment wherein states can maintain peaceful and harmonious international relations.16 The major military powers see AI as a critical magnifier of their present and future nuclear capabilities. Most of the countries seeking to militarize AI also possess nuclear weapons. According to the authoritative assessment by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), machine learning algorithms are already unpredictable and lack transparency (i.e., it is hard to understand how the machine arrives at the outcome). Therefore, command and control of nuclear systems are too critical to international security to be left to algorithms. This signals an agreement not to integrate machine learning and autonomy into the command-and-control systems of nuclear weapons.17 Nonetheless, the nuclear states do see AI as a vital amplifier of their future military capabilities.18 The risks are not trivial, though. The use of AI may heighten the risk of inadvertent use and, as a result, an escalation that could be magnified because of the loss of human control. The unpredictability and unreliability of AI could make for a precarious international system.19 The costs and benefits of the use of AI must be considered against the background of the broader geopolitical landscape, and how they may cause instability. Altmann and Sauer warn that the perils of operating machine-learning weapons reside in the inability to accurately foresee all outcomes in advance.20 This is especially the case when different countries’ algorithms interact with each other during operations. This lack of capacity to predict outcomes hampers the ability of humans to act as overseers in case things go wrong. Machine learning—succinctly defined by Sauer as the use of algorithms and advanced statistical models to improve task performance—is still limited to an extremely narrow set of tasks. Machine learning is “greedy (i.e., hungry for immense amounts of data), brittle (i.e., failing when confronted with a task that differs slightly from what it was trained for), and opaque (i.e., generating unexplainable outputs, essentially rendering it a black box that is impossible to debug).”21 It is worth bearing in mind the two dimensions of instability: the first is arms proliferation and a horizontal and vertical arms race.22 This refers, firstly, to proliferation beyond militarized countries and, secondly, to destabilizing accumulations by key military powers that would exacerbate the security dilemma. Autonomous systems are easier to build than nuclear weapons, which require extensive apparatus such as centrifuges, high-speed fuses, and controlled use of rare raw materials. Autonomous systems are likely to become available to a wider range of actors, including nonstate actors, because their implementation is more about the software. The implication of this is that a potentially destabilizing military race is already taking place. The centrality of software in autonomous systems makes them less reliant on traditional, quantitative, weapons-counting arms control. The software can be more readily duplicated and interfered with by manipulating computer network operations. On the battlefield, characterized by a dearth of data, this means that unpredictability and vulnerability compound uncertainty. The second dimension of instability is escalation due to accidents or lack of communication.23 Three factors are relevant here: casualty avoidance, cost reduction, and the implications of weapon swarming (the use of small or miniaturized systems operating together); this explains why it is likely that countries would more often resort to autonomous systems in surprise attacks that could lead to crises. Casualty avoidance is prompted by the attempt to keep soldiers out of harm’s way and reduce political risks, especially in democracies. Autonomous systems may lead to cost reductions as 3D printing becomes increasingly common. Autonomy can bring military advantages but creates vulnerabilities that create risks because it removes the human as the overseer. The costs of the deployment of autonomous weapon systems far outweigh the benefits. Global security will be harmed as more actors, many not accountable to legal frameworks under international law, start to play a more prominent role by using these systems. The interaction of different-origin algorithms increases the likelihood of the precipitous escalation of a crisis into violent conflict.24 For all these reasons, AI may not reach the levels of reliability and trustworthiness required by many military applications where life is at stake. What is certain is that the pursuit of the weaponization of AI is indeed leading to a greater risk of military races.25 Furthermore, the premature application of AI in the military may reduce and not enhance compliance with IHL. In sum, new global governance is the guardrail needed to foster prudence to avert a reckless AI military race toward the promised yet unfulfilled role of AI technologies.

C. AI Risks Because China and the U.S. are viewing AI as a race, they are negligently moving forward without acknowledging or addressing the risks. Little effort has gone to the creation of ethical standards and international agreements on use by either. Europe, on the other hand, is spending most of its ramp-up time in this regard but only recently determined that its industry is falling behind in actual development.307 Studies disagree on whether AI will eliminate or create jobs,308 but there is a need to understand, at the very least, what skills should be taught in the school system to meet the eventual AI revolution.309 One of the greatest concerns associated with the fourth industrial revolution is inequality.310 Although beyond the scope of this paper to discuss how these risks will manifest, these issues should be addressed prior to forging ahead with AI development in order to win a “race.” These include risks with automated decisions,311 human rights,312 programming ethics into autonomous vehicles,313 autonomous weapons,314 social and political manipulation,315 invasion of privacy, 316 destabilization of the financial system,317 product safety, liability and consumer protection,318 proxy discrimination,319 and cybercrime and cyberwarfare.320 One particular risk is that AI systems are especially valuable in assisting authoritarian regimes. A failure to seek agreement now on international standards and limitations for the use of AI could lead developments down a path that could endanger the safety of the world.321 Although some point to China’s social credit score as an example of a repressive regime, others see it as filling a void in Chinese society in alignment with Chinese culture. 322 A positive step with respect to at least a local level of acknowledgement was taken in May 2019, when the Beijing AI Principles were released, which include a call for “the construction of a human community with a shared future, and the realization of beneficial AI for humankind and nature.”323 These principals were created by a coalition of stakeholders from government, industry, and academia in China. “They include focus on benefitting all of humanity and the environment; serving human values such as privacy, dignity, freedom, autonomy, and rights; continuous focus on AI safety and security; inclusivity; openness; supporting international cooperation and avoiding a “malicious AI race”; and long-term planning for more advanced AI systems, among others.”324 While the AI Initiative indicates that “[t]he United States must foster public trust and confidence in AI technologies and protect civil liberties, privacy, and American values in their application in order to fully realize the potential of AI technologies for the American people,” it does not provide any explanation on how this would be accomplished.325 The final risk that needs to be addressed is that of cyber warfare. The main government sponsored initiative for AI in the U.S. is for the military. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has pledged $2 billion for their “AI Next” campaign.326 When people think of AI uses by the military, they automatically jump to killer-robots. It is important to remember that technology can be used for the good, bad, or neutral (efficiency) purposes. AI can be used to assist with training systems, surveillance analytics, logistical support, the use of unmanned vehicles, and aircrafts to carry supplies, all of which can all be used without threatening lives.327 AI can also be employed to decrypt military communications, hack into weapon systems, distributed denial of services, and cyber-attack utilities and other infrastructures. The real concern is not that other countries may be working on these types of technologies, because most assuredly they are; rather the concern is that there is no understanding of what the future of war will look like or how to respond in kind when it is not just state actors engaging in cyberwarfare but also individuals and groups hostile to an administration.328 This is an area in which international institutions and agreements would be of enormous benefit. 329 Much like the 1968 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) with 191 signatories,330 countries could agree that the risks are not worth the potential harms in weaponizing AI for assured mutual destruction. Some argue that even if countries agree to stop developing autonomous weapons, countries could still secretly violate such agreements. However, bringing this issue out in the open and agreeing to a set of principles at the very least provides a system of check and balances system to monitor the development of such technologies. As this NPT treaty will be reexamined in 2020, now is the time to get around a table to promote cooperation and peaceful uses of AI. RECOMMENDATIONS Although each region’s strengths and weaknesses have been touched on, the current situation is highly complicated. The interdependence of these regions remains unacknowledged and the U.S. and China are moving at full tilt without regard to how their trajectory will impact the world.331 Given the impact that AI will have in areas beyond where the technology is created, attention to the sweeping societal and economic effects must be addressed. While arguments can be made to name China or the U.S. the winner, each will have difficulty advancing by shutting out the other. However, it is the U.S. who risks losing its position due to its failure in policy with respect to 5G. Regardless, it is imperative that all countries come to an agreement on how to proceed responsibly.332 First, the AI race narrative must be discarded. With the U.S. seeking to shut out the spread of Chinese technology, not only is industry in these two regions impacted, but the EU is also caught in the middle. The U.S. and China must acknowledge their interdependence and work to responsibly advance AI, addressing health, safety, and fairness issues. Rather than isolating researchers from one another, funding must be dedicated to the responsible development of AI. While the EU is well on its way to meeting this goal, global agreement must be obtained on its trajectory and standards.

There are also a number of other narratives that, in different ways, identify China as a threat to the US and to ordinary Americans, and thereby feed racism. In addition to blaming China for the pandemic, leaders in US politics and media speak about China as an economic threat and/or a national security threat (through military power, espionage, or so-called “influence” campaigns), and accuse China of “cheating” the US. These narratives are not limited to Republicans or figures on the right like Trump, but are also popular among many Democratic and liberal figures. When these “China threat” narratives are repeated by leaders here in the US, it creates an environment in which many Americans feel encouraged to imagine that these threats are emanating not only from China (as in the country or the government) but also from individual people who are of Chinese descent, or who are perceived to be so. And it creates a sense of license for people to express these racist sentiments in both words and actions. First, it is a long standing feature of racism against people of Chinese descent (as well as people of many other Asian ethnicities) that they are imagined as being part of a single homogeneous collective, lacking in individuality. This implies that if the collective (“China”) is a threat, then any individual member of that collective is also a threat. In addition, connecting individuals of Asian descent in the US to a threat posed by China is sometimes an explicit feature of these narratives. For example, narratives about the supposed threat of espionage or “influence” from the Chinese government consistently portray individuals of Chinese descent in the US as part of the threat. For example, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified in a 2018 Senate hearing that the espionage threat from China is “not just a whole-of-government threat, but a whole-of-society threat.” He named students and academics from China as part of this “whole-of-society threat,” language that casts anyone of Chinese descent as a potential national security threat. Wray was severely criticized by Asian American civil rights organizations but has continued to make similar sweeping claims.4 Originally appointed by President Trump, Wray was kept in place by President Biden. Not just language but also actions communicate “China threat” narratives that can translate into. There are legitimate reasons why many in the US have become increasingly critical of the Chinese government, including escalating human rights abuses. But it has also become regular practice for figures across the political spectrum to exaggerate and inflate the threat that China poses to the US and to the vast majority of Americans. For example, in a speech on June 23, 2020, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo portrayed the threat of China in almost apocalyptic terms, warning that “If we bend the knee now, our children’s children may be at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party,” and claiming that the Chinese Communist Party aims to destroy freedom worldwide. These ideas are echoed in the Strategic Competition Act, led by Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), a bill that currently has broad bipartisan support in the Senate: “The [People’s Republic of China] is promoting its governance model [worldwide] and attempting to weaken other models of governance by undermining democratic institutions.” It’s now common to hear US politicians and other leading figures say that China is “an existential threat” to the US, or “a threat to the American way of life.” These are all great exaggerations and distortions of both the power and the intentions of the Chinese government, and they serve to feed anti-Asian racism