Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"The most powerful states within the capitalist system have historically been the ones which establish the International Political Economy regimes of international capitalism and they establish rules which favour the expansion of their own capitalism."  —Peter Gowan 2005, an unpublished paper " Gabriel Hetland  (theguardian.com, 24 January) is right to highlight how US sanctions have aggravated the economic crisis in Venezuela, perhaps by deliberate policy. US actions follow a predictable pattern. Just over a year ago, another Latin American country riven by economic and social problems descended into widespread street protests and violence following a disputed election, with dozens of people killed by security forces. That country was impoverished Honduras, where the pro-US Juan Orlando Hernández was re-elected president in an election many, including the Organization of American States, saw as fraudulent. The US response that time was to support Hernández agai...

Calculus of Power

This is a nice piece. The philosophical roots of rights-based liberal individualism lie in efforts to legitimate imperial expansion

Rethinking International Relations

The Birth of the American International Relations

" What I have in mind here is to take seriously the fact that the historical record of “capitalist” foreign policy – the structuring and management of spaces of capital – is so incredibly diverse: from the Peace of Utrecht that left a specific political geography on the Continent regulated by British power-balancing, via the Vienna Settlement and the Concert of Europe, the construction of the Western Hemisphere through the Monroe Doctrine, formal and informal imperialisms in the late 19 th  century, the American interwar strategy to break up the old empires and replace them at Versailles by pushing mini-state proliferations through the principle of “national self-determination,” based on liberal and republican state forms and tied into notions of collective security, German and Japanese notions of autarchic regional orders – Carl Schmitt’s “greater spaces” – to US hegemony and the European Integration Project. The political geographies of historical capitalism cannot be derived f...