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The Political Logic of Russia’s Imperialism

According to the political economist Ilya Matveev (2021), Russian imperialism transitioned from the economic logic to the territorial logic around the year 2014, when the Russian state resigned from the strategy of expanding private businesses to Ukraine and other post-Soviet republics and started waging political control over these territories even at the expense of the interests of private capital.
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A Review of Fukuyama’s Liberalism and Its Discontents

What remains constant is Fukuyama’s reliance on transhistorical psychological models of immutable human nature, rather than an analysis of material and economic relations, to explain the current fragility of liberal democracy. While Fukuyama does not abandon a commitment to the capitalist market, he avers that, under neoliberalism, the “valid insight into the superior efficiency of markets evolved into something of a religion, in which state intervention was opposed as a matter of principle.” The review has a misleading title. Fukuyama, according to the review itself, does not argue that or has reached the conclusion that “socialism is the only alternative to liberalism.”
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Gas and Israel’s Regional Integration

“The picture that emerges is clear. East Mediterranean natural gas is serving as a lubricant for Israel’s regional integration . It connects the country politically, economically, as well as in terms of infrastructure to the rest of the region, and serves as an effective tool to deepen its normalization with its neighbors. This process, carried out under US tutelage, highlights the ways in which regional ruling classes are increasingly deepening their ties, simultaneously, with Israel and the Gulf.”
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John Bolton and American-Supported Coups

“Speaking to CNN yesterday, John Bolton — a national security adviser under Donald Trump, who also served under George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan — volunteered that he’d helped plan coups in other countries. He was drawing a distinction between what Trump had done on January 6, 2021, encouraging rioters to march on the Capitol, and his own portfolio. ‘As somebody who has helped plan coups d’état, not here, but you know, other places,’ he said, ‘it takes a lot of work and that’s not what [Trump] did. It was just stumbling around from one idea to another.’  The US  has a  long history  of  removing elected  politicians of which  it does  not  approve .” Latin American coups upgraded
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Lebanon’s Kafala System

‘Modern-day slavery’
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Les Créateurs de Richesse?

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British Economy: Stagnation Nation

Key Facts 1. Low growth: real wages grew by 33 per cent a decade from 1970 to 2007 on average, but this fell to below zero in the 2010s. 2. High inequality: income inequality in the UK was higher than any other large European country in 2018. 3. The toxic combination: low- income households in the UK are 22 per cent poorer than their counterparts in France, and typical household incomes are 9 per cent lower. 4. Stalled progress: 8 million young workers have never worked in an economy with sustained average wage rises, and those born in the early 1980s were almost half as likely to own a home as those born in the early 1950s at age 30. 5. Levelling up: income per person in the richest local authority – Kensington and Chelsea (£52,500) – was over 4 times that of the poorest – Nottingham (£11,700) – in 2019. 6. Brexit Britain: fishing output could shrink by 30 per cent by 2030 as a result of Brexit, but food and beverages manufacturing output could increase by more than 5 per cent. 7. The...
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Music and Politics

Rayya El-Zein has written about how the framework of neoliberal orientalism has built a fantasy about  the Arab rapper . She explained that Western mainstream media are “eager to imagine Arab youth in non-threatening modes of resistance that are directly related to American culture. The rapper speaking truth to power is a very easy character for audiences to imagine; at the same time, he is a totally benign figure that caricatures authoritarian regimes as all the same bad guys.” El-Zein has argued that when the West focuses on creative youth, it does not have to understand how Western powers are complicit. After the Arab uprisings (Part 1) After the Arab uprisings (Part 2)
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The Veil, the Discourse of the West and Resistance

In the discourses of geopolitics the reemergent veil is an emblem of many things, prominent among which is its meaning as the rejection of the West. But when one considers why the veil has this meaning in the late twentieth century, it becomes obvious that, ironically, it was the discourses of the West, and specifically the discourse of colonial domination, that in the first place determined the meaning of the veil in geopolitical discourses and thereby set the terms for its emergence as a symbol of resistance. In other words, the reemergent veil attests, by virtue of its very power as a symbol of resistance, to the uncontested hegemonic diffusion of the discourses of the West in our age. And it attests to the fact that, at least as regards the Islamic world, the discourses of resistance and rejection are inextricably informed by the languages and ideas developed and disseminated by the West to no less a degree than are the languages of those openly advocating emulation of the West or ...
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