If capitalism is a legal regime above all else, then legal reform is not only necessary but sufficient in order to achieve democratic self-governance, ecological sustainability, and equality. As the collapse of the WTO and the rise of China suggest, however, law alone does not decide who holds economic power.
When seen through the prism of the kafala system, it appears that the Trump administration seeks to consolidate and formalize the most extractive features of the U.S. migration regime.
As the country marks 250 years, the left faces two imperatives at once: confronting a constitutional order warped by judicial supremacy, and reorienting American foreign policy away from endless war.
The marginalization of international law under the second Trump administration has been a shock to the post-Cold War world order. Yet the impact of this development on the global economy has been far from uniform. Some of the most important sectors to trade — including telecommunications and civil aviation — were already governed primarily through informal, political arrangements.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was widely lauded for declaring the rules-based international order effectively dead and urging middle powers to build “what we claim to believe in.” Unfortunately, as quickly became apparent, what Carney believes in is the continuation of neoliberal capitalism.
As of May 2026, the United States has agreements with at least 27 countries to accept deportees who are neither nationals nor citizens of those countries. Seen from one perspective, this emerging regime looks like a natural extension of efforts by the United States and other countries to externalize refugee obligations and offshore migrant policing. In practice, however, third country deportation is more sinister — more akin to an illegal, “black site” extraordinary rendition than a judicial removal proceeding.
For much of the past century, international lawyers have sought to drive a wedge between “economic” matters and the use of military force. Recent events in the Caribbean and the Strait of Hormuz suggest that wedge is no longer viable.
The overt gangsterfication of US foreign policy, formalized through the so-called “Board of Peace,” marks the culmination of a dangerous transformation in the nature of American hegemony.
The United States’ turn toward naked coercion and transactional deal-making represents both a genuine departure from its commitment to the liberal international legal order and the culmination of that order’s internal contradictions.
A selection of worthy additions to your “important PDFs” folder.
In Argentina’s recent debt renegotiations with the IMF, the overriding goal has been to ensure the government can meet all future payment obligations. Yet the conditions imposed to achieve this aim have deepened a crisis of social reproduction, rendering life itself unsustainable.
At the core of Jason Jackson’s Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry is a longstanding conversation among Indian modernizers about how to identify and nurture the ‘right’ kind of capitalists. Yet this is not just an Indian story. Struggles over “good” and “bad” businessmen have structured political life in all capitalist societies, and the book’s deeper implication is that morality tales about virtuous entrepreneurs and predatory speculators are less descriptions of economic reality than prescriptive efforts to shape it.
Weeks after pardoning former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández for drug trafficking, Donald Trump ordered U.S. forces to seize Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro on the same charges. How should we make sense of these seemingly contradictory actions? And what do they tell us about the true purpose of the War on Drugs?
Jason Jackson’s erudite Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry shows that, for more than a century, Indian firms labeled as “traditional” capital faced policy hostility, while those considered “modern” were more likely to receive favorable government treatment. Yet how should we understand the modernity of so-called “modern Indian capitalists”? Did Indian capital ever shed its identity as speculators and traders, or was this classification merely a way to block foreign competition?
Veena Dubal interviews Aziza Ahmed about the exclusion of women from early AIDS definitions, the feminist lawyers and activists who transformed the government’s response to the epidemic, and the adverse public health consequences of carceral feminism.
