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.
Jason Jackson’s Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry argues that capitalist societies develop a moral hierarchy of market actors, enabling certain firms to position their interests as good for society and thus deserving of regulatory protection. Though focused on India, the book also invites reflection on the recent return of patrimonial capitalism in the United States: is this merely an inversion of the prevailing moral hierarchy, or a post-moral turn in which firms no longer justify their privileged status in terms of a shared future?
In today’s seemingly deglobalizing economy, policymakers across the world are in a quandary over how to regulate foreign firms. Should policymakers prevent foreign firms from attaining dominant market positions in order to prop up domestic industry? Or should they permit foreign firms to establish ownership and control of domestic markets in the hope of accelerating industrialization, economic modernization, and societal transformation? As Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry shows, such decisions are shaped by deeply institutionalized and highly contested moral beliefs about business actors and practices.
In the early 20th century, foreign companies operating in Brazil would extract profits while using thinly capitalized subsidiaries to directly employ their workers. When things went wrong, workers were left with worthless claims while capital remained safely sheltered in the foreign-located parent companies. To address this issue, in 1937 Brazil adopted a novel legal innovation: imposing joint and several liability on parent companies for labor obligations. Recovering this history reveals that legal innovation often flows from the Global South, that limited liability is neither natural nor universal, and that seemingly technical corporate law doctrines are deeply entangled with questions of distribution, power, and sovereignty.
U.S. attacks on alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean have been widely condemned for violating international law. Yet much of this criticism, by focusing narrowly on the Trump administration’s military excesses, risks repeating a familiar mistake: debating how the United States wages war while leaving unquestioned why it wages it at all.
