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LPE Originals

Labor Rights and the U.S.-China Relationship: From Neoliberal Consensus to Imperial Rivalry

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From the 1990s until the Trump presidency, political and economic elites on both sides of the Pacific held a largely uncomplicated enthusiasm for the re-centering of global supply chains within the borders of the People’s Republic of China. More recently, however, the U.S. federal government has resorted to a range of interventions to try to derail China’s ascendance, including, improbably, a newfound commitment to labor rights in China. By examining this trajectory, we can see why efforts to address labor exploitation will not succeed unless they transcend the narrow political vision engendered by the increasingly hostile U.S.-China rivalry.
LPE Originals

Marxism and China’s Effort to Build “Foreign-Related Rule of Law”

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Given its history, China is acutely aware of the hypocrisy of powerful countries speaking in the language of international law. Over the past two years, however, the so-called “foreign-related rule of law” (涉外法治) has gained enormous influence in Chinese official and academic discourse. While this turn is motivated, in part, by the China-U.S. rivalry, to fully understand the importance of this development, we must begin with a more basic question: why does a geopolitical power need law in the first place? And what kind of LPE-inspired approach is best suited to address this question?
LPE Originals

On the Place of Racial Capitalism in China’s Northwestern Frontier

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Though its contemporary theorization emerged from Cedric Robinson and other scholars of the Black Radical Tradition, racial capitalism is neither an idea somehow restricted to the U.S. or Europe, nor an idea that can be provincialized solely within the processes and structures of Western colonial expropriation and exploitation. Rather, this approach can help us understand the immense expansion of securitization and forced assimilation in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, not as an aberration, but as the logical extension of Han settler capitalist development strategies since at least the early 1990s.
LPE Originals

China and the Political Economy of the International Legal Order

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There is an urgent need to develop a genuine critical left internationalism to help think through issues related to China. Yet engaging this subject from an LPE perspective confronts two broad challenges. First, it requires bringing LPE concepts into conversation with debates regarding the diverse legal underpinnings of the global economic order. Second, it requires developing a left internationalism that embraces a non-U.S.-centric anti-imperialist position, moving beyond limited Cold War imaginaries.
LPE Originals

Early Edition: (Some of) the Best New LPE and LPE-Adjacent Scholarship

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With the spring submission season nearly in the books, and our Twitter feeds abuzz with placement announcements, the LPE Blog highlights some of the most exciting forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles. Covering tech, care, labor, criminal justice, religious freedom, money and banking, property, the administrative state, and so much more, this scouting report is not to be missed.
LPE Originals

Terrorism Torts and the Right to Colonize

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The D.C. Circuit appeals court heard arguments last month in a bizarre case: the Jewish National Fund is leading a lawsuit against the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, a nation-wide coalition of groups advocating for Palestinian liberation, on accusations of supporting terrorism. A look at the political economy of terrorism tort litigation shows how this lawsuit is not merely an instance of terrorism laws potentially trampling human rights; it is also an aggressive assertion of a right to colonize, and to do so in peace and quiet.
LPE Originals

What Will Worldmaking Require?

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Building on Adom Getachew’s account of anticolonial “worldmaking,” Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò defends reparations as a worldmaking project aimed at creating a world free from domination. Yet given this ambition, his targets for climate justice seem, if anything, too modest: why stop with eliminating tax havens or endowing the Global Climate Fund? Why not aim at the reorganization of the global economy itself, as many anti-colonial leaders once did? And if we accept these broader ambitions, what political formations might plausibly advance the project of anticolonial climate reparations?
LPE Originals

Reconsidering the Future

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Reconsidering Reparations offers several sound policy proposals about how to pursue reparations and climate justice. Yet its main contribution to the realm of climate politics has little to do with policy. Rather, it’s about a way of situating oneself in historical time. Unlike ordinary philosophical parables that freeze time and abstract away from specific places (think of the “trolley problem” or the “veil of ignorance”), Táíwò is arguing that the big picture is always historical, and always spatially complex. This shift in orientation will change how we see environmental or climate issues, but it will also change how we see much else.
LPE Originals

Reconsidering Reparations

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For better or worse, our world stands on the precipice of major changes. Our current energy system is driving a rapidly unfolding climate crisis, and the need for total transformation “at every level of society” is now the prevailing scientific opinion. Given this context, Reconsidering Reparations argues for two things. First, reparations for trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism should be seen as a future-oriented project engaged in building a just social order. Second, if we accept that view, then reparations and the struggle for racial justice should be directly linked to the struggle for climate justice.
LPE Originals

Recovering Emergence: A Nation Within What?

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In the sci-fi short, The Sixth World, filmmaker Nanobah Becker poses the unthinkable: Diné people on a space mission to colonize Mars. Yet, in Becker’s telling, colonizing Mars is not a linear journey into a post-apocalyptic future, but is instead part of a genre of indigenous futurism and “decolonizing encounters.” Ezra Rosser’s A Nation Within follows a different temporality. Moving from “past to present to future,” Rosser offers a rich history of a Nation that emerges in relation to perhaps the most central, kindred actor for Diné futurism: the land itself.

LPE Originals

Tribal Consultation as Right and Obligation

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In his prodigious A Nation Within, Ezra Rosser identifies numerous moments throughout Navajo Nation history that would have benefited from more robust consultation. The Diné’s forced march to Bosque Redondo, the arbitrary sheep stock reduction, and harmful strip mining all point to a lack of tribal input and an overabundance of federal paternalism. In the scheme of federal Indian law, however, consultation is a relatively new and underdeveloped framework that fails to reflect the extensive amount of governmental decision-making that impacts Tribal interests.
LPE Originals

Good Native Governance for the Seven Generations

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Native Nations in the United States are stronger today in many respects than they have been in the past 250 years. Despite much growth, however, tribes continue to experience the instability that comes from the ruptures of colonialism and must work to recover, rebuild, and revive the cultural lifeways that make them who they are as Indigenous Peoples. This presents a significant governance challenge for many Indian nations in the modern world. This struggle is, in many ways, at the heart of Rosser’s provocative deep dive into the remarkable experience of the Navajo Nation in A Nation Within.
LPE Originals

A Nation Within: Navajo Land and Economic Development

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Demand for land and natural resources has fundamentally shaped both the development of the Navajo Nation government and the relationship between the tribe and non-Indian interests. In this post, Ezra Rosser kicks off a symposium on his recent book, A Nation Within, by offering a brief look at this history, and suggesting that Diné have the power to assert even greater control over the reservation.
LPE Originals

International Law and (the Critique of) Political Economy

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International law has a thriving critical scene, arguably bigger and more institutionally established than any other field. Yet political economy has been an unstable point of focus for critical international lawyers, in part because the justifications of the status quo in the international domain never coalesced into anything akin to a ‘21st-century synthesis.’ This picture of fragmentation and instability helps explain why Marxism provides a useful set of intellectual tools for approaching law, in particular, and social formations in general.
LPE Originals

LPE and the Global Food Crisis

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Due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, food prices are higher in real terms today than at any point since the early 1970s. Yet it is the underlying political economy of the global food system that has created the conditions where hundreds of millions of people don’t get enough to eat.