Geography Archives: Global

New institutional economics has received another so-called Nobel prize, ostensibly for again claiming that good institutions and democratic governance ensure growth, development, equity & democracy.

The boundaries that separate higher education from “the rest” of the capitalist economy have eroded, imperfectly and unevenly but to a sufficient extent that the systemic force of financial markets dictates investment decisions and makes universities hard to distinguish from banks.

Tech companies are leveraging the misery of Palestinian war victims for their own profit.

Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A Robinson have been awarded the Nobel (really the Riksbank prize) in economics “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.”

Several international organisations are now engaged in the business of measuring what they call “poverty”.

Unlike mainstream media, which all too often distorts the truth and lies by omission–as we see with reporting on Palestine, where the death toll has reached 114,000–conjunctural analyses help us understand the deeper forces at play and provide political and social movements with the materials to intervene to shape the future.

EXTINCTION REBELLION (XR) issued an ultimatum to insurance bosses today as the climate group gears up for a week of protests across the country.

The material changes ushered in under the aegis of artificial intelligence (AI) are not leading to the abolition of human labor but rather its degradation. This is typical of the history of mechanization since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Instead of relieving people of work, employers have deployed technology—even the mere idea of technology—to […]

A brilliant, powerful writer, but clearly the literary dark horse in the race, Han Kang’s unexpected award is the closest the Nobel committee could get to acknowledging the Palestinian genocide.

CounterSpin interview with Derek Seidman on insurance and climate.

Scientists warn: ‘The future of humanity hangs in the balance.’

The further development of the centralisation of capital, leading to its consolidation, has on the one hand muted inter-imperialist rivalry, since capital now wants the entire world, not broken up into spheres of influence of rival powers, as the domain for its unrestricted movement; on the other hand it has also led to an attempt on the part of now-united imperialism to reassert its hegemony over the territories that had broken off from it earlier.

Social media bans on African Stream should remind us that corporations will never facilitate anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist narratives and stir us to look for alternatives.

On Monday, the Director of General Affairs of the Cuban Foreign Ministry, Carlos Pereira, announced that his country had requested to join BRICS+.

To track progress towards its goal of eradicating extreme poverty by 2030, the UN relies on World Bank estimates of the share of the world population that fall below the so-called International Poverty Line (IPL).  

Could Artificial Intelligence render the university obsolete? Katy Hayward explores what is lost when human thought is made subordinate to the machine.

For much of the twentieth century, Marx’s ideas inspired anti-colonialism and other movements for social justice worldwide.

Credit card data is extremely valuable for companies aiming to predict how people will spend money in the future. Knowing how much people spend, where and on what day says a lot about consumers’ financial situations.

John Bellamy Foster speaks with Daniel Tutt about the work of István Mészáros and Paul Baran, contemporary irrationalist tendencies in left ecological thought, intensifying global class struggles, and the continued relevance of Georg Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason (1952), recently reissued with an introduction by Enzo Traverso by Verso in 2021.

Consequently, despite co-founding dependency theory, teaching at some of the most important universities in Latin America, and publishing dozens of highly original books and articles, Vania Bambirra’s name is completely absent from IR and IPE handbooks and disciplinary surveys.