Exclusion by design: the Eurocentrism of Labour Migration in Economics

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– Bianca Kyd-Rebenburg

Exclusionary migration policies are gaining traction internationally. In the UK, the US, Germany, and most other regions of the Global North, we see stronger shifts towards immigration policy characterised by borders and exclusion. Foundational to this are our understandings of nationals’ and non-nationals’ right to inclusion within a nation’s borders. Economic migrants are increasingly met with hostility and suspicion (Tendayi Achiume, 2019). This hostility is supported by ideology and violent structures of international labour migration. To critically engage with these structures, we must expose the prejudice of eurocentrism underlying economic theories of migration. This prejudice distorts the social science and distracts from historical contexts (Amin, 1988). Eurocentric justification relying on colonial logic of the states’ ethical right to the exclusion of migrants must be challenged (Tendayi Achiume, 2019).

It is not yet well known that popular understanding of international economic migration is based on the eurocentric discipline of migration theory in mainstream economics. In these theories, migration is seen primarily through the lens of economic utility and growth. In true economics fashion, labour is a resource most efficiently allocated by the market. As such, there is an (eurocentric) assumption in the discipline that wage disparities and better labour conditions in the Global North are an endogenous result of economic development, without recognizing historical contexts. Economists’ bias undermines any holistic understandings of why people from the Global South immigrate to the Global North. Why do migration patterns replicate colonial ties so closely? And why is internal anti-immigrant policy ineffective at reducing labour migration?

Mainstream Migration Theory

Neoclassical Migration Theory (NMT), foundational to theory and policy, consists of a macro-and micro-economic level. The macro level outlines elements of the labour market equilibrium, the balance of labour supply and demand across regions, as the driver for labour migration. Labour is scarce in some regions, therefore wages are high; labour is abundant in others, therefore wages are low. Labour moves from low wage to high wage until wage disparities are minimised, achieving the new equilibrium. Labour migration takes place because of wage disparities and without them, there would be no migration (Massey, 1993). On the micro-level, the theory outlines individuals’ labour decisions. Workers migrate wherever labour is scarce, so they can secure higher wages in return for their skills. This behavioural prediction is in line with neoclassical economics, based on rational decisions of individuals to maximise income and utility.

Although NMT has evolved from these basic neoclassical foundations, it remains the baseline of how migration is more generally understood. Changes to the theoretical framework have been incrementally adapted through the expansion of the concept of utility. In the face of criticism to mainstream migration theory, the conceptualisation of the migrants’ personal cost-benefit analysis has changed. NMT focuses on the individual, while the succeeding theories – New Economics of Labour Migration and the Livelihoods Approach – expand decision making to households and families. The object of decision-making evolves from wage maximisation, to wage maximisation and risk minimisation, all the way to diversification of risk to maximise resources. Mainstream migration theory, which is an expansion of NMT, frames international labour migration as the economic and social decision of individuals based on opportunity differentials, rooted in a labour market equilibrium, and abstracting from historical and social context (Massey, 1993). The dimensions arguably expand to a more holistic understanding of utility, but the individualistic premise remains. At no point do such theories address global power structures underpinning the ability of people to migrate. Social and political phenomena are removed from their historical context and understood purely through concepts of expanded utility (Fine, 2000). Revised approaches patch up shortcomings of economic theories and fail to address the power relations and historical legacies of migration (Cross, 2020). All categories of social and geographical motivations are sooner or later encompassed by utility, feeding into the ultimate cost-benefit analysis that underpins contemporary mainstream.

This economic individualism constructs not only a limited but profoundly Eurocentric theoretical framework of migration theory that justifies exclusion. The individual decision of a migrant and their effort to maximise utility is set up against the right of a country to deny that decision and exclude the individual. It facilitates an international structure that constructs exclusion as the default and only deviates from this in cases that prove high utility to benefit receiving countries. The theoretical foundation of methodological individualism and the justification of exclusion is thus fundamentally linked. A nation’s right to exclude an individual is constructed or justified through the economic premise of rational decision making. Scholar Tendayi Achiume (2019) emphasises a key reason why individualism shapes migration policy and allows exclusion. Nationals and non-nationals are not seen as political equals and therefore states have different obligations to them. This creates a hierarchy of second-class citizens in which migrants become valuable through their economic contribution.

The World Bank’s Match and Motive Matrix, published in 2023, acts as a framework for receiving countries to navigate costs, benefits and obligations of international migration. Receiving countries can classify whether migrants are of benefit to them through the alignment of migrants’ skills and attributes with the needs of destination countries (Do and Özden, 2023). This Matrix is a perfect illustration of the uneven power structure between an individual migrant and a receiving country. Costs of integration along with social and economic costs are measured against benefits of skills. ‘A strong match occurs, for example, when the labour market benefits of the migrant exceed the costs of integration, while a weak match arises when the costs outweigh the benefits.’ (ibid, p.26). Underlying this analysis, is the benefit an individual migrant can contribute to a receiving country in their production structure.

Figure 1. Match and Motive Matrix (Do and Özden, 2023)

The report claims that labour migration is necessary for all countries to meet their labour shortages (Do and Özden, 2023). It legitimises the North’s way to assess the utility value of migrants from the Global South, and abstracts countries and individuals from their historical and political context (Blaney, 2020) to misleadingly neutralise the matrix. This methodological abstraction is not only insufficient but also harmful, as it holds significant policy implications. It prioritises economic utility and frames migrants as workers in a cost-benefit analysis, positioning them as second-class citizens that are by default excluded and exposed to exploitation and criminalisation. The assertion of receiving countries’ rights to exclusion are based on this framing of encounters between Global South peoples and Global North nation-states (Tendayi Achiume, 2019). This speaks to individualism through economic ideologies’ impact on international migration.

Colonizers like the UK have long relied on internal and foreign cheap labour to fill certain positions in the value chain. Frameworks such as the Match and Motive Matrix support this need as they clear paths for countries to evaluate what migration incentives would be needed to meet their labour needs, while there is little recognition of the systemic reproduction of the underlying neo-colonial structures. What is missing in this framework is the fact that labour migration is deeply embedded in the capitalist mode of production and plays an important role in managing labour supply (Cross, 2020). Cheap labour is the engine of neoliberal capitalism, especially via outsourcing and dismantling of labour protection since the 1980s (Delgado Wise, 2014).

The Expansion of Irregularity

Through the presented framework, migrants’ decision to move is individualised, yet their labour is systematically exploited. The same logic that justifies exclusion, also facilitates exploitation. ‘Illegal’ or ‘irregular’ immigrants are particularly treated as excludable political strangers (Tendayi Achiume, 2019). Yet irregularity is not a self-producing phenomenon but is rather facilitated by states. Countries like the USA and the UK continue to expand the boundaries of irregularity. Eurocentric and exploitative views on labour migration facilitate large levels of irregularity under which cheap labour can be endlessly exploited. The state does not only allow labour exploitation through lack of regulation but also actively facilitates it by expanding irregularity. In the UK, restriction of labour mobility is directly shaped by ties between Britain and its former colonies. Åhlberg’s work (2022) on migration illustrates the growing parameters of irregularity, encompassing several migrants, even those whose status was previously secure. She emphasizes how irregularity works in favour of capitalist accumulation. Irregular migrants are subject to major labour exploitation due to a lack of social protection and the power imbalance between employer and employee. Employers can capitalise on vulnerabilities of migrant workers and keep their labour costs low (Åhlberg, 2022). Risk of labour exploitation is particularly prevalent when under an insecure migration status and working in low-paid jobs (Boelman, 2023). In addition, there is a serious risk of falling into a ‘hostile environment’, a series of measures that aim at making it difficult or even unbearable for undocumented migrants to live in the UK. This includes barriers to accessing housing, healthcare, and bank accounts (Boelman, 2023). Significant increases in the number of people classified as irregular, have led to heightened labour exploitation (Åhlberg, 2022). Cross (2020) suggests that the rise of labour exploitation is a function of capitalist accumulation. The making of irregularity facilitates and justifies exploitation under the colonial logic of excluding migrants. 

Decolonising Labour Migration

Economic migration theory needs to decolonise and shift towards alternative understandings of labour mobility. The discipline must reorganise focus from economic utility towards balancing power structures based on historical legacies (Cross, 2020). Addressing eurocentric bias brings us closer to recognising the underlying logic that justifies global exploitation. The labour exploitation that continues between Global North and Global South countries must be acknowledged. Labour conditions including wages of the Global North are not endogenous to these countries. To recognise Global South countries’ contribution to prosperity in the Global North would mean to recognise the countries’ people as equally deserving of its benefits and therefore to migrate with the right to inclusion (Tendayi Achiume, 2019). This challenges the role of methodological individualism by explicating the historical enduring of hierachical and exploitative structures. Interdisciplinary insights from sociology and political economy that incorporate perspectives that allow for an understanding of historical legacies of exploitation should be spotlit. Theoretical frameworks must be reframed.

More attention should be focused on radical reimaginings of migration following framings such as those proposed by Zolberg (1989) and Tendayi Achiume (2019). They are historically embedded in power relations and initiate a radical reordering of priorities. Such critical scholars play a crucial role in challenging mainstream migration theory that sustain the unjust systems of exclusion dominating current political narratives. Zolberg (1989) proposes migration as a global system of equal liberties where disparities exist, yet everyone holds equal liberties to mobility. There is a collective obligation to provide entry and enable the right to exist. (Zolberg, 1989) Tendayi Achiume’s understanding of neo-colonial structures leads her to reject frameworks of economic migration that insist on exclusion and instead positions people as co-sovereign with equal right to inclusion and self-determination.

References

Tendayi Achiume, E. (2019) Migration As Decolonization. (Vol.71). Stanford Law Review 1509, UCLA School of Law, Public Law Research Paper 19(5), 1509-1974.

Åhlberg, M. and Granada, L. (2022) The making of irregular migration:

Post-Brexit immigration policy and risk of labour exploitation, Journal of Poverty and

Social Justice, 30(2): 120–140, DOI: 10.1332/175982721X16492615015710

Amin, S. (1988) “The Construction of Eurocentric Culture” In Eurocentrism, 2nd edition. New York: Monthly Review Press, 165-188.

Boelman, V., Radicati, A., Clayton, A., De Groot, S., & Fisher, O. (2023). Rights and Risks:

Migrant labour exploitation in London [Research Report]. Focus on Labour Exploitation.

Cross, H. (2020). Migration Beyond Capitalism (Vol. 1). Polity Press.

Delgado Wise, R. (2015). Migration and Labour under Neoliberal Globalization. In

Migration, Precarity, and Global Governance (Vol. 1). Oxford University Press.

Ellis, F. (2003). A Livelihoods Approach to Migration and Poverty Reduction.

Commissioned by the Department for International Development.

Fine, B. (2000). Economics Imperialism and Intellectual Progress: The Present as

History of Economic Thought? History of Economics Review, 32(1), 10–35.

Massey, D. S., Arango, J., Hugo, G., Kouaouci, A., Pellegrino, A., & Taylor, E. (1993).

Theories of International Migration: A Review and Appraisal. Population and

Development Review, 19(3), 431–466.

Do, Q.T., & Özden, Ç. (2023) World Development Report 2023 and the Match and Motive

Matrix. World Bank. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2023/12/11/global-migration-in-the-21st-century-navigating-the-impact-of-climate-change-conflict-and-demographic-shifts

Sassen, S. (1988). Mobility of Labour and Capital (Vol. 1). Cambridge University Press.

Zolberg, A. R. (1989). The Next Waves: Migration Theory for a Changing World.

International Migration Review, 23(3), 403–430.

Brushing History Against the Grain: Decolonizing Geopolitics to Teach about Palestine

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– Anonymous

“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another… [the historian] regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.” Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (Thesis VII). 

This quote frames the approach to teaching and learning in my Geopolitics course. The term “documents” is given a wide interpretation to include what is covered by the concepts of critical geopolitics. Documents of civilization are those associated with the oppressive practices of the Global North. When those concepts of critical geopolitics are used to brush history against the grain, those documents also expose the barbarism of the Global North vis a vis the Global South, significantly through colonialism and imperialism. The imperative to brush history against the grain includes an accurate depiction of the history of the marginalized and oppressed of the Global South, referring to counter narratives that challenge mainstream narratives and representations. This imperative is operationalized through the application of these concepts that include geopolitical architectures, identities, and objects. Brushing history against the grain by applying these concepts to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and apartheid structures and practices in Palestine are used as examples to illustrate how to decolonize the curriculum.  

Decolonizing the curriculum also requires a critical examination of how various approaches to geopolitics and legacy/corporate media representations of geopolitical phenomena occur. My course focuses on media representations and draws out the implications of Global North methods of framing. Geopolitics is usually associate with Great Powers struggle and different theoretical approaches will frame this struggle in different ways. Framing geopolitics in this manner tends to marginalize those who are not in the great power camps. Even worse, those outside of those camps are subordinated to empire were their value lies only with the resources that are coveted by Global North countries and corporations. This can include generating consensus for wars against various Global South nations, something that Chomsky and Herman (1988) articulated decades ago. In justifying imperialist wars of aggression, Orientalist tropes abound, as will be discussed below. To decolonize the curriculum, these themes are addressed in the course using critical concepts.  

Brushing history against the grain first requires centering the experiences of the marginalized and oppressed, which initially requires addressing legacy/corporate media representations. In the case of Palestine, the prevailing, mainstream narrative is that the war on Gaza began after the events of October 7th occurred, effectively erasing the previous 75 years of the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the Zionist settler colonial project. I introduce students to the importance of context by having them read Ilan Pappe’s Why Israel Wants to Erase Context and History in the War on Gaza and an interview with Rashid Khalidi. It is worth noting that both historians recognize Zionism as a settler colonial movement and frame their discussions as such. They begin the process of brushing history against the grain by addressing the implications of erasure of Palestinian history and challenging the Islamophobic tropes that perpetuate anti-Palestinian racism. For students who are not well initiated, paring these two historians, one a Jewish Israeli and the other a Palestinian, helps to reframe this issue as an anti-colonial one rather than through the ahistorical lens of an intractable religious conflict (i.e., Muslim versus Jew).        

The concept of geopolitical architectures refers to how state and non-state actors access, manage, and regulate the intersections of territories and flows establishing boundaries and borders between inside and outside, citizen and alien, and domestic and international. This also involves the international order, institutions, conventions, and laws (Dodds, 2019) . Key to the understanding of geopolitical architectures is the concept of sovereignty, which includes the ability to exercise effective sovereignty (and its recognition by other states and non-state actors) and its legal implications in the international realm. This concept helps to put into context the historical antecedents of October 7th.  A Zionist contention is that because Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2006, Gaza was not occupied before October 7th, 2023. Since Gaza was not occupied, the Palestinian attack occurred because Palestinians are inherently antisemitic, or what Pappe (in the article included above) calls the Nazification of Palestinians that renders them the eternal enemy of the Jewish people. However, Gaza has been under an Israeli military blockade since 2007. Blockades effectively negate the sovereignty of the country or territory that is under a blockade: as such, it is Israel, and not Palestinians, who exercise effective sovereignty. The Gaza strip has been under siege since the disengagement with Israel having control over who and what enters and exist Gaza thus allowing Israel to impose its will on the Palestinians in Gaza. Geopolitical architectures also include Israel’s blockade related policies: Head Ride of the Water, a policy of collective punishment in which the amount of calories entering Gaza are sufficient to put Palestinians on a diet, but not make them die of hunger; and Mowing the grass, in which Israel periodically kills Palestinians and destroys civilian infrastructure in an attempt to ensure that no viable resistance is able to operate. The blockade has been devastating to Gaza’s economy, a situation made worse by Israel’s frequent bombings of Gaza that degrade an already weakened civilian infrastructure. In short, Palestinians do not have sovereign control of Gaza, a situation that is revealed by brushing history against the grain using the concept of geopolitical architectures. 

The concept of geopolitical identity refers both to the construction and representation of certain identities, especially as these identities articulate differences between self and others. This can include framing the other as good, evil, or indifferent, as this framing occurs in media representations, speeches by political leaders, etc., constituting an emotional affect on the receiving audience (Dodds, 2019). It is through the concept of geopolitical identity that the structure and content of Orientalism is most usefully employed. The narrative that the October 7th attack was unprovoked, or that the war started on October 7th, fuels an ahistorical narrative that depicts Palestinians using the most horrible Orientalist tropes – blood thirsty terrorists whose inherent antisemitism leads them to commit crimes against Jewish people instead of seeking a peaceful solution. This narrative depicts good and innocent Israeli victims against barbaric and evil Palestinians. A particularly egregious example is the development and use of atrocity propaganda perpetuated by various Western media sources. The atrocities that they claim were committed by the Palestinian resistance on October 7th have little to no basis in fact but were, nevertheless, perpetuated by a compliant Western corporate media. The use of atrocity propaganda plays on the well-established Orientalist tropes noted above and prepares a Western audience for the genocidal atrocities committed against Palestinians in Gaza by Israel by providing pre-emptive justifications. Brushing history against the grain using the concept of geopolitical identities involves the historical explanation of Palestinians as displaced and a largely ethnically cleansed population, many of whom live under apartheid conditions. In this sense, Palestinians, who are struggling for their freedom and right to self-determination, are the victims of the Zionist colonial project and its imperialist backers in the Global North.  

Both critical concepts can be coupled with the concept of geopolitical objects, which refers to objects that have geopolitical relevance (Dodds, 2019). The apartheid wall Israel has constructed in the Palestinian West Bank is an example, providing an entry point to examine other features of Israel’s colonial control over Palestinian lives. As indicated by several reputable international human rights organizations and Noura Erakat’s (2019) meticulous articulation and documentation of Israel’s apartheid practices from an international law perspective, apartheid is not simply a West Bank Phenomena but entails the entirety of Palestinian existence insofar as Israel attempts to exert colonial control over Palestinians. As a geopolitical architecture, apartheid refers to physical segregation and “legalized” control of Palestinians. The apartheid wall controls the movements of Palestinians, separating them from the Jewish only colonies illegally constructed in the West Bank by the Israeli state and Messianic settler movement. Apartheid is based on and constructs geopolitical identities, designating those who are considered to be fully human from those who are not allowed to exercise their human rights. It is an instantiation of the colonial, apartheid practices descriptive of Zionist colonization, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. In this sense, the apartheid wall is a material instantiation and enforcer of these geopolitical identities.      

The concepts and ideas that have been incorporated into my teaching have been well received by the students, who have responded with enthusiasm. Today’s students are suspicious of legacy and corporate media and sometimes lack the intellectual and critical tools to interrogate what they see and hear. This module provides them with the tools as well as the opportunity to practice using them to examine and better grasp issues of geopolitical significance.    

Chomsky, N. and Herman, E.S. (1988) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books. 

Dodds, K. (2023) Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  

Erakat, N. (2019) Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 

Decolonising Economics and the University: Padlet Launch Event (Recording)

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On Friday August 8th, 2025, D-Econ organized an event on Decolonizing the University, where the D-Econ Padlet was launched. The event brought scholars and activists together to discuss the role of universities in decolonisation struggles, especially in the wake of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and how the economics discipline specifically serves to legitimise occupation, imperialism, and capitalism. These questions were discussed in light of the speakers’ own work and activism and they were asked to reflect on what role organisations such as D-Econ and resources such as the D-Econ Padlet can play in the broader decolonisation project of various spaces including that of the university. The panel consisted of Prof Chirashree Das Gupta, Dr Tom Six and Amaarah Garda and it was chaired by Afreen Faridi. Watch the recording above.

The D-Econ Padlet is an effort to make resources related to decolonizing economics available to a wider audience. Explore it here.

D-Econ’s Seasonal Alternative Reading List – 2025, pt. 1

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It’s been quite a year thus far, and we have some reading recommendations from new books on economics that were published this year that you may have missed either because of the identity of the author, or their geographical location, or because the topics are not typically considered interesting to those interested in reading about the economy. We include 11 books that cover a range of topics that we think provide a richer understanding of socioeconomic phenomena and are therefore crucial to understanding economics and the world.

With the escalation of the othering of migrants all over the world and increasing repression of movements opposing genocide in Palestine, especially in the United States, this time around we are reading two books that look at the political economy of the United States with obvious global repercussions: one around the business of incarceration of immigrants and one around how decolonization movements in the rest of the world has shaped United States politics and economics. We also love reading about the field of economics, and therefore we include a new and exciting volume on radical political economics and about why we need to decolonize feminist economics. Excellent beach reads, in our opinion! The race to general artificial intelligence has come to define our time, and our reading list would be incomplete without a comprehensive look behind the scenes of one of the biggest firms in the business: OpenAI. The environmental cost of AI is increasingly becoming evident, as is the rapacious nature of the resource-grab to support the development of these enterprises. Therefore, we also have been reading two new books on the topic: one on environmental transformation, capitalist expansion, agrarian extractivism and local resistance across Senegal’s River Delta and one on grassroots resistance to the privatization and commodification of water using the lens of global solidarities. Relatedly, we include a short but powerful new book on the intertwined colonisation of Palestine and imperial capitalist expansion enabled by fossil fuels’ destruction of the Earth. Finally, we always love reading about third world movements, and this time this meant reading a new autobiography of Andree Blouin, an analysis of political and social transformations in four pivotal Global South nations- Brazil, India, China, and South Africa, and about representation of anti-imperial history through the periodical of the Organization for the Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America, the Tricontinental.  

We hope you enjoy these books! As always, please let us know if you have any suggestions for our next reading list. 

Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination

By Karen Hao

Generative AI has become ubiquitous in our lives. One of the most successful companies in the AI industry is OpenAI, which is in quest to develop artificial “general” intelligence, described by the founder of OpenAI, Sam Altman, as the “most transformative and beneficial technology humanity has yet invented.” However, behind the development of this seemingly transformative technology is the consumption of “previously unfathomable” amounts of data, labour, computing power, and natural resources. It is therefore not surprising that Hao likens the leading power players in the AI space to Empires that exploit and subjugate workers and seize and extract resources for their own enrichment, often by theft and compromising sovereignty, among other things. This book, which explores how OpenAI has operated and shaped the AI industry, and the global economy at large, is compulsory reading for an era in which it is impossible to open any application on your phone or computer without some type of AI feature being pushed on us.  

Immigration Detention Inc: The Big Business of Locking up Migrants

By Nancy Hiemstra and Dierdre Conlon

With growing anti-immigrant sentiment all over the world, especially in the United States, this book provides a shocking, yet essential look into the political economy of depriving immigrants of their freedom. Specifically, Hiemstra and Conlon show that since corporations and local governments in the United States now depend on the financial rewards that detaining immigrants brings, an incentive to incarcerate even more immigrants in worse and worse conditions is created. Furthermore, they also show how many people and institutions are implicated by the vicious cycle of more and more profits being generated by locking up more and more human beings. This has altered society’s moral compass and also internationalized the problem: with detention becoming a nearly universal response to “unauthorized” international migration. 

The Internal Colony Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization

By Sam Klug

This book reveals and interrogates the importance of global decolonization for the divergence between mainstream American liberalism and the Black freedom movement in post-War America. As global decolonization is generally underappreciated as a force that has shaped American politics, through this book Klug allows the reader to understand different American political movements in a new way. In doing so, Klug demonstrates how debates about self-determination, post-colonial economic development, colonization and decolonization have shaped American politics, even in spheres that are often primarily thought of as related to domestic policy, such as issues of race and social class. Overall, the book provides us with a history that broadens our understanding of ideological formation and the global forces that shape it. Buy the book here.

Decolonizing Feminist Economics: Possibilities for Just Futures

By Gisela Carrasco-Miró

This book is a much-needed critique of feminist economics. Carrasco-Miró traces how certain parts of feminist economics have remained locked in a Western-centric modernism and how they have failed to engage with the critiques of Eurocentrism that other social science fields have had to deal with. As an alternative understanding, she introduces what decolonization of feminist economics would involve, and in doing so, she explores the relationship between colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy and ecological degradation. Moving beyond the usual disciplinary boundaries, Carrasco-Miró draws on a range of scholarship from across the world to put forward a transdisciplinary and radical view of feminist struggles which are ultimately global in nature. You can buy the book here.  

Radical Political Economics: Principles, Perspectives, and Post-Capitalist Futures

Edited by Mona Ali and Ann E. Davis

This exciting collection of essays demonstrates that radical political economics is a vibrant and dynamic field. The chapters are written by brilliant political economists from across the world and they touch on a range of urgent topics, including class conflict, ideology, financialisation, feminism, imperialism, crises, social protection, migration, development assistance, state capitalism, worker cooperatives, economic development, and climate change. The contributions together offer a sharp critique of capitalist institutions as well as of mainstream economics, and in doing so they also reveal the underlying structures and dynamics of global capitalism. In addition to its sharp and convincing critique of contemporary problems, the radical political economy of this book also offers ideas and policies to change capitalism in ways that are more beneficial for people and the planet. Buy the book here.

My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria

By Andrée Blouin

My Country, Africa

Andrée Blouin’s autobiography—long out-of-print and now available under the supervision of her daughter, Eve Blouin—narrates the story of, per one of the monikers used by the 1960s newspapers, the “Most Dangerous Woman in Africa”. Born to a Banziri mother and a French colonial father, Blouin was in the thick of the decolonization movements across Africa throughout the 1950s and 1960s: from revolutionary work in Guinea and, most notably, the Congo (Blouin, a speechwriter and diplomat in Patrice Lumumba’s government, wrote Lumumba’s independence day speech) to an exile in Algiers (where, as Eve Blouin reminds us Amílcar Cabral noted, revolutionaries make pilgrimage) and, finally, France. The memoir’s title is a nod to Blouin’s expansive pan-African nationalism, whose enactment and promise intersect with her own life perched at various conflicting identities. As Blouin concludes her autobiography, “speaking of my life has been my way of speaking of Africa”—a story that will be of interest to anyone committed to decolonial struggles around the world. Buy the book here.

Teaching with Tricontinental: A Sourcebook for Students Working with Radical Periodicals

Edited by Danny Millum and Paul Gilbert

Cover image for Teaching with Tricontinental

Launched during the 1966 Tricontinental Conference, Tricontinental was the official periodical of the Organization for the Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America until the latter’s dissolution in 2019. What can one learn from the representation of anti-imperialist history in the pages of such revolutionary periodicals? This open-access edited volume, the fruit of a collaboration between staff and students at the University of Sussex, collects a series of possible textual and audio-visual answers: engaging with archived radical periodicals, inter alia, fosters “radical imaginations and emancipatory futures” (p. 18) that may otherwise seem foreclosed; reveals the importance and fragility of archival and publishing infrastructures; sensitises to the textual and paratextual choices in building international solidarity; and deconstructs Eurocentric historical education, including the lack of tendency “to understand development as coterminous with anti-colonial liberation” (p. 16). The volume is an important, fascinatingly creative pedagogical and emancipatory tool in helping students, and others, re-imagine past visions of the possible into the present and future. The volume is freely accessible here and the digitised collection of Tricontinental issues—an outcome of the University of Sussex workshops—is available here. For digital archives of other radical periodicals, see The Freedom Archives and here.

The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth

By Andreas Malm

The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth

Two catastrophes underlie Andreas Malm’s “longue durée analysis of fossil empire in Palestine”: the unfolding genocide in Palestine, actively abated by the capitalist core in the West, and the ecological destruction wrought by fossil fuels, which “kill people, randomly, blindly, indiscriminately”. These catastrophes are not independent, Malm argues, as he takes us back to a single moment of co-determination between the two: the British empire’s first use of steam warships, powered by fossil fuels, in the 1840 pulverisation of the Palestinian town of Akka. The pulverisation fulfilled many aims: imperial (it cut short Egypt’s burgeoning and short-lived contest of the Ottoman and British empires), economic (it supplied outlets for Britain’s overproducing cotton industry), and ideological (it opened, to a proto-Zionist project, the Palestinian land, where the British, in Lord Palmerston’s words, hoped to implant “a great number of wealthy capitalists”). In this powerful pamphlet, Malm narrates the intertwined colonisation of Palestine and imperial capitalist expansion enabled by fossil fuels’ destruction of the Earth. Initially published on the Verso Blog, and a step towards a larger future sequel to Malm’s Fossil Capital, the essay in this edition is accompanied by Malm’s response to his critics. Buy the book here. 

Land, Capital and Extractive Frontiers:Social Conflict and Ecological Crisis in the Senegal River Delta

By Maura Benegiamo

Using ethnographic and archival research, Maura Benegiamo explores the complex interplay between environmental transformation, capitalist expansion, agrarian extractivism and local resistance across Senegal’s River Delta. While examining land grabs, the author traces its colonial roots to establish links with the current ecological crisis stemming from the relationship between capital and nature. The book locates how green growth is used as an extractive tool under neocolonial capitalism in the Global South while providing insights into how communities respond to such policies using grassroot struggles for justice. 

Global solidarities against water grabbing: Without water, we have nothing 

By Caitlin Schroering

Caitlin Schroering undertakes a powerful examination of grassroots resistance to the privatization and commodification of water using the lens of global solidarities. Drawing on two transnational movements, Schroering highlights how communities are organising and learning from one another across borders to defend water as a public good and a human right. The book delves into the political, ecological, and social dimensions of water struggles, emphasising the role of feminist and anticolonial movements in global activism for water rights. Caitlin’s work is a compelling call to action against extractive systems and for water justice worldwide through collaboration between the Global South and the Global North.

Southern interregnum Remaking hegemony in Brazil, India, China, and South Africa 

By Alf Gunvald Nilsen, Karl von Holdt, Ruy Braga, Ching Kwan Lee and Fabio Luis Barbosa dos Santos

This edited volume undertakes groundbreaking analysis of political and social transformations in four pivotal Global South nations- Brazil, India, China, and South Africa. The authors locate the responses of the governing elites in these four emerging powers to a period of enduring crisis—marked by deep inequalities, popular unrest, and shifting geopolitical dynamics. While employing a Gramscian lens, the book examines distinct hegemonic projects in each country viz. authoritarian neoliberalism in Brazil, neoliberal ethnonationalism in India, digital expansion in China, and patronage-violence in South Africa. The volume offers a vital contribution to critical political economy as it maps the turbulent reordering of power and its limits in the Global South as a tool of accumulation and legitimation in a period of exhausted neoliberalism.

This list was compiled for D-Econ by Devika Dutt, Afreen Faridi, Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, and Marina Uzunova

Decolonising Economics and the University: Padlet Launch Event 

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Decolonising Economics and the University

In the wake of the intensification of the genocide in Palestine since October 7th 2023, it became crystal clear to all that the contemporary moves to ‘decolonise’ within the university sector had been tokenistic. With many universities playing a crucial role in supporting the genocide and suppressing anti-colonial and pro-Palestine scholars, what does ‘decolonising the university’ mean? And how does the economics discipline specifically serve to legitimise occupation, imperialism, and capitalism?

D-econ is organizing an online panel that brings scholars and activists together to discuss these questions in light of their own work and activism and what role organisations such as D-Econ and resources such as the D-Econ Padlet can play in the broader decolonisation project of various spaces including that of the university. The Panel will comprise of Prof Chirashree Das Gupta, Dr Tom Six and Amaarah Garda. It will be chaired by Afreen Faridi.

Decolonising Economics and the University: Padlet Launch Event
Date: Friday, August 8, 2025
Time: 03:00 PM IST (India); 05:30 AM EDT (New York); 10:30 AM BST (UK); 11:30 AM CET (Central Europe); 12:30 PM Palestine Time
Speakers: Prof. Chirashree Das Gupta, Dr. Tom Six, Amaarah Garda
Chair: Afreen Faridi
Registration: Sign up for the event here. 

The D-Econ padlet

The padlet is an effort to make resources related to decolonizing economics available to a wider audience. We have chosen to start with a few select themes but hope to develop this into a bigger resource with time. We would never be able to exhaustively put together all resources related to Decolonizing Economics and the selection of these initial resources are certainly influenced by the orientation of each contributor to the Padlet. We make no claims about this being a comprehensive guide, but we hope it can serve as an opportunity for those who are curious to learn more about decolonization to consider this one starting place for further engagement. Perhaps this can be avenue for reforming a part of curricula, shaping a research idea, using this for collective organizing, or for reflection in our own personal capacity.

Notes on the Palestine Solidarity Movement in the United States

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A PhD Scholar in History based in the United States

Editor’s Note: This blog was written in the fall of 2024, amidst the US elections. The analytical insights raised here have become even more significant for the Palestine solidarity movement and for broader struggles toward a more democratic, equal, and just society in the aftermath of the elections—not only in the US, but globally.

In a translation of a poem by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, the title refers to “someone fleeing into death from hell.” One might imagine the poem was written yesterday but it was first published in the 1960s. Darwish’s words not only provide a clear sense of the horrors of the last year but also remind us of the “ongoing Nakba” experienced – and resisted – by Palestinians over the last seventy five years. And it is these visions of hell, largely whitewashed by the media in the United States, that have fueled a movement in solidarity with Palestinian people; the livestreaming of the destruction of homes, water infrastructure, farm fields, hospitals, transport channels, refugee camps, food and medical aid, universities and schools, archives and cultural artifacts – in a word, the livestreaming of genocide.

How to cognitively map this catastrophe and the movement against it? How to historicize from within the US, the global power providing the arms and vetoes to ensure the catastrophe continues? The United States is the prime example of a settler colonial nation, a land where the story of genocide against Indigenous peoples provides a shadow to both liberal visions of progress and the far-right fever dreams to “make America great again.” And settler colonialism – whether in the US or Israel – continues to be a remarkably impervious structure to movements oriented around decolonization and land justice. 

A diversity of tactics has defined the movement for Palestine in the US; not just protests and encampments but mutual aid efforts, road blockades, legal work, boycotts, divestment campaigns, occupations (on and off campus), city-level ceasefire resolutions, electoral efforts like the Uncommitted Movement in the Democratic primaries, and even self-immolation.

Encampments on US campuses, especially the prestigious Ivy Leagues, have gathered the most attention in the media. The US university as a site of struggle is, of course, nothing new. Prior to the surge of student protests in the spring, labor struggles were a perennial feature of the post-pandemic university; not just a flurry of union drives across the country but also the largest strike of university workers in US history led by graduate students in California in 2022-23. The far-right has also revived its attacks on the university (considered a lost “battle” since the 1960s). Incoming Republican Vice President J.D. Vance, an Ivy League graduate, referred to the universities as “the enemy” in a keynote conference talk from 2020 (a direct throwback to President Richard Nixon and the GOP rage of the 1970s).

The goals of the student movement – the end of the genocide and the liberation of Palestine – would need to find realization beyond the campus. But student demands of universities to “disclose and divest” any financial connections to Israel’s war and occupation – far from a radical demand, and with historical precedents in US student protests against South Africa apartheid in the 1980s – mostly met the indifference of administrators. And, as students turned to militant tactics, the same administrators responded with repression such as the dismantling of encampments, arrests, suspensions, the banning of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters and, in the exceptional case at the University of California-Los Angeles, allowing Zionist and white nationalist counter-protestors to violently attack an encampment for hours.

As Alberto Toscano notes, Israel’s war not only represents an attack on education in Gaza – the mass destruction of universities, the killing of students, and the targeting of intellectuals and scholars – but also an attack on education in the US through censorship, suspensions, and arrests:

Over the last four months, as Israel has ratcheted up its long-term attacks on Palestinian intellectual life, pro-Israel political actors in the United States have tied the silencing of Palestinian solidarity to ongoing campaigns against critical and progressive agendas in education. In so doing, they are also bringing together the political center and far Right in ways that trouble the narrative of a coming battle between a broad liberal front and a proto-fascist Trumpism.

Despite media narratives of political polarization, unbridgeable party chasms, and looming civil wars, Israel’s genocidal war and the repression of student protests have achieved that supposedly rare thing in contemporary US politics: “bipartisanship.”

The student protests should be placed in a wider context of struggles that have defined the period following the financial crisis of 2008: Occupy Wall Street and the occupation of Wisconsin state capitol (both inspired by the Arab Spring), Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, climate movements, the George Floyd Uprisings of 2020, and a re-energized labor movement more generally. Making sense of this new era of social struggle can only be touched on here, but Israel’s genocidal war has brought US imperialism into greater focus. A longer narrative arc would also note the important organizing groundwork laid by Arab and Muslim Americans (for example, the BDS movement in the US and SJP chapters on campuses), in addition to the growth of Jewish organizing channels critical of the Israeli occupation (for example, Jewish Voices for Peace and If Not Now).

Even before the spring encampments, at least 5,425 protests in support of Palestine occurred between October 7 and the end of February. These protests went beyond the campus and occurred in every single state in the country. The protests at Ivy League universities like Columbia and Harvard – along with the spectacle of university presidents questioned before Congressional committees – became the spotlight of the US media. But this neglects the geographical magnitude of the protests; like the George Floyd Uprisings of 2020, the landscape of revolt was not restricted to major urban centers and protests and encampments blossomed on the campuses of public universities across the country.

While liberal pundits and politicians have obsessed over the far-right revolt of January 6 for almost four years now, this misses out on the fact that the George Floyd Uprisings dwarfed the “insurrection” not only in scale but also duration. The uprisings were coast to coast, including street skirmishes with the police in major urban areas like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta and Chicago but also in the small cities of the so-called “flyover states” (or “Trump Country,” as some would call it) like Des Moines, Iowa and Fargo, North Dakota. And it was, indeed, a long hot summer, from the spring burning of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis following the killing of George Floyd to the summer burning of the Department of Corrections building in Kenosha, Wisconsin following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

While not reaching the same pitch of revolt, protests against US policing have not ended, best exemplified by the nationwide movement against Cop City, a massive police training facility currently being built out of the Weelaunee forest in Atlanta, Georgia. Here, too, we find a discrete connection between US policing, universities and the Israeli occupation. Georgia, a former heartland of Jim Crow apartheid in the US South, collaborates with Israeli police forces in an international police training program. Based out of Georgia State University, the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) provides “peer-to-peer professional training” and allows US police officers to learn “counter-terrorism” and “community policing” from Israeli police forces. The boomerang of the US-Israeli relation goes beyond military aid as counterinsurgency and policing tactics circulate between the two states; Palestine becomes what Antony Loewenstein calls a “laboratory” for Israel to test and then export deadly and oppressive counter-insurgency tactics around the world. The tactics utilized to surveil, police, and repress Palestinians makes its way back to the belly of the US empire, put to use to police racialized populations in Georgia and beyond.

Whereas January 6 has provided endless electoral fodder for the Democratic Party, and the George Floyd Uprisings could at least be loosely co-opted in the elections of 2020, there was little room for the Palestine solidarity movement in the party’s “big tent.” This was clearly on display at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in August. Presidential candidate Kamala Harris may have invoked the right of Palestinians to “self-determination” on stage at the DNC – but her support of Israel’s right to “self-defense” (echoed in multiple statements after the convention) clearly overrode the former. The fact that Harris repeatedly claimed there would be no arms embargo under her presidency (or vice presidency for that matter) only gave material substance to the rhetoric; one cannot ceaselessly work for a ceasefire if one is ceaselessly arming the Israeli state. As a further snub to the movement, the DNC refused to let Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian-American state representative in Georgia, speak at the convention.

The Democratic Party establishment has yet to achieve any kind of lasting synthesis with the insurgent components of its base (beyond cooptation). The Uncommitted Movement – voters who cast their votes as “uncommitted” in the Democratic primaries to signal to the Biden and then Harris campaigns disgust over US support for the war in Gaza – gained nearly 700,000 votes (over 4 percent of the Democratic primary vote). The full impact of the Uncommitted Movement on the November election may not be known but the loss of voters in the Arab-majority city of Dearborn, Michigan was clear; Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American serving in Congress, did nearly twice as well as Harris who lost the city to Trump.   

Despite the surge of solidarity, the reality must be addressed: nothing has worked to pressure the US state to intervene and stop the crisis. From the militant to the electoral, nothing has worked. The death tolls rise, Israel’s war expands into Lebanon, Yemen, Iran and Syria, and the US arms continue to travel across the Atlantic to fuel it all. Palestinians continue fleeing from hell into death.   

One tiny sprout of hope that might be found in all this fire, blood and rubble could be a revitalized internationalism, a cross borders solidarity. A number of college students who could not even find Gaza on a map a year ago have turned into activists who understand the genocide as a world historical event. Crisis – whether ecological, economic, imperial – is not going away, and where there is crisis we will continue to find struggle.

D-Econ’s Seasonal Alternative Reading List – 2024, pt. 2

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Most of us might still be processing 2020, and yet 2025 is just around the corner! As 2024 wraps us, here are some new books on economics that were published this year that you may have missed either because of the identity of the author, or their geographical location, or because the topics are not typically considered interesting to those interested in reading about the economy. We include 10 books that cover a range of topics that we think provide a richer understanding of socioeconomic phenomena and are therefore crucial to understanding economics and the world.

This time we include a new edition of an important book on global labour processes and their manifestation in Dominican history. We have also been reading two new books about childbirth and social reproduction. One looks at the commodification of childbirth and the economic pressures that influence the choices and risks associated with childbirth, while the other  one explores interplay between ecological grief and neoliberalism, capitalism and settler colonialism through the author’s own experience of new motherhood. On a related note, we also read two new books on the ecological crisis, one that analyses the evolution of the global oil market and how it has been shaped by global capitalism, and one that explores the relationship between colonialism, capitalism, imperialism and ecological crises. Given the ugliest current outcome of colonialism in the form of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, we have also been reading a new collection of essays on Palestine that highlight the centrality of the Palestinian issue in global struggles against capitalism, imperialism, racism and misogyny. We also include a new book that explores what anti-colonialism means today, and an incredible collection of essays, speeches, poems, stories and reflections from the 60 anniversary commemoration of the 1958 All-African People’s Conference. 

We hope you enjoy these books! As always, please let us know if you have any suggestions for our next reading list.

Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy

By Michel-Rolph Trouillot

This is a new edition of the widely read 1989 book by the world-renowned Haitian anthropologist, historian, and writer, Michel-Rolph Trouillot. The book is highly innovative in its ethnographic study of peasantry in Dominica not as left-over practices from the premodern era but as central for the global capitalism itself. With attention both to the local banana-producing villages in Dominica and the links between them and the global world system, Trouillot shows how Dominican peasant farmers are an important source of profit for multinational corporations. Beyond contributing to novel theorisation about global labour processes, the book is also a highly praised account of Dominican history and society. The methodological ethnographic approach of studying peasantry through a multi-scalar lens is highly relevant for economists trying to understand global value chains as well as people in the general public simply trying to understand global capitalism. Buy the book here.

The political ecology of colonial capitalism
Race, nature, and accumulation

By Bikrum Gill

This book is an exciting exploration of the relationship between colonialism, capitalism, imperialism and ecological crises, that guides the reader to the inherently international nature of these processes. The book situates the phenomenon of the “global land grab” within a historical and theoretical context of the colonial capitalist world system. The author introduces a theoretical framework which highlights how the co-production of race and nature has been crucial in creating the “ecological surplus” necessary for capitalist development. It is an important read for economists, and a broader audience, as it presents arguments for how in order to address contemporary ecological and social crises, we must understand the intertwined histories of race, nature, and capitalism. The book is available in hardcover as well as ebook format here.

Going Into Labour: Childbirth In Capitalism

By Anna Fielder

This book is a Marxist analysis linking together “the powerful physiological and emotional process” of childbirth labour with the “the labour through which people create and produce things, in order to eat, stay warm and survive” (p. 1) as two socially significant areas subsumed under capitalism. The book raises questions around the commodification of birth and the economic pressures that influence the choices and risks associated with childbirth. It examines childbirth as a form of labour, while highlighting how birth workers tend to be undervalued and exploited within a capitalist system. The book also explores political issues around how various forms of oppression, such as colonialism, racism, sexism, cis- and heteronormativity, intersect and create compounded impacts which shape contemporary childbirth practices. The author provides insights into how economic systems shape healthcare practices and the commodification of essential services, while calling for systemic change to create more equitable and just birthing practices. The book is available as a paperback and as an ebook here.

Can Africans Do Economics?

By Grieve Chelwa, Marion Ouma, Redge Nkosi

This inspiring new book redefines development as a process of emancipation rather than simply one of economic growth. It challenges conventional economic theories and practices through an examination of the intimate link between political independence and economic progress. The book explores the intersection of economic development and freedom across the Africa, informed by ideas by African leaders such as Thomas Sankara and Julius Nyerere. The book presents scholarship from a range of economists “[c]ombining historical context with forward-thinking policy proposals … for transformative policies grounded in African realities, and rejecting foreign-led interventions on the continent”. In addition to historical context, the book presents forward-thinking policy proposals aimed at transformative change, addressing issues such as social policy, poverty, and monetary policy in the African context. This reading provides a comprehensive analysis of how economic development can be reimagined to better serve the needs and aspirations of African people. This book is available as a paperback in a number of places, such as 1, 2, 3 and 4.

The Unfinished Business of Liberation and Transformation: Revisiting The 1958 All-African People’s Conference

By Dzodzi Tsikata, Edem Adotey, and Mjiba Frehiwot

This is an incredibly exciting and timely book. The chapters are not simply academic accounts, but rather include essays, speeches, poems, stories and reflections from the 60 anniversary commemoration of the All-African People’s Conference, which originally took place in 1958. A central theme is Pan-African efforts toward and visions of liberation since independence and the importance of acknowledging that the liberation of one person and country is intertwined with that of another. The anniversary was a collaboration between the Institute of African Studies, the Trades Union Congress of Ghana, the Socialist Forum of Ghana, Lincoln University, and the Third World Network Africa and the contributions reflect this diversity of perspectives. The contributions do not simply look backwards and reflect, but rather they look forward and represent a call for action for present and future pan-Africanists. Buy the book here.

Being Anti-Colonial

By Jayan Nayar

At a moment when confusion regarding what anti-colonial, decolonial, and decolonisation actually means, this book is a very welcome intervention. It lays out a clear argument for what it means to be anti-colonial and how this differs from decolonial interventions. Nayar makes a radical call to re-engage with what he calls the anti-colonial ethos, which emphasizes the need to confront enduring global colonial architectures. At the same time, Nayar shows how contemporary calls for decoloniality tend to overlook the praxiological foundations of anti-colonial struggle, removing itself from the politics of resistance. As such, this book is an invitation to challenge the academic community using the colonial/decolonial terminology to revisit and critically re-engage in conversations about radical anti-colonial theory and praxis. It will be a useful contribution both for scholars and students already engaging with these debates as and for readers that are new to these debates. Buy the book here.

Palestine in a World on Fire

By Katherine Natanel and Ilan Pappé

Natanel and Pappé’s collection of interviews is poignant and timely, demonstrating the centrality of the Palestinian cause to global struggles against capitalism, imperialism, racism and misogyny. Establishing Palestine as not just a lens, but a crucial point of entry for analysing and understanding global crises, ‘Palestine in a World on Fire’ illustrates how dialogues, strategies and tactics engaged in by Palestinians and supporters can be (and have been) utilised in resistance movements across the world. Featuring influential activists, these interviews transcend time, resolutely opposing narratives situating 7th October 2023 as the genesis of violence. Natanel and Pappé draw out the complex nature of struggle, positing people as both victims and agents through solidarity which confronts colonial conditions. Building narratives around shared concerns, they argue, can become power in itself: but in this pursuit, we are challenged to critically rethink the boundaries of our imaginations, the implications of our language, and our understanding of complacency. Buy the book here.

Hot Mess: Mothering Through a Code Red Climate Emergency

By Sarah Marie Wiebe

‘Hot Mess’ is rooted in Wiebe’s experience of new parenthood amid climate crisis, after record-breaking heat waves in British Columbia hospitalised and separated her from her nursing baby. She uncovers the interplay between ecological grief and neoliberalism, capitalism and settler colonialism through a book that weaves her own difficult transition to motherhood with her academic work on the structures surrounding and reproducing climate emergency. Organised through colour-coded chapters, based on Wiebe’s repeated spells in hospital, she guides readers through diverse terrain: from climate anxiety, to caesareans, to circular economies of care, the ‘collapsing boundaries’ between the personal, political and planetary are highlighted. As a critical ecofeminist scholar, Wiebe details alternative ways of organising, including circular economies and indigenous land structures, accompanied by a vision of radical care between humans and the planet, rejecting capitalism’s extractivist nature, that can help us achieve this. The book can be bought here.

Crude Capitalism: Oil Corporate Power and the Making of the World Market

By Adam Hanieh

This excellent new book traces the history of how a “simple sticky goo” came to be at the core of the global economy and our energy systems. It also shows how the discovery and use of oil has shaped global markets, extreme wealth, global institutions, and the development of global capitalism. One of the most striking features of this book is the demonstration of the centrality of oil in our daily lives, not just in the form of energy, but also in the form of plastics and other petrochemicals that are almost ubiquitous. Therefore, it moves beyond just the focus on the “upstream” segment of oil exploration and extraction, and discusses what oil becomes once it is out of the ground. Hanieh provides an in-depth yet accessible analysis of the key players in the oil market, not just in the United States, but also in other parts of the world, and the relationship with production of other goods and finance. As he points out, this is crucial as we cannot see key players in oil production merely as case studies, but part of the larger world market with “reciprocal interdependencies”, which has many implications for US hegemony today. Importantly, by discussing what the energy transition looked like from coal to oil, and critically analyzing what in fact is an energy transition, Hanieh provides crucial insight for whether a non-fossil fuel economy is possible and how it can be achieved. An absolute must read as we come to the end of the hottest year on record in human history. 

Beyond Liberalism

By Parabhat Patnaik

This new book provides a Marxist critique of liberalism from one of the most important Marxist economists today. With incredible clarity, Patnaik lays out the key features of classical liberalism and the central importance of individual freedom within it. Essentially, classical liberalism, which Patnaik associates with liberal democracies, sees individual freedom as something that is often threatened by specific agents, like other individuals, or the state, or economic agglomerations like monopolies. However, it does not see individual freedom as something that is threatened by the normal functioning of the system as a whole. He contrasts this with the formulation of “new” liberalism, associated with social democratic systems, which does recognize that individual freedom is constrained by the operation of the system itself. This is because laissez-faire capitalism systemically produces large-scale unemployment, and that this requires intervention by the state to protect individual freedom. Patnaik argues that both classical and new liberalism are limited because the operation of the system of capitalism limits the ability and willingness of the state to intervene to protect individual freedoms within its jurisdictions. Furthermore, he argues that this problem is exacerbated by globalization. This book is a fascinating new treatise on liberalism, and weaves together economics, political philosophy, and an agenda for action, which Patnaik argues, are deeply integrated.

This list was compiled for D-Econ by Alex Arnsten, Devika Dutt, Maya Fitchett, and Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven

Examining the Unsettling in the Settled Science

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A review of Alex M. Thomas, Macroeconomics: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, xx + 234 pages, 978-110873199-7

by Subhasree Ghatak1

“Textbooks often portray economics as a settled science, but this is far from the truth.”

Macroeconomics: An Introduction deals with pluralist ideas that challenge and unsettle the settled thoughts of orthodox economics. The book presents a view of economics as an everyday science embedded in the social fabric of human interactions while also dealing with the complex web of foundational macroeconomic theories.

Take, for instance, the emphasis placed by marginalist economics on the ‘rationality’ of an ‘economic man’, which relegates the economic position of women by disregarding the burden of unpaid care-work on which the economy thrives. The author points out not only the need to change the male pronoun, but also to question the failings of orthodox economics that lead to this neglect. Neoclassical economics determines wages as a function of the marginal productivity of labor. Given this reasoning, it fails to explain the wage gap between men and women in the same occupation with similar levels of skill and expertise. This is just one instance of how the author subjects macroeconomic theory to critical scrutiny in light of its real-world implications, a definitive characteristic of this textbook.

This book offers a novel problem-setting approach rather than a problem-solving one in the teaching and discussion of macroeconomics. This approach aims to construct the context around which the problem will be addressed. It relies on day-to-day observations made on the economy to answer macroeconomic questions.  The discourse and pedagogy around macroeconomics heavily center on the mainstream line of reasoning. Instead, this textbook focuses on the significance of pluralism and acknowledgment of contending to enrich the understanding of economic phenomena. Alternative perspectives rooted in Classical Political Economy and the Keynesian school of thought as propounded by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Kalecki, and Piero Sraffa are invoked to compare and contrast with the marginalist paradigm.

The study of macroeconomics as prescribed in the curriculum of Indian universities is widely Eurocentric, sidelining the unheard perspectives from the Global South. This book aims to improve accessibility of economics to readers in India by drawing on examples from the Indian context rather than from the Global North. Thomas also makes a point to urge the readers of the book to supplement reading with various governmental and non-governmental issued reports, releases, newspapers, and literary fiction.  A comprehensive list of suggested readings, including academic writing and fictional work, rooted in the local context accompany each chapter to enable the readers to study the subject further. For example, the sixth chapter on ‘Why Economic Theory Matters’ has a suggestive list of G. Omkarnath’s 2012 book Economics: A Primer for India (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan) and Arun Kumar’s 2017 book Understanding the Black Economy and Black Money in India (New Delhi: Aleph) among others.

The highlighting of economic thought in literary fiction and political writing is also a novel concept put to use in this work. For instance, to exhibit the complicacies in the land ownership issues in India, the author highlights the work of Hansda Sowvendra Sekhar in his short story, The Adivasi Will Not Dance. The story is centered on the fierce agitation by landless Adivasi people (tribals) to reclaim their land-owning status. A reference is also made to Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste, which analyses the role played by the caste system in the economy, arguing that caste is characterised not just a division of labour but a division of labourers. Thomas deftly incorporates gender concerns in the recognition of the extent of labor immobility that women face, depending on the specificities of caste, community, and region. India fares poorly in terms of female labor force participation, Thomas brings the manifold reasons behind this to the fore using literary texts. He cites Shrilal Shukla’s Raag Darbari, Kota Neelima’s Death of a Moneylender, and Skybaaba’s short story Vegetarians Only to exhibit the socio-cultural specificities that inhibit women’s labor mobility.  The author’s use of literary texts emphasises that economic behavior has been studied in fictional contexts as well. This further strengthens the understanding and provides a junction for the humanities and social sciences to interact.

The structure of the book reflects the author’s “context-measurement-theory-policy” approach, comprising nine chapters with detailed references and an index. Chapters 1 and 2 essentially introduce the idea of economics and conceptualize the macroeconomy. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 deal with the theoretical and foundational framework of the macroeconomy, addressing the issues of money, interest rate, output, employment levels, and economic growth. Chapters 7 and 8 concern itself with the understanding of ground realities and what could be the relevant policy implications for solving macroeconomic problems.  Chapters 6 and 9 ultimately provide a philosophy behind the study of the discipline, unearthing the underlying theory explaining both monetary and non-monetary transactions.

This book deserves ample praise for centering the role of socio-economic factors in economic processes, an approach lacking in textbooks set in the mainstream tradition. It leverages the social context of India to highlight issues of caste, class, and gender, and their importance for all-round development of the economy. Thomas’ Macroeconomics: An Introduction undoubtedly simplifies otherwise abstract macroeconomic theories by setting them in a context accessible to its readers through use of novel methods. Perhaps its most significant contribution is in equipping its readers to unlearn orthodox explanations and develop an enriched understanding of the economy that harnesses the wealth of the pluralist traditions in economics.

  1. Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Patna ↩︎

D-Econ Seasonal Alternative Reading List 2024- Part I

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Somehow we are already 8 months into 2024 (how is it August already?), and here are some new books on economics that were published this year that you may have missed either because of the identity of the author, or their geographical location, or because the topics are not typically considered interesting to those interested in reading about the economy. We include 10 books that cover a range of topics that we think provide a richer understanding of socioeconomic phenomena and are therefore crucial to understanding economics and the world.

This time around, we are reading two new important books around feminist interventions in understanding work around production and reproduction by blurring the boundary between what are often considered as distinct parts of the economy, but with a decidedly distinct focus. One centers work and workers in the story of environmental change and the other focuses on, among other things, decentering the costs of social reproduction to emphasize the relationships that often form the basis for social reproduction “that invoke love, pain, joy, exhaustion, solidarity, and exploitation.” We know that the burden of the work of social reproduction is disproportionately borne by women, however, both these books highlight the differential and racialized nature of this burden. Relatedly, therefore, we have also been reading about the role of White women in the United States in the slave trade. Importantly, it shows how white women fought for their own social and economic empowerment based on their ownership of slaves. We also include two books on revolutionary thought and thinkers in Africa, about movements from across the continent, and with interviews with anti-apartheid activists, radical organizers, journalists and former students of Africa’s anti-colonial liberation thinkers. In a related vein, we have been reading a critical commemoration of the legacy of Vladimir Lenin. They make for some really inspiring reading! We have also included two books that looks at the political economy and history of two countries in the world that many of us in the Anglosphere do not know much about, and place them in the global context: Iran and Guyana. As always, we love reading about the economics discipline, and we include an interesting new book looking at economics imperialism. Finally, 10 months into the intensifying genocide of Palestinian people, we include a brilliant new book that systematically show the role played by Israeli universities in constructing and perpetuating Israeli apartheid and genocide in Palestine. Therefore, it becomes evident that Israeli academic institutions are legitimate targets of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction movement, despite claims by Israeli academics to the contrary. 

We hope you enjoy these books! As always, please let us know if you have any suggestions for our next reading list. 

Depletion: The Human Costs of Caring

By Shirin Rai

In this new book, Shirin Rai explores the labor that goes into the reproduction of life in different contexts and with differential resources, which is largely performed by women across countries and cultures. In order to do that she uses the concept of “Depletion”, or the human cost of social reproductive labor, which affects everyone as individuals, households, and communities, often drawn upon as a “free good.” She shows that the unequal system of social reproduction harms those who care, and unequally affects life that needs to be sustained and reproduced. Rai also extends the concept of depletion to include planetary care, and argues that this helps us connect ecological harm and harm to individuals, households, and communities. Using theories of social reproduction and fascinating and varied case studies, Rai makes an important new contribution to our understanding of production and reproduction, including the need for and movements and institutions that in different contexts have worked and continue to work to reverse depletion. She also decenters the focus on costs of social reproduction to highlight the relationships that often for their basis that invoke love, pain, joy, exhaustion, solidarity, and exploitation. Importantly, she also challenges the neat binary between productive and reproductive realms using the concept of depletion. In her own words, “Depletion argues that strategies for recognizing, measuring, pluralizing, and reversing the harms of depletion are urgently needed in the context of the growing costs of care and caring for our social and ecological worlds.”  Order it here.

Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom

By Maya Wind

In this compelling new book, Maya Wind argues that while universities in Israel are often considered as being “exceptionally free” by people and institutions in the West, they are an integral part of the Israeli security state and serve as an extension of its violence. She also takes on the claim made by many Israeli scholars that while the Israeli state may be committing atrocities against Palestinians, it has nothing to do with the Israeli academy. Based on her extensive research of policy documents, state and military memos, and other documents in the Israeli state and military archives and libraries, Maya Wind documents the material ways in which Israeli universities are materially implicated in the systemic violation of Palestinian rights and academic freedom. Israeli academia has been involved in the Israeli project of territorial and demographic replacement which has been central for Israeli statebuilding. Furthermore, students and faculty in these universities have developed and manufactured weapons for Zionist militias since the inception of the Israeli state. In addition, Palestinian universities have also been governed by the Israeli military, meant to specifically prevent them from becoming sites of Palestinian resistance. In this and many other ways, and through rigorous research Wind shows why Israeli universities are legitimate targets of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement against Israeli apartheid. This book is absolutely essential reading today, and the call for BDS has never been more important than when there is an ongoing genocide against Palestinian people. Order it here. And don’t forget to sign the D-Econ BDS Pledge.

Workers of the Earth: Labour, Ecology, and Reproduction in the Age of Climate Change

By Stefania Barca

By centering labor and the working class in environmental change, Barca tells an “unusual” narrative of environmental change, specifically in the context in the period known as the Great Acceleration, the last six decades characterized by unprecedented degradation of earth systems as a result of rapid economic growth. In her analysis, Barca considers humans as a living part of the earth who are also affected by the degradation that affects non-human nature, but unequal distribution of agency, power, and vulnerabilities. Therefore, she positions the planetary crisis as an endogenous problem that requires transformation of the global economy in service of those who work for it as opposed to an external one that requires limiting the global economy over which global capital has mastery. She argues that an obsession with GDP growth is not only ecologically unsustainable, but also unsustainable for workers who labour for it, specifically from environmental hazards like air and water pollution, radiation or electromagnetic exposure, and catastrophic climate events. Using an ecofeminist lens, this book shows how environmental changes in the industrial age have directly affected workers and turned them into ecological subjects. Barca also broadens the labor-environmentalism beyond its focus on waged work and shows that reproductive labor has played an indispensable role in the history of environmentalism. Buy it here. 

Revolutionary Movements in Africa: An Untold Story

Edited by Pascal Bianchini, Ndongo Samba Sylla and Leo Zeilig

This is a fascinating book that uncovers revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s across the African continent. Covering specific radical projects from Sudan to Madagascar, from South Africa to Mali, the book spans labour movements, student movements, feminist movements, and radical debates such as the famous (but often forgotten) Dar es Salaam debates (which featured intellectual and political giants like Julius Nyerere, Issa Shivji, Walter Rodney, Mahmood Mamdani, Dani Wadada Nabudere, Yash Tandon and others, all engaging with the cutting edge Marxist debates of the time and how they related to Africa). The book maps these movements and ideas and gives some suggestions as to what we can learn from them today. Order here.

Lenin – The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce

Edited by Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eirchhorn and Parick Anderson

This book critically commemorates the 100th anniversary of the death of Lenin on 21 January, 1924. Through 104 contributions, the book is a vast and exciting revisiting of Lenin’s legacy and the relevance of his thinking for understanding contemporary times. The topics that the chapters touch on are vast, the contributors are diverse, and the form of writing varies from poetry, skits, fictional writing, to academic and journalistic contributions. Themes include imperialism, the right to self-determination, dialectics, AI, Black liberation, communist feminism and revolutionary dreaming and organizing. Interestingly, the chapters also put Lenin in conversation with other radical thinkers to trace the scope and changing forms of his influence, such as Amílcar Cabral, Ruth First, and Mao, and they examine his influence in a range of national contexts, from Nigeria, to Iceland, to Sri Lanka. The chapters and short and accessible, making for great beach reading. Order it here.

Capitalism in contemporary Iran: capital accumulation, state formation and geopolitics 

By Kayhan Valadbaygi

This is an important book taking a radical political economy approach to understanding capital accumulation in Iran. Unlike a lot of mainstream literature on Iran, Valadbaygi carefully interrogates how processes of domestic class and state formation are situated in and related to the wider capitalist world market. As such, the book shows how there are connections between the nature of development in Iran and the geopolitical tensions with the West. Starting from the 1979 revolution to contemporary Iran, it provides a historical and contemporary analysis of development in Iran, including an in-depth interrogation of how Iranian neoliberalism has brought about new contested class dynamics in the country, which in turn has impacted the state form and geopolitical strategy. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding Iran beyond the simplistic media reporting on the country. Order it here.

They Were Her Property – White Women as Slave Owners in the American South 

By Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

This book overturns the widely-held assumption that married white women were passive bystanders in the business of American slavery. On the contrary, Jones-Rogers shows that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors that actively engaged in and profited from holding slaves. Indeed, since women tended to inherit more slaves than land, enslaved people tended to be women’s primary source of wealth. Jones-Rogers also documents how white women treated enslaved people as brutally as slave-owning men, dismissing assumptions that women would be more empathetic. Bringing together, women’s history and African American history, this book unpacks how white women actively participated in the slave market and even used it for their own economic and social empowerment. Order it here.

False Prophets

By Matthew Watson

In False Prophets, Matthew Watson examines the two-step movements through which ‘economics imperialism’ has been rolled out across the social sciences. The first step in this process of intellectual colonisation concerned efforts to mathematize economic knowledge. The second concerns the ‘apparently indiscriminate wielding of mathematical market models’. How this plays out in practice is familiar to most of us already: questions of climate justice are subordinated to models seeking the ‘efficient allocation’ of resources; party politics is framed not in terms of  ideological promise and contestation but ‘the purely functional task of identifying the electoral market equilibrium reflected in the wishes of the median voter’; or when economics imperialism sets its sights on history, ‘mathematical market models have been used to overturn consensus opinions built on deep archival research of what the actors involved thought at the time’. There has of course been much written about economics imperialism before, and about the role played by Watson’s cast of mathematizing economists (Jevons, Robbins, Samuelson, Debreu and Arrow). What False Prophets provides, though, is a sense of economics imperialism as a ‘much more conditional and a much more contingent process than its proponents like to make out’. Jevons, Robbins and Samuelson wrote against a backdrop of contestation and methodological pluralism about what ‘mathematical rigour’ means, even if it is treated as settled by economics imperialists as they stray into new disciplinary territories. But if the claims that economics imperialists make about bringing clarity of understanding are laid on wobbly mathematical and philosophical foundations, can their project hold up to criticism, even on its own terms? You can buy False Prophets from Agenda here. 

Voices for African Liberation

Edited by Leo Zeilig, Chinedu Chukwudinma, and Ben Radley

The Review of African Political Economy editors have a longstanding commitment to providing a platform for analysis and discussion that can inform strategies for Africa’s liberation. Though Euro-American leftists and academics often orient themselves around the memory of 1968 in Paris or New York, the students and workers who rose up across the African continent are too easily forgotten. When ROAPE was founded, hope abounded in the liberation-development projects of Tanzania, Ghana, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. In 2014, ROAPE embarked on a project to connect a new generation of radicals, socialists and revolutionaries with elders of liberation movements. This book is the outcome of that project, containing interviews with anti-apartheid activists, radical organizers, journalists and former students of Africa’s anti-colonial liberation thinkers. Many of the radicals and organizers of the mid-twentieth century, including Walter Rodney and Amilcar Cabral were assassinated, and the editors of ROAPE have included here interviews with their biographers and comrades who seek to carry on their legacy. The book also gathers interviews with contemporary radical theorists, from Issa Shivji to Ndongo Samba Sylla and the late Samir Amin, interviewed shortly before his passing. The final section has interviews with contemporary activists operating outside academia, from reparations campaigner Esther Stanford-Xosei to South African anti-apartheid and union organiser Trevor Ngwane and Ghanaian Third World Network coordinator Yao Graham. The book’s collection of voices, radical histories and hope for unfinished liberation struggles is, it is fair to say, unparalleled. There is so much ground covered, it could be a summer reading list on its own! You can get Voices for African Liberation  from ebb here.

Global Guyana

By Oneka LaBennett

In Global Guyana, Oneka LaBennett weaves together auto-ethnography, oral history and archival research to create a book that is about ‘seeing Guyana and Guyanese women, in particular, as always-already-there but often invisible players linked to the construction of gender and race, globalization and resources’. Guyana is often sidelined in academic discourse on the Caribbean, occasionally even snipped out of maps of the region, and subjected to infantilizing coverage by the New York Times and Netflix specials that depict Guyana as ‘nowhere’. It does not have a booming tourist economy, true, but the ‘political economy of erasure’ to which Guyana has been subjected is intertwined, as LaBennett shows, with a political economy of erosion. The silica-quartz sand from Guyana’s beaches is shipped out across the Caribbean to replenish tourist beaches elsewhere. LaBennett sees parallels with the erasure of blackness in the construction of African-Indian ancestry in Guyana and elsewhere across the Caribbean. Guyanese women in particular have been scapegoated by the Bajan state, constructed as hypersexualized threats to the nuclear family, rooted in Bajan anxieties about competition for employment and scarce resources. As the global business press ‘rediscovers’ Guyana in the wake of Exxon Mobil’s 2015 oil discovery, which has Guyana poised to be the world’s largest per capita oil exporter, longstanding tropes about isolation, backwardness and ethnic conflict have resurfaced. Hemispheric environmental change might be emanating from Guyana’s unparalleled oil discoveries. But taking inspiration from Andaiye in the closing chapter, LaBennett argues for a global feminism looking out from Guyana, rooted in the longstanding global outreach of Guyanese women who have time and again unsettled gendered racializations in their negotiations of kinship, labour, migration and the imposition of extractive economies. You can buy Global Guyana here. 

This list was compiled for D-Econ by Devika Dutt, Paul Gilbert, and Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven

What Palestine teaches teachers of politics and law

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By Afreen Faridi1

Liberal legal and political theory, morality and institutions which uphold the Westphalian human rights charter have dug their grave in Palestine. Magna Carta, Bill of Rights, Universal Declaration of Human Rights … are dead. They have time and again failed to be useful to the Global South and its peoples who continue to face imperial and neo-colonial forces.

The death of over 8,000 Palestinians (editor’s note: the number of Palestinians murdered has risen to 31,184 since the original publication of this article) in the current assault on the Gaza Strip, excluding those in the West Bank, with no end in sight of the indiscriminate assault on civilians, is testament to the vacuous nature of such institutions. The cry of the people facing a genocide is not carried over to gilded halls where a spectacle is made by supposed White saviours over language to be utilised in powerless resolutions as children die.

We are witness to how post-War institutions like the United Nations, International Court of Justice, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the European Union filibuster, indulge and finance a racialised notion of exploitative violence as justice and freedom. Meanwhile, people of colour are demonised as barbarians who need to be occupied by “peacekeeping forces” and any resistance at their end is vilified as terrorism.

The televised genocide of Palestinians is clear evidence of how White liberal States and societies can flout international conventions— of their own creation— freely and with absolute impunity.

This lack of moral hesitation is clearly shared between States driven by hegemonic groups which rely on fascism and authoritarianism to fuel capitalist accumulation through a militarised industrial complex. One can see a complicity of the State, corporations and civil society in their hypocrisy while belittling and obfuscating the deaths of their counterparts in Palestine.

The most nefarious alliance is seen amongst Western media houses and their journalists as Palestinian journalists are killed and their families fatally targeted as retribution while they show the world the true toll of the occupation.

Our roles as scholars of law, political scientists and faculty in solidarity, and our moral duty, must be to rethink how Western morality, theory and institutions are taught in the classrooms of the Global South. We need to be cautious especially when the former are applied to the Global South as methodological tools for research, analysis and policy practice. As such, we must be conscious of three trends:

Appropriation of emancipatory ideals and language

The discourse on the Palestinian struggle is cornered by terms such as equality, feminism, decolonisation, and self-determination being usurped by a bigoted group in power while weaponising Islamophobia and anti-Semitism against Palestinians and their supporters.

The ongoing Nakba is couched in sectarian terms such as self-determination and decolonisation to justify the creation of an ethno-nationalist State masquerading as a democracy. One witnesses liberal feminisms creating the spectacle of Brown girl bosses in White spaces showing unfettered support for indiscriminate violence against Brown societies.

This has been spectacularly mobilised on social media with the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) women brigades posing for gender parity with guns which deny the same right to Palestinian women, and Kamala Harris’ endorsement of the American–Israeli nexus as the first woman of colour in the White House.

Furthermore, oppression of Palestine exhibits bias within political pundits and lobbyists preaching non-violence as the only legitimate tool of resistance for people of colour as they face erasure by a globally armed force. This stance exists in diametric opposition to the stance on Ukrainian response to Russian armed forces.

Human rights discourse is being used for rainbow washing to create a façade of democracy which hides majoritarian bias and apartheid laws which allow for political representatives to publicly dehumanise Palestinians as animals to be set for slaughter.

We see armed settlers hiding under the mask of civilians, acting as State-sponsored paramilitary forces while infiltrating refugee camps and residential settlements to kill and displace. We must be wary of convoluted statements by thinkers who engage in false equivalence and force the victim to justify their positions as they lay dying.

Privatised technology as a centre of power

In a continuation of history, the western military industrial complex develops weapons and tests them to kill and confine the oppressed while contravening international conventions. Technology has also been used by the settler State to develop architectures of control both in the physical and digital realm which are exported globally.

While the genocidal use of military tech against civilians is conspicuous, the use of artificial intelligence and social media platforms against Palestinians is nebulous but equally insidious. The role of the internet as a public good, as essential as the air needed to breathe and survive, cannot be overstated.

The power of corporations over access to the internet and the flow of information using social media platforms is understated. For Palestine, we see technology being used to perpetuate disinformation and erase the truth, surveil, and silence the voices of the victims and dissidents, and manufacture genocidal consent among a global audience. The suspension of internet and mobile services by the occupation, especially in Gaza, only aims to perpetuate unabated violence against Palestinians during the blackout.

The struggles to establish just perspectives and fact-check information flow are made even more difficult with the use of artificial intelligence which shows bias in their models. The pervasiveness of digital technologies and their significance within classrooms cannot be ignored owing to the increasing reliance of students on such technology to seek information, learn and develop opinions.

Palestine as a site of more-than-human injustice

The images of Palestinian children in Gaza emerging with their furry friends in their arms and cats being rescued from the rubble of bombed apartments have tugged the strings of our hearts.

However, this is not the extent of beyond-human trauma in Palestine. The struggle to save Palestinians is to stop the systemic erasure of indigenous societies which were tied to and co-existed alongside the land upon which they lived. The bombs that fall on the children of Palestine are enforcing a rift between people and the environment as a form of environmental apartheid.

We see a nation-State terraforming the environment and polluting it as settler colonialism is enacted. Agrarian lands are dug up and hillsides converted to settler residences. Sea shores and sea waters bear the brunt of occupational blockade. Olive trees are burned down, fertile lands ruined and cut off by apartheid walls. Water sources are poisoned as a form of biological warfare. Native pastoralists and their livestock are displaced, native flora and fauna killed alongside Palestinians. The air is poisoned by chemical warfare and bomb plumes, massive emissions due to military infrastructure.

The famed water management and agrarian practices which irrevocably change native biomes are a tool to wrest control over domestic production and finance the settler colonial project. The myth that settlers brought bloom to a desert which was uninhabited and untended is one of the myriad ways in which sustainability narratives are used to greenwash colonialism in Palestine and other regions of the Global South.

Justice for Palestine is simultaneously a preservation of animal and plant life, caring for diverse biospheres and a systemic change towards climate justice.

A question of education

So, what do we do as educators? There already exists evidence of White legal and political theorists selectively applying notions of fairness and justice using patriarchal and racist morality to create institutions which disrupt native values and provide for the extraction of wealth through modern regimes.

As legal and political thinkers and instructors, we need to re-centre such critiques in our classrooms and contextualise them against local injustices. At the same time, we need to rethink rights and justice as collaborative regimes by bringing back local knowledge from colonial obscurity, all the while being careful lest we fall for conservative interpretations of vain glorious pasts.

We must not teach young learners the quintessential colonial method— wait for a people to die, make a museum of their genocide, then set up departments of decoloniality over their mass graves. We must not follow tokenistic models set by prolifically White departments with indigenous names which sell the story of the dead native for academic funding.

Even as Palestinians struggle to survive, they are teaching us important lessons in humanity and critical thought. As legal scholars, political scientists and teachers we must borrow their courage and integrity and extend them to our classrooms.

As educators we must ask our students to speak truth to power when it is hardest and matters the most. Let us continuously speak about all the Palestines in the world and strive for a new Palestinian charter of more-than-human rights to emerge where children are not martyred before the rest of us learn our lessons.

This article was first published on 29 October 2023 by The Leaflet and is reposted here with permission.

  1. Afreen Faridi is a Doctoral Candidate at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and founder of the Pastoral and Himalayan Academic Discourses Network (PAHAD). They can be reached on Twitter/X @aamacademic. ↩︎