Enhance your library’s holdings with our comprehensive collection of 56 titles in international law, international relations and security studies. This curated selection includes both timeless classics and pioneering new works, featuring esteemed titles from the renowned Melland Schill series, known for its signifi cant contributions to the field.
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| Total collection | 56 |
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This chapter shows how the year 1979 forever altered the relations between Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. It presents the Iranian Revolution and the Iran–Iraq war as events that transformed the strategic triangle into a ‘stable marriage’, in which the US–Saudi Arabia relationship grew stronger while the other two relationships became increasingly hostile. With the Twin Pillar order gone and Iran no longer willing to guarantee Western interests, the United States and Saudi Arabia were drawn together to seek political alternatives to maintain the status quo. This chapter reassesses the Persian Gulf balance of power throughout the period and explores how status satisfaction, state identity, and leadership preferences affect the three countries’ decision-making. It shows how Iran became a revisionist country, simultaneously promoting its Islamism as emancipatory from Western domination and as an alternative political project that diverged immensely from the Saudi one. As a result, sectarianism began to permeate the Iran–Saudi ties as a tool to compete for Islamic leadership. The chapter also explains how the fear of Iran exporting its revolution cemented the US–Saudi oil-for-security partnership. Yet, Iran’s isolation was not immediate, and only by contextualising power and scrutinising the domestic variables can one fully grasp the process that led to this triangle. By the second half of the decade, Riyadh and Washington's anxiety toward the regional order reduced as it became clear that Iran would not fall under Soviet influence, and Ayatollah Khomeini consolidated the new regime despite (or thanks to) international isolation.
Chapter three deepens the Cortesian thesis introduced in chapter two by moving beyond the premise of conquest in accounting for the analytical significance of Indigenous earth-worlding capacity. It demonstrates that the racialized society/nature distinction emerges out of the European settler’s move to effect a “reversal of dependence” upon Indigenous peoples whose earth-worlding capacity had been vital to the survival of the settler. Specifically, the racialized society/nature distinction structures the “appropriation and erasure” of Indigenous earth-worlding capacity that comes to underpin both colonial capitalism’s productive power and recurrent ecological exhaustions. The chapter demonstrates, in other words, that rather than being premised upon an appropriation of the “free gifts” of nature, as the world-ecology approach argues, capital accumulation finds its condition of possibility in the appropriation and erasure of the earth-worlding capacities of colonized Indigenous peoples. The chapter further clarifies the key contradiction of frontier appropriation, namely how the racialized denial of the reproductive conditions of the frontier, while setting in motion the ecological surplus underpinning capital’s historical accumulation cycles, comes ultimately to exhaust the frontier’s surplus provisioning capacity. This “surplus/exhaustion” contradiction is shown to be central to the rise and fall of successive accumulation cycles from the emergence, via the colonization of the Americas, of the capitalist world-ecology in the long sixteenth century to the anticolonial exhaustion of the British-led accumulation cycle of the long nineteenth century.
Chapter two both builds upon the potentialities, and overcomes the limitations, of the world-historical approaches engaged in chapter one through a more direct theoretical and historical set of reflections on the relation between colonialism, capitalism, and planetary ecological crises. While retaining the world-historical premise of world-systems analysis and third world marxism regarding the colonial basis of the classical European transitions to capitalism, the chapter moves to overcome what I identify to be their “quantitative limitation.” Specifically, world-historical approaches have largely conceived of the function of race to colonial capitalism as providing ideological legitimation for the theft of land and labor, and the transfer of surplus from the periphery, which is understood to serve as the quantitative basis for the reproduction of the definitive qualitative capital-labor relation in the core. It is in integrating the ecological dimensions of the transition to capitalism, as chapter two demonstrates, that we are able to grasp and articulate the qualitative social-ecological relations that emerge from, and continue to structure, the colonial foundations of the capitalist world-ecology. The chapter undertakes this objective through a close engagement with the world-ecology approach to the Capitalocene, and in particular with its claim that the capitalist world-ecology is reproduced through two distinct yet co-constitutive qualitative contradictions – capital/labor and society/nature. In drawing the capitalocene into conversation with anti-colonial theory and historical ecology, the chapter ultimately demonstrates that capitalism’s founding society/nature distinction is underwritten by the racialized denial of humanity to the Indigenous peoples of the frontier.
The book concludes with reflections upon the ongoing threat posed by land grabbing to social-ecological justice on a planetary scale. It thus questions the “development as catching-up-with-the-West” paradigm and engages with the alternative development trajectory that has been termed the “new agrarian question.” This emergent development path is one that is premised upon a “re-peasantization” logic. Here land reform and/or reclamation is essential to building a model of development that centers broad based access to land and recognizes the indispensable role played by Indigenous practice and knowledge in the restoration and sustenance of agrarian landscapes.
The introduction offers an overview of the key themes and arguments presented in the book. It begins with a brief encapsulation of key approaches to land grabbing, and a summary of the empriical findings of the India-Ethiopia case study discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5. The remainder of the introduction is concerned with presenting the theoretical and historical framework through which the book will endeavor to understand the significance of the motive forces and consequences of the land grab. It takes as its point of departure the imperative of interpreting the global land grab in relation to two longstanding concerns of agrarian political economy – the agrarian question and primitive accumulation. By reconstructing these two concepts on a world-historical scale, it becomes possible to demonstrate how land grabbing implicates the ongoing agrarian questions of capitalist states encouraging their agribusiness capitals to expand production into the terra nullius of extra-national space. Key to this expansion, the introduction argues, is the racialized construction of extra-national space as “unused nature” awaiting appropriation by more “rational” social forces.
Chapter five applies the theoretical framework of the political ecology of colonial capitalism to the neoliberal crisis conjuncture giving rise to the global land grab. It articulates the land grab as a strategy of “capitalist restoration” in the face of a global peasant counter-movement that both was integral to brining the neoliberal agrarian order to crisis and, in its more militant trajectories, advanced an alternative resolution to the neoliberal crisis. The capacity of emerging Southern states to resolve the neoliberal crisis in an anti-colonial direction would be contingent on the extent to which they responded to agrarian counter-movements by re-structuring their development paths upon Fanon’s “peasant basis” via a renewed project of land reform. Ultimately, it has been the case that the majority of Southern states, including India, remained incapable of instituting the land reform option, and thus found themselves structurally compelled to respond to the contradictions of the neoliberal accumulation crisis with a “land grab as development” strategy.
This book situates the post financial crisis phenomenon of large-scale agricultural land acquisition, otherwise known as the global land grab, within the longue duree of the capitalist world system. It does so by advancing a theoretical and historical framework, called the political ecology of colonial capitalism, that clarifies the key role played by the co-production of race and nature in provisioning the “ecological surplus” that has historically secured the emergence and reproduction of capitalist development. This framework specifically foregrounds the racialized disarticulation of sovereign Indigenous earth-worlds as the necessary condition of possibility for the reduction of the colonial frontier to a state of “unused” nature. While the racialized denial of the reproductive conditions of the colonial frontier’s fertile soils ultimately exhausts the latter’s surplus provisioning capacity, the longue duree of the capitalist world-ecology has been marked by successive attempts to overcome such exhaustion by forging, through technologies of racialization, new frontiers of “unused” externalized natures. The key premise of this book is that, in light of the food price crisis indexing the exhaustion of the accumulation capacity of the neoliberal epoch of the capitalist world-ecology, the global land grab constitutes another such attempted moment of re-securing the cheap food premise through racialized frontier appropriation. The argument advanced here is that, within the neoliberal crisis conjuncture, the hegemonic resolution of capital’s escalating social-ecological contradictions necessitates, through the practice of “global primitive accumulation,” the racialized construction of frontiers of unused nature in emergent zones of appropriation.
Chapter four accounts for the “rise of the South” in the contested reconstitution of the accumulation capacity of the capitalist world-ecology over the “long- twentieth century.” The chapter combines the “agrarian question of national liberation” framework developed by Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, with Samir Amin’s account of the contradictions of what he terms the “reawakening of the South” (2010), in order to emphasize that the active anti-colonial opposition articulated to the motive forces of capitalist development figures centrally into both the exhaustion, and attempted reconstitution, of the ecological surplus underpinning capital’s accumulation capacity. The more radical dimensions of the anti-colonial rejection of the South as a “unit of nature” were, however, compromised, as postcolonial states, shaped by the imperative of securing their sovereignty in the face of an emergent ‘neocolonialism,’ embraced a conception of development as catching up with the North. This necessarily called for the appropriation of an “internal” ecological surplus oriented towards rapid national industrial development. In the case the chapter will examine most closely, the postcolonial Indian state, having failed at instituting comprehensive land reform, did not so much as contest the underlying racialized society/nature distinction as it did seek to re-order it in the service of what Fanon characterizes as bourgeois national development. A further argument of this chapter, then, is that the “long twentieth century” is marked by an ongoing North/South contestation over the imperialist rent that, more specifically, expresses control over the mobilization and circulation of the world-ecological surplus.
Chapter one critically engages the implications of the agrarian question framework for the study of the global land grab. It begins by recognizing the important emphasis that the agrarian question framework places upon class struggle, particularly as it relates to an emergent capital-labour antagonism, as a key variable in agrarian transitions. While thus constituting a necessary response to the more celebratory accounts of transition forwarded in classical political economy, Western marxist approaches to the agrarian question, the chapter argues, nonetheless fall within what I call a “Eurocentric-anthropocentric” paradigm which privileges Europeans as the exclusive originary agents of agrarian transition. This, consequently, reduces much of the non-European world to a derivative space destined to follow the paths of transition forged earlier by autochthonous European societies. The chapter seeks to reveal that such an origins-diffusion framework informs much of the cautious optimism with which powerful developmental actors and organizations, particularly the World Bank, have identified the surge in global land deals as potential mechanisms for overcoming the stalled agrarian transition in the Global South. It then considers the extent to which more critical world-historical approaches to the agrarian question have overcome the “origins-diffusion” premise, particularly through a foregrounding of the “extra-national” colonial basis of the classical European transitions, and what the implications, in terms of both potentialities and limitations, of such a “global” reconceptualization are for the study of the land grab.
The selective review of some of the major approaches to international relations, past and present, has been intended to introduce students to some of the central ideas with which the subject has been studied during the twentieth century and some of the ideas that will concern students in the twenty-first. Globalisation embraces many of the developments in the economic, technical, social and cultural arenas that underlie much of the contemporary dynamic. Increasing regionalisation offers one possible pattern of response to contemporary pressures and developments, particularly for beleaguered governments seeking to restore some measure of control over an apparently runaway world economy. Intellectual fragmentation has also marked the turn of the century/millennium. There is nothing new about such an intellectual kaleidoscope. Ideas and approaches tend to clarify and simplify at times of serious and pressing problems in the real world.