The Rest and the West: Capital and Power in a Multipolar World

Far from heralding the return of the nation-state, today’s wars and struggles are fights for the future of globalization

The unipolar world has exploded. In the wake of a pandemic that has tested economies and societies, geopolitical conflict is no longer a prospect but a reality.

The Rest and the West locates the makings of this situation in turbulent dynamics of the capitalist world market. Understanding the conjuncture to spur competition for the political organization of the spaces of globalization, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson resist the reduction of this conflict to great power rivalries or processes of economic decoupling.

Instead, they investigate how geoeconomic forces cross the rising centrality of war to capital operations and the transformations of capitalism. The arc of Mezzadra and Neilson’s analysis is wide, encompassing topics such as the pandemic crisis of mobility, shifts in the relation of social reproduction to capital circulation, state transformation in Russia and China, the politics of infrastructure and energy, and the impact of geopolitical change upon social struggles.

The book’s gambit is to forge a theory of imperialism adequate to a world in which the rest no longer provides a putative unity that makes and opposes the West.

Sandro Mezzadra is professor of political theory at the Department of the Arts, University of Bologna, and adjunct research fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. His work centers on the relations among globalization, migration and political processes, on contemporary capitalism, as well as on postcolonial theory and criticism. He is a participant in ’post-workerist’ debates and one of the founders of the website Euronomade. Mezzadra has published widely in the Italian, English, German and Spanish languages. His latest book in English is In the Marxian Workshops: Producing Subjects (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

Brett Neilson is professor and deputy director at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. In the last decade, his work has centered on issues of migration, borders, and globalization, logistics and digitalization, contemporary capitalism, geopolitics, and automation. Apart from writings with Sandro Mezzadra, he has published many articles and books, including Free Trade in the Bermuda Triangle ... and Other Tales of Counterglobalization (Minnesota, 2004). His writings have been translated into sixteen languages: Italian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Slovenian, Turkish, Arabic, Polish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.