The Age of Inversion

Revolutionary periodicals of the Global South offer an alternative tool for studying and practicing left anticolonialism. These journals function as a space “for the creation and reproduction of counterhegemonic formations, often under conditions of extreme repression and neglect.” They are not just a primary source but also a method that centers on the collective. 

“The notion of collective authorship also has consequences for how anticolonialism is researched and taught. In social and political theory, it means paying less attention to Fanon the individual and more to the movements that surrounded him and the debates in which he was enmeshed. It requires that we turn back toward what David Scott calls the ‘problem spaces’ of anticolonialism, a discursive space made up of an ‘ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes (conceptual as well as ideological-political stakes) hangs.’ We might look at social rather than individual thought as the place where questions were asked, unsettled, and worked out through processes of dialogue and disagreement.”

A fundamental shift in U.S. ideational conservativism—the New Right—can be divided into three, occasionally overlapping, factions: the “Claremonters,” also known as “West Coast Straussians”; the post-liberals; and the national conservatives. Among these, the national conservatives have become the most influential, partly due to their broad appeal, prompting some traditional conservative elites to describe this shift as a “natcon takeover.”  

“The New Right has coalesced around the view that future Republican administrations should not primarily seek to cut down what conservatives have historically perceived as a bloated federal bureaucracy, or to curtail the powers of the administrative state by shrinking its size and mandate. On the contrary, the vision that increasingly pervades the New Right is that the administrative state must be captured and transformed from within through large-scale personnel replacement. Ultimately, this article argues that while all three groups on the New Right ostensibly embrace some notion of grand strategic restraint, the rise of national conservativism is likely to accelerate the pivot from Europe to Asia, rather than lead to neo-isolationism as is sometimes suggested.” 

Glasman writes in response to the rise of humanitarianism statistics, to what he describes as the “data frenzy” of the 2010s. For him, both the optimistic explanation (the bureaucratization of the humanitarian sector) and the pessimistic one (neoliberal control by big donors) fail to recognize the internal workings of humanitarian organizations. He argues instead that “minimal humanity” looked at how the people involved in humanitarian work decided to value certain techniques over others and how these organizations had combined technology and morality in a particular way. Bertrand Taithe, Léa Macias, Dennis Dijkzeul, Andrea Behrends and William Anderson respond to the book in this discussion.

The anthropologist Léa Macias posits: “As Glasman demonstrates, numbers have become the guardian of humanitarian impartiality. Indeed, humanitarian organizations are being put under a lot of pressure to demonstrate their need for action in a particular context. Therefore, data quantifying the needs is a powerful tool to make the case for a humanitarian intervention. Yet numbers are still a political and social construct from the way the standards are set, translated into questionnaires, to the teams recruited to collect the data, etc. What you can collect, where you can collect it, and how, shapes the quantification process itself. It means political contexts still shape the level of response and therefore quantification of needs itself cannot be seen as the sole justification for the impartiality of humanitarian organizations.”

What would an Africa built on a foundation of its own thinkers—rather than a Euro-centrist blueprint—look like? And what could it teach Europe? Sarr argues for an African utopia, one that is not constructed on a foreign model. Africa is diverse, but Sarr argues that its countries experienced common historical trends and that a continental project of emancipation could undergird an “Afrotopia.” 

“If you look at the human societies, there is a lot of imagination on how to feed one’s need, how to organize politically, how to organize your economy, how to relate with your ecology. And there’s a lot of human creativities in human group, depending on where they are, depending on the historical time. And this production of the metaphor of the future, what does it mean to build a good country? What does it mean to build good ways of living? What does it mean to live well? What does it mean to reinvent social forms? … And I think the question is not to say we have to be developed or not. It’s just to define what does it mean to live well in a geography, in a territory. Which kind of relation do you want to build with economy, culture, ecology? How do we invent political forms that express our aspiration to what is a good way of living together, a good relationality? And it’s what I call reinventing the metaphors of your future. … And I think this task is very important. And it’s also a task for every society not to think or to consider that the given social forms are the ultimate one. And all social forms have to be reinvented, depending on where we are and depending on the new challenges, etcetera.” 

Liberals often emphasize values like equality, freedom, and opportunity, yet they tend to underestimate the role of stability as a prerequisite for these ideals. Drawing parallels between Thomas Hobbes’s 17th-century context—political turmoil, plagues, and economic uncertainty—and today’s societal challenges, Morton suggests that the fear of instability is a rational response to real dangers.  

“Democratic liberal states have rejected authoritarianism as the solution to the problem of insecurity, preferring to emphasize the benefits of living in a state where our wellbeing is safeguarded by the enshrinement of our freedom into laws and institutions. Stability is meant to be the product of citizens’ acceptance of the shared values at the heart of liberalism. But does this compact guarantee the material security and stability that are preconditions for flourishing lives? For the millions who worry about whether they can afford their grocery bill, rent or medical expenses, the answer appears to be no.” 

Ecuadorean citizens voted to protect the Yasuní region, one of the world’s most biodiverse places, from oil exploitation in a landmark 2023 referendum. The massive break with the status quo built on years of activism and failed political initiatives. Arauz, a senior fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research and a former Ecuadorean government official, discusses how injustice is built into global capitalism and how Bretton Woods institutions fuel extractivism in the Global South. 

“When you’re thinking about these short-term needs … then you don’t really have the time or the energy or the vision to think about an energy transition when you have to deal with these day-to-day issues of survival and there are many more specific instances on how, for example, World Bank loans are structured in such a way that they’re not really solving any of the adaptation issues or the loss and damage issues. There are no reparations embedded into the system either it becomes of a cross-subsidy where you know poorer countries are actually paying higher interest rates in the rich countries, so it’s like a net transfer of wealth from the south to the north. … That’s not how it’s supposed to work, you know—it’s supposed to be a multilateral system with solidarity embedded in it, and it’s actually not working that way.”