Please note: this event has passed
After a long-term decline in engagement with the subject in mainstream IR and IPE, imperialism is back at the centre of the Western media and academic vocabulary, mainly to describe Russian imperialism. While Western state discourses describe Ukrainian resistance and Europeanisation as a path from being 'colonised by communism' to being 'de-colonised' and 'de-communised’, Vladimir Putin used a ‘de-communisation’ rhetoric to justify its regime's invasion of Ukraine and presented it as a step towards decolonisation from Western imperialism. In both cases, the language of anti-colonialism has been divorced from the anti-capitalist project of self-determination.
The crumbling of the French neo-colonial empire in west Africa, moreover, sheds new light on the global and systemic nature of contemporary imperialism and its alternatives. In this context, it is essential for IPE to renew its engagement with Marxist theories of imperialism and revolutionary anti-imperialist and anti-racist thought.
In this two-day workshop, hosted by the Contemporary Marxism Research Group and the King’s Decolonising Working Group, an international group of scholars re-engage with these theories to provide the basis of a fuller assessment of the ongoing fracturing of the international order, the intensification of capitalism’s antagonisms as well as the prospects of today’s struggles for decolonization and liberation.
Places are limited. If you would like to attend, please email: seminarmarxisttheory@gmail.com specifying whether you wish to attend online or in person, and either on both days or just one.
Schedule
Thursday, 14 September
Room S0.12, Strand building.
10.00 - 10.30: Welcome and introduction, Lucia Pradella, John Narayan
Panel 1, 10.30 - 12.30
- Lin Chun, The ideology and politics of market transition in China
- Patrick Bond, Decolonizing IPE with 'uneven development': Insights from South Africa's struggles against racial capitalism
- Ingrid Kvangraven, Paul Gilbert and Maria Dyveke Styve, An anti-disciplinary approach to IPE: Its potential for understanding reform of the global economic order
- John Narayan, The international political economy of abolition
12.30 - 13.30. Lunch break
Panel 2, 13.30 - 15.15
- Noaman Ali, Sub-imperialism and semi-colonial dependence: Pakistan and the Gulf
- Kristoffer Marslev, Unequal exchange and class dynamics in global value chains: Insights from the Cambodian garment industry
- Lucia Pradella, A question of time: class, imperialism, and the ‘cost-of-living crisis’
Panel 3, 15.30 - 17.15
- Alex Callinicos, Fractures: The Ukraine war and theories of imperialism
- Olena Lyubchenko, Capital accumulation and peripheral whiteness: The social reproduction of post-war Ukraine
- Hebatalla Taha, Racial capitalism and Palestinian labour in the Israeli high-tech industry
Friday, 15 September
Room MB1.01, Macadam building
Panel 4, 10.00 - 12.00
- Leandro Bona, Subordinate financialization in Argentina and the differences with the European periphery
- Sean Kenji Starrs, China’s techno-dependency on the core: Taking US imperialism seriously in IPE
- Gabriel Trettel Silva, Brototi Roy, Anke Schaffartzik, Colonial patterns in critical minerals extraction and trade: Renewable energy transitions under capitalist globalization
- Thomas Patriota, Peasant family farmers: international struggles for political and economic recognition of a global rural labouring class