Alexander Stoffel’s Eros and Empire offers a historical-materialist account of why movements for sexual freedom in the United States emerged when they did, how they understood their place in the international political economy, and which dominant figure of “national subjectivity” they were contradicting. Applying its method to the present, this essay asks what figure succeeds the “Fordist consumer“and the “neoliberal child” as the anchor of national subjectivity. By doing so, it shows that Stoffel’s work is a valuable tool for understanding how “culture wars”, imperialism and the international political economy interrelate.
This contribution seeks to dialogue with SylviaWinter’s work assuming quilombist formations such as African-diasporiccommunities – favelas and morros - in general and Morro doSalgueiro in particular as its space of enunciation. Salgueiro community can beregarded a historical platform for the (re)creation of African-diasporic modesof living and being in nature. Such geo-historical, cultural and politicalplatform, which took shape out of the very first plots that sheltered the Africanfreedom fighters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so weargue, harbors an extensive inventory of autonomist cultural practices that notonly challenge the rationale and the social and political imaginaries of theplantation system, but, most crucially, has also proven to be valuableresources for liberation of the Black communities of the African Diaspora. Wecontend that the liberatory potential embodied in such vast cultural repertoire,however, may hinge on the capacity of members of communities like Salgueiro tocollectively respond to all sorts of expropriating assaults by plantation heirsand the multiple white supremacist institutions that protect those enslavers’heirs and carry on their cultural-political-military agenda. Salgueiro andother African-descendent inhabitants will need to fashion these liberatorypotentials in institutional ways to best respond to the life-and-death challenges currently facing these communities.
Professional sports leagues in the United States are multibillion-dollar enterprises that face diverse and evolving security threats. Although these organizations invest significant resources into security intelligence, academic research on this phenomenon remains sparse. This paper explores security intelligence within these leagues, focusing on efforts to mitigate risks, enhance decision making, and support operational security. Using open-source data, we benchmark capabilities across these leagues, with particular attention to their employment of the intelligence cycle and collaboration with external entities. Our findings indicate that 80
Russia's all-out war against Ukraine has exposed the persistence of imperial grammar beneath the surface of the post-Cold War world order, rendering visible dynamics that existing frameworks have struggled to name. Engaging with Svitlana Biedarieva's Ambicoloniality and War as a springboard, this contribution maps the mutual ignorances, historic frustrations, and tokenistic appropriations that have shaped post- and decolonial studies, and argues for the untapped potential of Eastern European cases to expand and refine the field. It proposes ambicoloniality as a paradigmatic arc for emerging post-Soviet decolonial studies at the nexus of area studies and international relations. Three broader lessons follow: that decolonization must go hand in hand with de-imperialization, requiring shadow work - the integration of one's part in imperial projects; that imperial/colonial difference is constructed through intersecting ethnic, social, and gendered hierarchies; and that Ukraine as a method offers a generative lens for rethinking Europe from its internal peripheries.
Subsistence struggles, whether as social movements or in the form of less organized expressions have highlighted the importance of plants and food, and of human-plant interactions more broadly for the study of politics. In this essay, we are interested in the meanings and forms of decolonization when explored in relation to plants by way of a conversation with Sylvia Wynter’s 1971 essay, “Novel and History: Plot and Plantation”. Wynter not only situates plants within a longer history of struggles for political and economic freedom, but also grapples with the material and imaginative possibilities afforded by plants, as well as the ambivalences, conflicts and challenges engendered by such liberatory enactments. Wynter’s provocations have been illuminating for us in our work on the afterlives of apartheid among small-scale growers in the rural settings of KwaZulu-Natal. Her work has broadened our understanding of the potential of plants and foodways to repair the wounds of racialized modes of displanting and how such utilizations escape the colonial logic altogether.
