Co-organized by:
Praksis Journal · Turkish Social Sciences Association · Sosyal Araştırmalar Vakfı (Social Research Foundation, SAV) · Mülkiyeliler Birliği · Eğitim Sen Istanbul Branch No. 6

Since the mid-2010s, East and Southeast Asia have witnessed an unending chain of uneven uprisings against interlocking oppressive processes of racial capitalist accumulation. This new conjuncture has emerged during an interregnum of multipolar competition for global military domination and financial hegemony. It is characterized by counter-revolutions of the global right and authoritarian regimes with muscular ethnocentric aspirations for settler and imperial consolidation. The mobilization of US military allies in the Asia-Pacific to suppress support for Palestinian liberation, the Chinese extraction of frontier resources through infrastructural development, and Russia’s imperial rhetoric in its invasion of Ukraine demonstrate such ongoing geopolitical competition. Other Asian states, even those not situated at the extreme end of the rightwing and authoritarian spectrum, likewise participate as sub-empires in the process of global capital accumulation—violently subsuming in the process their peripheral regions and ethnic minorities for resources and labor. This sub-imperial dynamic is evident in the relationships between Japan and Okinawa, Indonesia and West Papua, Taiwan and the country’s indigenous people, and Myanmar and the Rohingya.

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We now live in a world of genocide and disaster. That we are witnessing the Israeli war machine destroying Gaza and attacking Lebanon while the Earth is crossing one ‘climate-change’ threshold after another suggests that catastrophe is becoming the ‘new normal’ of contemporary capitalism.

Alexey Gusev, Associate Professor, Faculty of History, Lomonosov Moscow State University