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The Rest and the West:Capital and Power in a Multipolar World
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At the heart of the fiercest international conflicts is the struggle for the future of globalization
In the wake of a pandemic that tested economies and societies, geopolitical conflict has taken on a new intensity. The Rest and the West locates the origins of this development in the turbulent dynamics of the capitalist world market. Rather than reducing global conflict to a matter of great power rivalries or the process of economic decoupling, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson investigate the increasing centrality of war to capital operations and to the transformation of capital ism. The goal is to forge a theory of imperialism adequate to a world in which the ‘rest’ no longer provides a putative unity that defines and opposes the ‘West’.
Reviews
What is old and what is new in the world system since the global pandemic? Impatient with pieties and distortions, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson survey the categories used by Left and Right and unfold their own map of the present moment thick with operative spaces, infrastructural power, and a variable geometry of oppositional politics.
Conjunctural analysis has rarely been so urgent or so elusive. In this timely new book, Brett Neilson and Sandro Mezzadra take the full measure of a foundering Western hegemony, while avoiding well-worn narratives of civilizational decline. Amidst all the talk of reshoring and renationalization, they distil a picture of current geopolitical tectonics that is as nuanced as it is lucid.
The Rest and the West by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson sharply captures the world’s emergent war regimes by analyzing a broader militarization of politics and economy rooted in contemporary capitalism's logistics, finance, and infrastructural logic. This is a must-read book to understand the relationship between war and capital and its potential for disruption and emancipatory politics.
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In The Rest and the West, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson extend, enrich, and deepen their programmatic project—to marshal new ways of not just comprehending but engaging the geopolitical dynamics of contemporary capitalism. Expansive and incisive in equal measure, the book works with an expansive conception of extractive, variegated capitalism to explore the fractured but interconnected worlds of infrastructural and financial power, pandemic and war, state transformation and social reproduction … and not together but in combination. A signal achievement.