Expert Commentary
Spectre of Formal American Empire – All Vengeance, No Vision
The specter of a formal American Empire of Might Makes Right—an idea many mistakenly believed long dead—has reemerged with a vengeance after Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025. The reckless and dangerous force driving US power today is its revival of...
America in Crisis: Will there be a peaceful transfer of power?
The United States enters 2024 with a deep sense of foreboding. As Republican primaries loom to find their nominee for the November presidential election, US politics hits new lows. Donald Trump’s CV plumbs new depths as several states are contemplating barring him...
Mobilising Knowledge for Power, to Obscure Where it Lies and How it Works – It’s What American Universities, Foundations and the State, Do
Emily Hauptmann, Foundations and American Political Science: The transformation of a discipline, 1945-1970 (University press of Kansas, 2022) It is almost banal to say that “knowledge is power” and yet, even then, miss the woods for the trees. Most of us tend to think...
“Who Won the Iraq War? Twenty Years On, Iran, China and Russia boosted while US loses ground in the region”
Introduction The twentieth anniversary of American-led aggression in Iraq generated a Great Debate around what was achieved, squandered, and why the US intervened in the first place. This particular anniversary of a crime against peace is especially poignant because...
Poly Crisis or Organic Crisis? The Crisis of the United States and the US-Led World Order
(Lightly edited transcript of an Inaugural Lecture by Professor Inderjeet Parmar, City, University of London, to the students and faculty of the Department of International Relations, PUC Minas, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 13 April 2023) It's a pleasure and an honour to...
One Year of War, More to Come: Rooted in Global Crisis of Imperial Power Politics
One year on, the ‘Ukraine war’ – aka Russia’s illegal aggression amid a strategy of US/NATO expansionism, over a state that voluntarily relinquished its weapons of mass destruction moving closer to the EU and NATO - shows few if any signs of abating. It has featured...
Endless War, Elite Propaganda, and Mass Fear: Drivers of American Imperial Power
Book Review: Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall, Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror (Stanford University Press, 2021)The veteran national security reporter Seymour Hersh recently published an article strongly indicating...
Fascism and Far Right Extremism is Mainstream, Systemic, and Protected by Establishment Liberals
The recent attack by supporters of Jair Bolsonaro on Brazil’s legislative, presidential and supreme court buildings, while city police largely looked on, has been analysed as the work of Bolsonaro alone, as a threat that’s largely been dealt with by the authorities,...
Colonial Undertones of Western Nonproliferation Discourse about Pakistan
Following the end of World War II, nuclear proliferation was characterized as the biggest security challenge to international peace and security by Western states (predominately the United States). The discourse on nuclear proliferation has several strands, and it...
War in Ukraine and Law of War
During the post-World War II era, states in general, abstained from resorting to the use of violent force in resolving their bilateral disputes. The relative decline of inter-state wars in past seventy-odd years stands out as one marker of adherence of states to this...