Theory for a global age: From nativism to neoliberalism and beyond

I

As we approach the third decade of the twenty-first century, climate change, military aggressions, settler colonial projects, resource extraction and dispossessory debt mechanisms – the primary causes of mass expropriation and displacement – remain active across the globe. At the same time, political environments are becoming ever more hostile to persons rendered placeless. Authoritarianism permeates global politics through active and connected projects, both at the formal political level and at the social level, across Turkey, Brazil, India, various European countries, the US and beyond (see Baruah, 2009; Beetar, 2019; Bilgiç, 2018; Sharma, 2019; Sosa, 2019). The renewal of political violence, racialised and ethnicised exclusions, and the generally uncertain fate of democracy under conditions of neoliberal globalisation present deeply troubling aspects of our contemporary politics (Chandhoke, 2015; Narayan, 2016). This is particularly so, as codified, structural and interpersonal forms of racism persist, and are deployed with renewed vigour against migrant populations and internally racialised Others (see Bhambra, 2017; de Noronha, 2019; Narayan, 2017; Shilliam, 2018). As such, the social and political geographies of frontiers and borders and the populations that inhabit, and seek to traverse them come to take on ever greater significance (Nanton, 2017; Nowicka et al., 2019; Turner, 2020).

With this context in mind, our central, collective contribution here can be expressed both in terms of an exploration of the ways in which theory might be compelled to adapt and respond to the present, and also in terms of an exploration of how theory might help us to navigate this tumultuous and historically-informed political epoch. This monograph issue of Current Sociology asks about the role that theory might play, in challenging the historical present, and in creating new horizons of being and thinking (see Bhambra, 2014b; Bhambra et al., 2019). Collectively, we ask: what can theory do for us in this present moment and how might we approach questions of critique and critical agency (Rebughini, 2018)? In what ways can we put theory to use in better articulating the claims of social justice and of movements resistant to the rise of authoritarianism? Further, and equally pressing: in what ways does theory constrain us and lead us away from solutions to the problems of the age?

Relatedly, we may also want to examine the place of the university itself in such endeavours (Bhambra et al., 2018; Holmwood, 2011). If we recognise the university – following John Dewey – as one of the vital repositories of the common learning of communities (see Holmwood, 2011) then we also need to examine how our understandings are transformed – or, perhaps, ought to be transformed – as the communities that constitute universities change (Johnson et al., 2018). Yet, at a global level, the patterns of knowledge production and dissemination remain routinely uniform, from the north to the south (Keim, 2008). This is reproduced in and by patterns of academic publishing. As Collyer sets out, ‘publishing is of central importance to the creation and sustenance of global inequalities in academic knowledge production’ (2018: 69). In this way, the absence of excluded histories, theories and theorists, as much as the presence of long-dominant theories, are curated by academic practices.

II

The practical importance of the concerns set out above seems most stark in the context of the growing political urgency to tackle climate change and the possible trajectories any action might take globally (see Zinda et al., 2018). Contemporary forms of fascism are fractured between the adventurism of Trump and Bolsonaro, and the equally deadly replacement-conspiracy driven eco-fascism which inspired the Christchurch and El Paso massacres in 2019. And yet, without a meaningful commitment to anti-imperial politics, even socialist-branded sketchings of ‘green new deals’ risk reproducing what Max Ajl describes as ‘green social democracy at home [with] militarized maritime and terrestrial borders, and beyond them, resource extraction for domestic clean-tech’ (2018: 4). The difference between genuinely emancipatory futures for all versus sleepwalking into eco-fascism in the name of the threats of climate change mitigation rests upon the cultivation of a meaningful anti-imperial political consciousness which considers any course of action on the environment from the perspective of the Global South (Sealey-Huggins, 2017). With this scenario in mind, social theory attuned to anti-colonial and anti-imperial forms of social justice appears to be more vital than ever in the face of contemporary problems.

This is exemplified in Kathryn Medien’s (2019a, 2019b) recent work which has examined the central role of anti-imperial politics to the formation of European social theory itself; adding to important work excavating and illuminating otherwise broadly disavowed lines of theoretical influence. In tracing the development of Michel Foucault’s analytic of power, Medien argues that his involvement in anti-colonial and anti-imperial movements in Tunisia provided the grounding for his analysis of power’s omnipresence and productivity. While in her examination of Gilles Deleuze’s writings on Palestine, she asks after their effective censure from contemporary Deleuzian thought, suggesting that the ‘lack of attention Deleuze’s writings on Palestine have garnered presents an occasion for us to reconsider the ways that colonial structures of dispossession and erasure permeate contemporary scholarly endeavours’ (2019a: 62). In so doing, Medien challenges the centrality of Europe to European social thought and the attendant provincialisation of theory from the Global South – concerns which are central to the theoretical framing of this monograph issue. Rather, she calls on us to take seriously the ways in which our social theory canon has been constituted through engagements with anti-colonial traditions, which are subsequently disavowed.

In a similar way, taking cues from Sylvia Wynter, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and others, Lisa Tilley (2017) attends closely to social theory in relation to the material world we have inherited and which we continue to reproduce through the political economy of the present. The colonial centuries remade social and ecological orders across the Global South according to the extractive ambitions of European metropoles, setting in motion the plantation and other resource extraction frontiers which continue to expand today (Tilley, 2020). International capital works along old and new extractive tributaries in the global political economy and through the reproduction of racialised orders of land expropriation and labour exploitation at the local scale (see also Tilley and Shilliam, 2018).

Testament to the material afterlives of ‘theory’, this structural context – of concern to many of the contributors to this monograph – continues to destroy ecologies in the name of Lockean ‘improvement’, even as the deadly reality of environmental harm and climate change is long past being deniable. Tilley argues that the prospect of social, economic and environmental justice in our plantation-present depends upon a renewal of meaningfully materially-focused anti-colonial struggles for the contemporary age. As in the example of coordinated plantation rebellions against European planters in Southeast Asia, re-engagements with historical events and struggles which have been ‘ghosted’ from canons (Manchanda and Salem, this issue) may serve to richly expand our contemporary repertoires of theory and praxis.

How might we resolve the tension between these material, historical and theoretical endeavours and, as Gurminder K Bhambra (2016) suggests, work towards undoing the various instances of epistemic disavowal that otherwise constitute our canonical understandings? What can be learnt, for example, from the omission of events such as the Haitian Revolution from our social scientific understandings of the emergence of the modern world? What would the social sciences look like if, instead, we began with the Haitian Revolution, and other such events, as foundational to the world historical narratives that otherwise structure our disciplines? Together with other contributors, Bhambra addresses what is at stake in rethinking, to use Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s (2014) words, the ‘cognitive injustices’ at the heart of our epistemologies and wider understandings. This has perhaps nowhere been more contested than in the very idea of ‘the modern’ and ‘the global’ which has ever more frequently come to replace it.

III

Within the social sciences, understandings of ‘the global’ are often used interchangeably with ‘the modern’ and, at times, the global has come to be substituted for the modern. When this occurs, there is a danger that the histories and historiographies associated with the modern are effaced and the global comes to be presented simply as a descriptive frame within which our current social and political realities are to be contextualised (see Bhambra, 2014a). That is, if the histories that produced the modern – the colonial modern (see Bhabha, 1994; Quijano, 2007) – are no longer in question, then there is a very real danger that the frames of ‘global’ analysis are simply naturalised instead of being considered in the context of the histories that gave rise of them. Once the question of ‘history’ is removed from consideration, the global becomes a seemingly simple descriptive space within which different tendencies and processes can be observed (Bhambra, 2011). There is no necessity for coherence across the different analyses and, indeed, the very ambition of coherence is seen to be one of the problems identified in earlier modernist discourses.

The turn to the global, then, both perpetuates the earlier analytical frameworks that structured social and sociological thought, and, by rendering those frameworks invisible, displaces critique of them. By subsuming the analytical to the descriptive, the global is also able to become the space for the free play of narratives and discourses. In this way, ‘the global’ comes to be at one and the same time the continuation of a modernist analytical framework and sympathetic to subsequent turns that seek to move beyond the modern – but without necessarily resolving the tensions that are highlighted by postcolonial and decolonial thought. Such scholarship, over the last few decades, has been integral to the opening out and questioning of the assumptions of the dominant discourses of the humanities and, increasingly, of the social sciences (see, for example, Bhambra, 2007, 2014a; Persaud and Sajed, 2018; Rutazibwa and Shilliam, 2018; Tilley and Shilliam, 2018).

The end of colonialism as an explicit political formation has given rise to claims of postcoloniality and, perhaps ironically, an increased recognition of the role that colonialism played in the formation of the modern world (Sajed and Seidel, 2019). The development of decolonial scholarship points to the work still needed to complete, in Maldonado-Torres’s words, ‘the unfinished project of decolonisation’ (2007: 263). Given that postcolonial and decolonial scholars see global processes to have been in train for at least the last 500 years, the global is not, then, a new phenomenon. As such, this monograph issue asks about the development of theory and theories for a global age that has long been in process; not necessarily theories about a global age understood to be new.

Notwithstanding what can be read as clear theoretical advances in recovering and taking seriously the formations of epistemic and material power endowed by the innovations of the colonial centuries, for practical and political purposes we might hesitate to conceive of this in terms of straightforward linear progress. Right-wing resurgence is not confined to visible movements of street-marching white nationalists, nor to the organised political fields around figures like Trump, Modi, and Bolsonaro. Instead, it permeates all of our social spheres and institutions, including our scholarly domains. In social and institutional contexts which often pivot on liberal ‘civility’ and ‘impartiality’ the balance can be rapidly tipped in favour of the agendas of retrograde agents. Indeed, in the present political context, we are witnessing attempts to reincarnate long-discredited and explicitly racist scholarship including, for example, pseudoscientific accounts of comparative IQ in relation to racialised groups, and demographic studies explicitly concerned with the racial balance of power and white replacement (Holmwood, 2019).

With this in mind, it seems more important than ever to cultivate what Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2012), drawing on Brecht, terms an ‘anticipatory consciousness’ which prepares for the archaic to return through attempts to undermine progressive movements. In Rivera Cusicanqui’s words, the ‘regression or progression, the repetition or overcoming of the past is at play in each conjuncture and is dependent more on our acts than on our words’ (2012: 96). Attentive to those who seek a return to explicit ‘race science’, then, our acts should constitute building movements as much as building archives of theory and praxis – resources both for the present and for anticipated futures.

IV

The contributions featured in this monograph issue re-engage with a range of popular sociological debates, including those around class, debt, migration, capitalism and democracy; but they do so by means of new and original research from a range of global locations and traditions. In the process, the authors consider the ways in which our foundational theoretical understandings of society are implicated in histories of racism and colonial rule. In this sense, the issue takes seriously the histories of empire that have been formative to our present, while at the same time centring intellectual histories and locations that have been marginalised or wholly erased from dominant worldviews.

In the opening article, ‘Capitalized money, austerity and the math of capitalism’, Tim Di Muzio and Richard H Robbins engage with the present-day material context of our debt-based economy – the model for which is theoretically dependent on unceasing economic growth. With such unending growth conditions far from being realised, those who control capital seek to sustain their rates of return through forms of structural adjustment and austerity which transfer shares of wealth from the poorest to the richest in society. Di Muzio and Robbins focus on the ‘math’ of capitalism to explore the continued ‘fetishisation’ of economic growth, the concentration of debt instruments in the hands of a wealthy few, and upwards interest redistribution, in order to argue that inequality and the environmental degradation related to a growth-based economy are reproduced incessantly within a capitalised monetary system. Overall, Di Muzio and Robbins survey the material grounding for the environmental pressures, dispossessions, impoverishment and extremely unjust concentrations of wealth which figure so prominently in the current debates attended to by our other contributors around mobility, citizenship, exclusions, and the rise of far-right politics.

Joan Cocks, in her article, titled ‘Between nativism and displacement: Citizens, strangers, and surplus status in the contemporary age’, begins with a thought experiment which takes us even beyond ‘the global’ we aspire to. Cocks considers three interrelated ‘perplexities’ experienced by an intelligent being contemplating planet Earth from outer space. One is the rapid advance towards ecological and climatic destruction. The second is a distributional system which benefits very few and leaves an expanding majority of the population living in wretched material conditions. The third relates to how a global population so economically interdependent can be so politically divided, and thus how some are able leisurely to cross borders while others are unable to move to fulfil their basic needs without taking on the dangerous status of ‘illegality’. To thread all of this together theoretically, Cocks reflects on the concept of the ‘stranger’ in relation to the production of nativist sentiments in a neoliberal context. Working through the concept of surplus populations, Cocks argues that ‘the defeat of the surplus category requires a collective fight for the right of every human being not merely to survive but also to thrive somewhere on earth’.

In ‘Survival pending revolution: Self-determination in the age of proto-neo-liberal globalization’, John Narayan’s analysis of Huey P Newton’s theorising of transformations in the global political economy in the 1970s provides us with two main, and vital, lessons for the present. Firstly, in contrast with later, de-raced understandings of neoliberalism which remain prominent today, Newton’s theorising of ‘reactionary intercommunalism’ provides an early genealogy of neoliberalism in which the racialised social order it emerges from is properly centred. Secondly, Newton’s writings reveal that the orientation of Black Panther praxis away from armed self-defence and towards survival programmes can be understood as a pragmatic response based on the accurate theorisation of early neoliberal transformations. Ultimately, in today’s context of a pervasive neoliberalism characterised by deeply antagonistic social relations, the pursuit of what Narayan refers to as ‘alternative revolutionary intercommunal institutions’ remains as vital as when these were cooperatively developed by the Black Panther Party back in the 1970s.

Stefan Jonsson’s article, ‘A society which is not: Political emergence and migrant agency’, rethinks the relationship between migration, politics, boundaries and collective protest. In so doing, Jonsson suggests that such a rethinking can help overcome three impasses in social theory. The first is social science analyses of migration that fail to grapple with the deeply political implication of migration. Here, in drawing on Carl Schmitt’s differentiation of ‘politics’ from ‘the political’, Jonsson advocates for analysing migration in the latter category, suggesting that such a framing positions migration as a social ‘force that transforms the political ordering of society’. The second theoretical impasse identified by Jonsson concerns the tendency in dominant strands of European history and sociology to posit ‘colonialism and imperialism as external to Europe’. The third and final impasse concerns the importance of collective resistance, which is often neglected in accounts of migration studies and social and political theory. Weaving these three strands together, Jonsson reflects on the concept of ‘agency’ in relation to the migrant. With this, Jonsson’s research article captures ‘the significance of contemporary protest and resistance for the renewal of a democratic agency that strives to move beyond national and/or imperial frames’.

The article by Robbie Shilliam, entitled ‘Redeeming the “ordinary working class”’, confronts present-day class and welfare relations in the old metropole of Britain directly in relation to histories of colonialism and enslavement. In the context of the Brexit vote to withdraw the UK from European Union membership, a renewed focus on the ‘white working class’ has centred such a grouping as a redeemable political category in political discourse. Shilliam confronts both the mendacity of one-nation conservatism and the exclusions of the British Labour Party’s ‘cooperative spirit’ by mapping out the formative role played by understandings of colonial labour vis-a-vis English labour in the construction of the welfare state. Built into this system are exclusions which work against those deemed insufficiently responsible – the ‘undeserving’ category which has been racialised in relation to various political movements over time. Considering that the consistent historical condition has been that the redemption of the working class in the UK has been contingent upon the exclusion of colonial subjects, Shilliam posits an alternative, and ultimately meaningful, redemption through a universalism cultivated ‘from the ground up, with and through minoritized, immigrant communities, and hand in hand with asylum seekers’.

In ‘Asabiyya – Solidarity in the age of barbarism: An Afro-Arab-Asian alternative’, Magid Shihade elaborates on Ibn Khaldun’s concept of Asabiyya – a form of collective solidarity – as one that may offer the Global South a political roadmap in the face of ongoing imperial aggression, wealth inequalities and settler colonialism. Situated in the historical and present context of imperial and colonial rule in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as the attendant rise of what Shihade terms ‘nativist’ political Islam, the article reminds us that nationalism and neoliberalism are an inappropriate response to the global afterlives of empire, enslavement and colonialism. Rather, in outlining Ibn Khaldun’s notion of Asabiyya, Shihade argues that this ‘new alliance and solidarity based on the common interests and needs of the peoples in the Global South to live without external aggression, intervention, and exploitation’ offers a theoretical framework that can unite the wretched of the earth in our current age.

Finally, in ‘Empire’s h(a)unting grounds: Theorising violence and resistance in Egypt and Afghanistan’, Nivi Manchanda and Sara Salem appeal against distortive forms of empiricism in scholarship on the broader Middle East which erase the productive agency of colonial and anti-colonial projects and reduce the region to representations as a perpetually retrogressive space. Developing work which uses ‘haunting’ as a social theory analytic, the article considers those constitutive historical processes which are rendered ‘missing, silent, and ghostly’ in accounts which suit a particular view of the Middle East as irredeemable. The authors bring together the carefully detailed examples of colonial era crime legislation in Afghanistan and anti-colonial nationalism in Egypt as projects which continue to be productive of present-day realities, but which are evacuated from empiricist forms of scholarship committed to evidencing the ‘endemic defects’ of the region. By engaging haunting as method and by ‘listening to ghosts’, Manchanda and Salem work towards a mode of scholarship in which empirical reality is made sense of through an historically informed and conceptually rich analysis, rather than a mode in which empiricism is operationalised in the service of an unspoken political agenda.

The monograph concludes with a powerful and politically urgent ‘Afterword’ from Neera Chandhoke. She clearly sets out how the political context of our time has been dramatically transformed by the consolidation of right-wing forces globally and asks how we, as academics and scholars, should orient ourselves in the light of these changes. She suggests that we need to recognise how our priorities shift in relation to processes beyond our control and the impact that this has on our scholarly (and political) engagements. In so doing, she asks that in our quest for rights and welfare provisions we not lose sight of those being met with unfreedom. Chandhoke briefly sets out the debates on nationalism that are standard across the social sciences and considers whether we might not have underestimated the power of nationalism to undermine democratic commitments. She ends with an exhortation of the advantage of the philosophical virtue of doubt in that it requires us to think and think again as we move further into this newly configured global age.

V

We return here to our central concern with treating the idea of ‘the global’, not as an empty vessel, but as an analytical framework which is informed by real histories and enriched with as many theoretical layers as the idea of ‘modernity’. The articles curated for this monograph issue make their collective contribution to an archive of theoretical tools for reading ‘the global’ as a complex tapestry of power, bound in many ways by historically produced structures; yet at the same time, one which is rich in terms of its repertoires of solidarity, resistance and alternative forms of world-making. Our contributors take seriously the material constraints of the global which underpin and exacerbate today’s harms of ecology and economy which render life so unbearable for those designated as ‘strangers’ or ‘surplus’ under the twin oppressors of nationalism and racial capitalism in its neoliberal phase. However, they also dare to mark out paths to better social worlds in the process.

As a whole, the contributions here offer us various ways to think through the role and uses of social theory in this global age. We are reminded of the importance of addressing the legacies of colonialism and empire as formative to our present, and we are given conceptual tools – such as ‘haunting’ and ‘reactionary intercommunalism’ – which aid the diagnosis of the ills of the global age. However, we are also reminded that we still have much to learn from the struggles for justice of our past. To this end, the authors here caution against relying on national and class solidarities that are intimately bound up in empire, and offer various communal and transnational methodological and theoretical frameworks with which to theorise justice and resistance – from Asabiyya, to ground-up solidarity among the ‘undeserving’, to ‘survival pending revolution’. Crafting these reparative theoretical apparatuses necessarily challenges where and to whom we look for sociological theory and asks that we stay attuned to continuities and connections with our shared histories.

To think theory for a global age, then, necessitates that we centre what Bhambra (2014a) names as ‘connected sociologies’ in order to help us to navigate this tumultuous and historically-informed political epoch. The challenge for social theory lies not only in this need adequately to diagnose present and past injustices, but also to cultivate meaningful frameworks of political solidarity and resistance that centre those populations who have long borne the brunt of imperial and racial violence. It is only in doing so that we will be able to nurture the kind of consciousness which is necessary to meet the sociological challenges that lie ahead.