The Rest and the West: Capital and Power in a Multipolar World

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 capitalism. 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.”

Sandro Mezzadra is professor of political theory at the Department of the Arts, University of Bologna, and adjunct research fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. His work centers on the relations among globalization, migration and political processes, on contemporary capitalism, as well as on postcolonial theory and criticism. He is a participant in ‘post-workerist’ debates and one of the founders of the website Euronomade. Mezzadra has published widely in the Italian, English, German and Spanish languages. His latest book in English is In the Marxian Workshops: Producing Subjects (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

Brett Neilson is professor and deputy director at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. In the last decade, his work has centered on issues of migration, borders, and globalization, logistics and digitalization, contemporary capitalism, geopolitics, and automation. Apart from writings with Sandro Mezzadra, he has published many articles and books, including Free Trade in the Bermuda Triangle … and Other Tales of Counterglobalization (Minnesota, 2004). His writings have been translated into sixteen languages: Italian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Slovenian, Turkish, Arabic, Polish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.