Posts by: Alex DeWaal

In his 1906 Handbook for Small Wars, Colonel Sir Charles Callwell advised his fellow British officers that colonial operations would likely involve confiscating cattle and burning villages, ‘an aspect that may shock the humanitarian.’ He continues:

 The most satisfactory way of bringing such [native] foes to reason is by the rifle and the sward, […]

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Yanis Yaroufakis’s Technofeudalism is a brilliant book. Let me propose an additional chapter and theme: militarism.

Let me suggest that today’s ‘cloudalists’—the owners of internet platforms—are the offspring of America’s techno-military complex and their system of ‘cloud capitalism’ is itself reproducing that permanent war economy.

Yaroufakis’s insight is that capitalism has been captured by […]

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In a paper published today, I frame the crisis in Red Sea Arena as the point of impact of contending war economies. The newly-expanded club of the BRICS, now including Red Sea Arena Middle Powers (RAMPs), are challenging the Pax Americana and its allies, but are also in contest with one another. Intersecting fractures are […]

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A throwback to the 1956 ‘Suez crisis’, when Britain, France and Israel attacked Egypt, which happened at the same time as the USSR invaded Hungary to suppress the democratic movement there.

Lady Violet Bonham Carter, an influential member of Britain’s Liberal Party, wrote in a letter to The Times:

I am one of the millions […]

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The basic charitable impulse is food for the hungry, a bed for the night for the homeless, protection from violence for the vulnerable and scared. For half a century, as the humanitarian international has become bigger, more professional, and more effective, aid givers have also been imbued with a general sense that the world is […]

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In 1910, the same year that the World Peace Foundation was established, the British writer (and later Member of Parliament) Norman Angell published his book, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage.

Angell’s argument is widely mis-stated as a belief that war was impossible in a world […]

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