Excited to announce our media partnership with the 'Age of Planning?' conference at the @humboldtuni.bsky.social organized by @christophsorg.bsky.social, and with a Future Histories LIVE recording with @iliasalami.bsky.social and Dylan Riley. Find out more: buff.ly/ciCXIxB

A great read

With governments buying stakes in AI and defense contractors, a new political economy is fueling imperialist scrambles abroad, while deepening illiberalism at home. Our essay of the week traces the rise of imperial state capitalism. By @iliasalami.bsky.social in @illsp.bsky.social buff.ly/fJRL9xn

Gorgeous, both form and content

HUGE UPDATE: we halted Amazon's panel at Climate Week. We shut it down so hard that every guest and every speaker had to leave the premises. No one was able to return. Their whole event lasted less time than their warehouse workers' pee break.

I've got a new piece on imperial state capitalism and frontier tech! A prelude to the full lecture coming out soon in the pages of Antipode. @campolis.bsky.social

Illiberalism Studies Program@illsp.bsky.social · 2w ago

New piece! Ilias Alami unpacks the drive toward state ownership in critical sectors today and details its relationship to the reconfiguration of empire. Check it out! @iliasalami.bsky.social @ieres-gwu.bsky.social www.illiberalism.org/imperial-sta...

New piece! Ilias Alami unpacks the drive toward state ownership in critical sectors today and details its relationship to the reconfiguration of empire. Check it out! @iliasalami.bsky.social @ieres-gwu.bsky.social www.illiberalism.org/imperial-sta...

Imperial State Capitalism: Fusing State Ownership with Frontier Tech Power illiberalism.org |

Ilias Alami unpacks the drive towards state ownership in critical sectors today, and details its relationship with the reconfiguration of empire.

illiberalism.org

Excellent stuff

Brilliant sunday reading

Remember when Anthropic were the good guys?

Fulya Apaydin@fulyaapaydin.bsky.social · 3w ago

New levels of dystopia unlocked.

Not sure what people at the Anthropic Institute are smoking, but it must be good stuff. "GDP growth then rises to 15 percent per year, the labor share of income falls from 60 to 45 percent, and nearly one in five cognitive workers is unemployed." www-cdn.anthropic.com/files/4zrzov...

Great piece!

Crystal A. Ennis@crystalennis.bsky.social · 4w ago

What do cheese 🧀, maple syrup 🍁 & the heating planet 🌍 tell us about global capitalism 💰? My short reflection for Developing Economics written during this summer's heatwave across Europe. H/T @eatingpolitics.bsky.social work developingeconomics.org/2026/09/04/p...

Later today!

Ilias Alami@iliasalami.bsky.social · last mo.

Very excited to be delivering the 2026 Antipode RGS-IBG Lecture next week, “Imperial State Capitalism and the Long Arc of History”!

Very excited to be delivering the 2026 Antipode RGS-IBG Lecture next week, “Imperial State Capitalism and the Long Arc of History”!

Antipode@antipodeonline.bsky.social · last mo.

Join us at #RGSIBG26 for the the 2026 Antipode RGS-IBG Lecture, “Imperial State Capitalism and the Long Arc of History”, presented by @iliasalami.bsky.social on Wednesday 2nd September at 4:35pm BST antipodeonline.org/2026/08/26/t... @rgs-ibghe.bsky.social

This stops in 2022. I imagine that we'll see a pretty much vertical line for the years 2022-2026, once these are included in the database.

I thought this piece from two days provided useful context regarding the on-the-ground situation. As @iliasalami.bsky.social recently explained to me, there's a question of how many good jobs this (impressive) late green industrialization path will generate.

Why Morocco’s ‘forgotten’ young are fleeing to Europe

Failure to translate growth into better living standards has driven migration attempts into Spain’s Ceuta enclave

ft.com

Here is my latest on how one particular company ended up dominating our skies: phenomenalworld.org/analysis/orb...

Orbital Enclosure - Phenomenal World

In mid-June, SpaceX went public. The company’s initial public offering share price of $150 quickly crowned Elon Musk the world’s first dollar trillionaire. As the company’s executives rang the Nasdaq ...

phenomenalworld.org

1/9 I am very happy to share a new special issue of the Journal of Economic Policy Reform, which I co-edited with Merve Sancak and Andreas Nölke: “Industrial Policy beyond the Hegemons” which examines how non-hegemonic powers respond to geoeconomic competition.

Finally reading this

Holy f*ck. What a story. "The troubling death represents a new stumble in China’s push to rival the United States as a biotech power." www.science.org/content/arti... h/t @chenchenzhang.net

Exclusive: Death of girl in Chinese gene-editing trial was never made public

Parents want accountability after study went disastrously wrong, Science and Retraction Watch investigation reveals

science.org

Reading today Giovanni Arrighi's 2-part essay "Hegemony unravelling" (published in 2005), which is on the "the terminal crisis of US hegemony" precipitated by the Iraq invasion, is a surreal experience

Great call for paper for a special issue on Crisis and resilience in Latin American politics www.nature.com/collections/...

Crisis and resilience in Latin American politics

This Collection seeks to explore continuity and change in Latin American politics in both historical and contemporary perspectives.

nature.com

Postdoc opportunity in development studies at Cambridge. Apply! www.queens.cam.ac.uk/about-us/vac...

What an extraordinarily wide-ranging conversation between Barnaby Raine and @adamtooze.bsky.social! I strongly recommend opening a bottle of wine and just enjoying the ride. open.spotify.com/show/033MAse... @tribunemagazine.bsky.social

postscript

Podcast · Tribune Magazine · Barnaby Raine hosts postscript, a podcast from Tribune magazine. In a series of reflective conversations, postscript explores the meaning of the left amid the slow death o...

open.spotify.com

Literally cambridge prof lol, but...

Is there a good soul out there willing to share a PDF of the 2026 issue of Socialist Register? socialistregister.com/index.php/sr...

Great stuff!

What does a grain have to do with anti-fascist economics? Everything. Penguin put the whole argument on the UK cover of my book. A thread 🌾

Sunday reading

Another brilliant interview with @alfatau.bsky.social , most certainly one of my favourite thinkers communispress.com/vectors-of-f...

Vectors of Fascism

The fish rots from the head down: A fascism endogenous to the liberal State.

communispress.com