New wars, the age of risk, and the future of international relations

Abstract

Drawing heavily on the work of Robert Cox and Manuel Castells, Duffield argues that the contemporary phase of capitalism is characterized by a radically different dynamic. Specifically, he argues that by the 1970s the historical process of seemingly unstoppable capitalist penetration and expansion had come to an end. In its place, a new dynamic of capitalist consolidation emerged – a dynamic characterized both by a deepening and thickening of market relations and associated networks within the core regionalized systems of the global political economy (the “North”) and by the increasing exclusion and disarticulation from the new “global” economy of those areas outside of the core (the “South”). This is not to suggest, Duffield emphasizes, that as a result of this world-historic rupture the South was somehow completely severed from what he terms the “liberal world order.” Rather, it is to make the point that over the past 30 or 40 years, the South has been subject to a complex process of simultaneous dis-and re-articulation to the capitalist core. On the one hand, it has been increasingly excluded from the “dominant networks of the conventional global informational economy”; on the other, it has been simultaneously “reintegrated . . . into the liberal world system through the spread and deepening of all types of parallel and shadow trans-border activity.”5