In this paper, I advance a theorization of recursive racial cruelty by focusing on the suffering of racialized respondents in the US immigration courts and connecting it to the routine functioning of the US empire and colonial racial capitalism. Immigration courts operate within the US Department of Justice (DOJ), where immigration judges hear the government's removal (deportation) cases against non-citizen residents and adjudicate their right to stay in the US. As the legal avenue for settling questions of deportation and asylum, these courts are often posed as humane and just alternatives to the spectacular public displays of cruelty involving militarized raids, abductions, and expedited deportations (sometimes to third-country prisons) that have characterized Trump's two terms in office. Using ethnographic data from 42 cases in Boston from 2020-2022, which took place during both Trump and Biden's presidential terms, I argue that the immigration courts are in fact a parallel public-facing vehicle and staging ground for racial cruelty for the US empire-state. In the immigration courts, a combination of de jure and de facto practices work daily to reinforce a racialized politics of imperial membership. In the process, it also circulates money out of the hands of racialized respondents and their families, so that eventually profit can be made. Furthermore, the racial cruelty exercised in the immigration courts, is recursive in two ways. For each immigrant respondent, such cruelty recurs and builds in every stage of the court proceedings, from the initial hearing to the adjudication of bond to the final deportation order, and through their everyday experience in proximate institutions such as detention centers. As a result of the ongoing effects of US (and more broadly, Euro-American) imperialism in much of the world, racial cruelty also recurs generationally and sometimes transnationally during immigrant respondents' lifetimes. By advancing a theory of recursive racial cruelty, this article contributes to decolonial theory building and bridges sociological literature on US immigration, race, organizations, empire, and political economy.

ABSTRACT The essay approaches the Anglosphere as a contested discursive formation, whose unity has been sustained by imperial imaginaries and ideological narratives of civilizational continuity. The metaphor rests on historical abstractions obscuring internal differentiation and uneven entanglements, which becomes especially visible in the condition of permacrisis, with its chronic convergence of environmental, political and technological instabilities resistant to teleological resolution. We reflect on the unsettling of these inherited assumptions adopting an archipelagic, relational framework. The case studies expose fractures shaped by colonial extraction, racial capitalism, ecological precarity and uneven vulnerability across multiple scales. Crisis emerges as a relational process reshaping subjectivities, institutions, and narrative forms across time and space. The essay identifies transformations in the episteme of crisis, from rupture to a condition of saturation and chronic exposure to relational adjustment. Addressing contemporary fiction, we demonstrate how narrative form evolves to register and negotiate chronic instability.

This conceptual paper extends Anti-Racism Industrial Complex (ARIC) to U.S. corporate sport, exploring the intricate relationship between racial capitalism and political economy of race. We show how sport organizations employ anti-racism discourses for corporate profitability rather than genuine commitments to social justice, with the ARIC underpinning this strategic commodification. Using conjunctive cultural critique as a method, we examine the seemingly disparate contexts surrounding racial capitalism, racialization, and U.S. multiculturalism in sport. Ultimately, this study calls for a critical re-examination of the sport industry's anti-racism initiatives and urges a deeper understanding of persistent racial inequalities embedded in the USA.

This article explores four crucial historical moments in the emergence of modern human rights, examining the ways in which they relate to themes of police power and fugitivity. Underpinned by critical theories of racial capitalism, it argues that the historically dominant liberal tradition of human rights—exemplified in the writings of John Locke and the politics of the French Revolution—implicates human rights discourse in hierarchical and racialised modalities of police power. Alternatives to this prevailing ‘policed’ discourse of rights are found in the early writings of Karl Marx on wood theft and the practice of marronage during the Haitian Revolution. Drawing on these examples, I posit that we can conceptualise a fugitive model of human rights which challenges global racial capitalism and rights discourses which are tied to police power. This historical exploration of human rights thus speaks to contemporary debates within critical international relations scholarship and modern debates on the abuses of police power.

The rise in reality television docusoaps featuring affluent Asian Americans builds from longstanding assumptions of Asian American economic prosperity, capitalizing on the success of the 2018 feature film Crazy Rich Asians . Yet the genre of docusoaps emphasizes melodramatic and messy emotional scenarios, allowing Asian American casts to reveal an array of new narratives—including around personal and familial failures. Through a textual analysis of Bling Empire and House of Ho as exemplars of this format, this article explores how narratives of failure within Asian American affluence media can disrupt conventional views of the Asian immigrant family and undermine the logics of racial capitalism.

ABSTRACT In a time of declining belief in the American dream (the U.S.-based meritocratic ethos that hard work results in socioeconomic mobility), this article asks how people are reacting to the concept. Drawing on interviews with 65 respondents in Oregon, this article demonstrates that critiques of the American dream as a tool of settler colonialism and racial capitalism serve as a springboard for transforming it. We argue that respondents endeavor to cultivate belonging in the context of racial, class, cis-heteropatriarchal and settler-colonial hierarchies by reimagining the American dream in three ways: (a) personalizing it to prioritize happiness and wellbeing beyond material gain, (b) collectivizing it to emphasize care, connection, and multigenerational family relations and (c) advancing a decolonial and racially-, class-, and culturally-inclusive vision that rejects oppressive systems. Respondents reframe the American dream from an exclusionary ideal into one that emphasizes individualized self-expression, connection to a collective and a more inclusive future.

ABSTRACT This paper identifies a distinctive “credential reversal” among British Muslims, whereby higher educational attainment erodes institutional trust, inverting standard meritocratic patterns. Analysing UK European Social Survey data (2002–2023), multi-level models demonstrate this penalty is specific to Muslims and not observed among the White British majority or aggregated non-Muslim minorities. The findings reject cumulative disadvantage theory: reversal operates as an immediate entry shock upon encountering gatekeeping structures in higher education and professional labour markets. This produces “alienated competence”: sharp declines in political efficacy and vertical state trust alongside intact horizontal interpersonal trust. Mediation analysis reveals resilient integration: despite high discrimination rates, Muslims maintain substantial baseline democratic faith, particularly among UK-born women, who exhibit strategically engaged realism offsetting deep generational alienation among men. Extending the ethnic penalty framework into the political domain, we theorise this as blocked credentialism within racial capitalism, where educational achievement triggers heightened state scrutiny rather than institutional mobility.

ABSTRACT This article aims to critically assess the perpetuation of racism and colonialism in university education, by developing a case study in international relation (IR) programmes. With a perspective rooted in a postcolonial analysis of colonial legacies in the IR system and a decolonial approach of pedagogy, I explore how IRs are taught in Belgium. I employ an interpretive approach using quantitative and qualitative methods, based on a content analysis of programmes and course materials. Findings suggest that both a decolonial approach of the discipline (decolonize the curriculum) and a decolonial approach of the classroom (decolonize pedagogy) are necessary. The commitment to creating an anti-racist space within the university necessarily leads us to go beyond the critical approach of the curriculum to develop a pedagogical approach challenging racial hierarchies inside the classroom itself. However, this commitment is challenged by the institutional settings of the university, an institution embedded in racial capitalism.

ABSTRACT Scholarship on racialisation and racial capitalism shows how racial logics organise capital accumulation and sovereign power. Yet applying these analytics to postcolonial contexts – where social difference goes by other names, and states and majorities carry their own histories of racial domination – reveals their limits. This article rethinks both concepts through a study of sovereign violence against Baloch populations in Pakistan. Racialisation and racial capitalism unsettle dominant accounts that frame this violence as ethnic conflict, security failure, geopolitics, or human rights violations. Instead, they situate these practices within historically produced racialised hierarchies tied to global accumulation, exposing how Euro-American assumptions obscure race-making outside the metropole. Postcolonial states are not only racialised; they also enact violent hierarchies. This double racialisation must be theorised conjuncturally, not separately. An incomplete, externally disciplined sovereignty positions the postcolony as a mediator of global capital in sites of unrealised accumulation, unleashing state violence. This demands an account of multi-scalar racial regimes that include racialised sovereigns and the forms of domination they enable – a rethinking crucial for antiracist internationalism.

Abstract Communication studies ignore colonial policing in racial capitalism. The oversight continues seven years after #CommunicationSoWhite studies called for needed inquiry into colonization and racialization, five years after the January 6, 2021 coup attempt by MAGA militia and mobs, and as federal police build new historic infrastructures of racial subordination. I address these gaps and communication studies’ marginalization of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, which inspires a methodological sensibility illuminating policing as a discursive and material force necessary to create racial capitalism. However, the central contributions of the article are case studies of settler colonial revolt, the Baconites and the Black Boys, which offer a framework for understanding the development of racial capitalism through police practice. Settler-policing, I find, was a form of work and performance that divided White settlerness from Indigeneity and Blackness as it produced racialized systems of land control, economy, and the state.

This paper intervenes in contemporary sociological debates over the relationship between race and class by excavating the early writings of Michael Burawoy. Against the prevailing polarization between twin absolutist models in which either racism or capitalism alone possesses causal force, we argue that Burawoy articulates a third position-one that grants relative autonomy to both racism and capitalism while rejecting their causal reduction to one another. Drawing on Burawoy's empirical work in southern Africa from the 1970s and early 1980s, we show how he theorized race and class not as discrete variables, but as articulated through historically specific configurations of labor, state policy, and political struggle. Probing the limits of his formulations-particularly his leanings toward economic determinism and inattention to racial subjectivity-we do what Burawoy himself always advocated: we reconstruct his approach. We do this by way of issuing three key injunctions drawn from, but going beyond, his work: (1) interrogate rather than assume the coherence of race and class categories; (2) treat racism as a structured contingency embedded within capitalist social relations; and (3) actively align anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggles, moving from logic to strategy. In doing so, we argue that Burawoy offers a distinctively Marxist perspective that does not subordinate race to class, but rather insists upon their mutual articulation. This third position opens the door to a historically situated theory of racial capitalism and a more strategic approach to political struggle.

This article excavates “Afro-Asian convergences” as ecological practices of survival forged in conditions of racial capitalism, caste hierarchy, climate precarity, and imperial violence. Rather than centering formal political alliances alone, it traces how African-descended and Asian communities have historically cultivated solidarities rooted in sustaining life—communal, interspecies, and planetary life—often outside official archives. Drawing on Black feminist geographies, decolonial thought, and the work of Sylvia Wynter and Paul Gilroy, the article conceptualizes solidarity as an ecological necessity rather than a purely ideological stance. Through three interlinked sites, the analysis moves across temporal and geographic scales. First, it examines the Siddi communities of India as an instance of embedded Afro-Asian convergence, where African-descended peoples forged marronage ecologies within forested margins of caste society. Second, it explores contemporary Afro-Asian labor encounters in the Gulf states, where African and South Asian migrant workers develop pragmatic solidarities of survival under extreme heat, wage theft, and climate crisis. Third, it turns to cultural and affective circulations—music, art, devotional practice, and diasporic imagination—as mycelial networks that sustain Afro-Asian ethical friendship across oceans. Across these cases, the article argues that solidarity emerges not only from declared political alignment but from shared vulnerability and cohabitation within hostile environments. By reframing Afro-Asian histories through ecological interdependence, it illuminates forgotten genealogies of coalition and offers a planetary vision of care grounded in material survival, difference, and mutual responsibility.

This article examines the aftermath of the 2025 Eaton Fire in Altadena, California, a historically Black, unincorporated community facing wildfire destruction, displacement pressures, and speculative redevelopment. Drawing on analysis of news reportage, visual culture, Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction, and local community organizing, I argue that wildfire in Altadena cannot be understood as a singular environmental event but as part of a longer racial-spatial process shaped by structural abandonment, racial capitalism, and uneven vulnerability. At the same time, the article shows how residents mobilize memory, art, refusal, and collective care to resist disaster-driven dispossession and imagine alternative futures of recovery. Focusing on Sunny Mills’s tintype photography and local postfire organizing, I demonstrate how speculative and creative practices function as geographic knowledge, enabling communities to narrate loss while asserting claims to land, belonging, and return. This article argues that the work of writer Octavia Butler, who hails from Altadena, is not just fiction, but a theory of speculative justice and futures. The article contributes to Black geographies and environmental justice scholarship by theorizing speculative world-building as a method for understanding disaster afterlives and for envisioning just recovery beyond technocratic resilience frameworks.

ABSTRACT This is the introduction to the symposium on Inés Valdez’s Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism, providing a brief summary of her book’s main contributions to the theory of racial capitalism. The book explores how the political struggles to establish popular sovereignty in contexts of empire and capitalist development, especially in the Anglo-European centres of power, became infused with racial capitalist logics. The introduction concludes with a brief summary of the avenues of critique posed in the symposium commentaries.

ABSTRACT Recent work in political theory has shown that republican and democratic freedom has often depended on settler colonialism, empire, and racial domination, raising the question whether collective self-rule is structurally entwined with unfreedom. Valdez’s Democracy and Empire addresses a major lacuna in this literature: the absence of capitalism. Valdez rightly insists that an adequate account of the relationship between freedom and empire requires a theory of capitalism. This paper critically examines how Valdez mobilizes the concept of racial capitalism and suggests avenues for future research.

Global heating and environmental degradation are pushing temperatures and air and water quality towards extremes that disrupt teaching and learning and put children and teachers at risk of premature death. We draw on the accounts of teachers in public schools of Punjab, Pakistan, to show how classrooms concentrate and intensify these effects. Using concepts from political ecology, racial capitalism, post-comfort architecture, and other theories, we track the flow of heat through materially heterogeneous networks of electric grids, windows, air, and teachers’ and students’ bodies. We problematize the taken-for-grantedness of comfort in educational theory. We look at how heat extends bodies beyond the skin through breath, sweat, and smells, and argue that such relational embodiments are central to understanding schooling. The article is both a case study of educational heatscapes and an example of a provisional framework for seeing energy, heat, breath, and embodiment as central to educational processes.

ABSTRACT This essay reads Democracy and Empire as an intervention into contemporary debates regarding the fate of the Western left in the age of neoliberalism. The left often explains (figures like) Trump by pointing out that the ravages of neoliberalism – weakening of the welfare state, stagnating social mobility, concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands – have made it easy to mobilize white working-class voters by scapegoating racialized others. Hillary Clinton infamously dismissed these voters as deplorables; it has since become more popular to try to understand their anger. Neither approach is sufficient without further specification. What is lost in the contours of this debate is that the racism called forth by the extreme right is not the resurgence of an obsolete force but simply the newest expression of an excessive attachment to wealth that defined even the apparent golden age of post-war welfare capitalism. A failure to generate a truly emancipatory, pluralistic democratic imaginary has led the left to fall into its own ‘make America great again’ narrative in its romanticization of this ‘golden age.’ Without a sufficient political-economic analysis of the conditions of possibility of wealth and an explicit commitment to anti-imperial sovereignty, the left risks reproducing – though disavowing – regimes of racialized labour exploitation. This raises the question of possibility and strategy: in a polity flanked by a left complicit in, a right indifferent to, and an extreme right actively pursuing injustice, can the way forward pass through a commitment to an imagined, desirable, radical, but improbable alternative?

ABSTRACT The assisted reproductive technology (ART) industry, along with national biopolitical agendas, have contributed to a reconfiguring of the historical entanglements of race and reproduction. In this article, we interrogate this phenomenon by exploring the practice of gestational surrogacy through the lens of racial capitalism. Focusing on surrogates in India and intended parents in Sweden — parties that represent opposite nodes in the “global fertility chain” — we aim to contribute to the understanding of racial capitalism as it articulates in the present, by including biological (in addition to social) reproduction. Our analysis builds on previous research on India and Sweden, including our own ethnographic work on Indian surrogacy. We depart from observations of how policies and discourses of mobility and national belonging reflect hierarchical relations to socially valued reproduction, linked to gender, race, caste, class and migration status. While the reproduction of some families is privileged through cross border mobility for access to ARTs and transnational adoption, and in-migration of reproductive workers, reproduction among other families is denounced in public discourse. Women who are discouraged from reproducing are at the same time made “bio-available” through processes of dispossession, and engaged as bio- and reproductive labourers upholding the reproductive needs of more privileged groups.

ABSTRACT Security Assistance (SA) – training and equipping another state’s security forces has become the dominant form of external intervention in the Mediterranean. Scholars have reflected upon trends such as reinforcing repression or aggravating sectarian tensions as the ‘unintended consequences’ of otherwise ‘well-meaning’ interventions. However, this fails to grapple with the incoherency of training and equipping the apparatuses of coercive state power as a means to achieve peace. Rather, by adopting an approach which explores SA’s entanglements with economic interventions in post-2011 Tunisia, I show the 2015 security ‘crisis’ was exploited by Tunisian political elites to reinforce their authoritarian neoliberal governance while also serving to deepen Tunisia’s dependent and peripheral position within the global economy. Thus, this case shows that SA is intrinsically linked with economic forms of intervention and thus must be understood as part of global, interconnected mechanisms of coercion and control designed to insulate capitalist accumulation from contestation. Furthemore, through its exploration of SA this article makes a theoretical contribution to critical IPE debates providing a thorough theorisation of the relationship between authoritarian neoliberal state strategies and global racial capitalism.

Drawing on long-term fieldwork with two generations of Black migrant men, including former mineworkers and contemporary informal traders, across the Mozambique-South Africa corridor, this paper traces the interplay between racial capitalism and masculinity. Under the colonial–apartheid regime, coerced migration and compound labour shaped masculinities centred on endurance and breadwinning. In the neoliberal era, however, this drive for self-worth has been reframed as entrepreneurial risk, mobility and consumption. In both regimes, masculinity is not merely a by-product of labour; it is also used to reproduce accumulation under conditions of inequality. Coercion and endurance gave way to desires for autonomy and success, channelling men’s aspirations into circuits of value extraction. Expanding upon Connell’s notion of transnational elite business masculinity, this paper introduces the concept of subaltern business masculinities to understand entrepreneurial ‘self-making’ within the margins of capitalist economies. Inspired by Gramsci’s interpretation of subaltern groups, this study highlights that subordination and exclusion are not opposite to hegemony, but rather the conditions for its reproduction. These masculinities are shaped by the tension between a desire for autonomy and conditions of structural precarity. Excluded from the privileges of hegemonic power, subaltern entrepreneurs embody Foucault’s description of the neoliberal ‘entrepreneur of the self’. Masculinity becomes an aspirational formation, with agency acting as a form of self-governance that simultaneously resists and perpetuates domination, thereby sustaining the racial capitalist order. Offering a Southern African perspective, this paper repositions masculinity as a formation of racial capitalist governance, contributing to broader debates on gender, race and postcolonial capitalism.