Crisis, ISIS, Synthesis: Where is Libya Going?

Just as the pace of subjecting Libya to a new phase of international discipline quickens, the elites of the small club of recolonizing powers that nominate themselves “the international community” have offered painfully little when it comes to explaining Libyan dynamics. The suggestion is that, with a new “unity government,” Libya can acquire “stability,” especially […]

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The Shape of Things to Come in Libya (Part 2 of 2)

A New World Recolonization Hillary Rodham Clinton, US Secretary of State, March 20, 2011, to Jeffrey D. Feltman: “Can we get a statement from the Libyan opposition…w [with] thx [thanks] for helping them and request for their Arab brothers to help as well?” RT, December 25, 2015: “ ‘Thanks for destroying our country’: Angry Libyans […]

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US Anthropology is Imperial, not Universal

Part Two of: “Canadian Anthropology or Cultural Imperialism?” Read Part One “today numerous topics directly issuing from the intellectual confrontations relating to the social particularity of American society and of its universities have been imposed, in apparently de-historicized form, upon the whole planet. These commonplaces, in the Aristotelian sense of notions or theses with which […]

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2015: Just Another Year for Empire

This year saw so little published on this site, that presenting our “top 10 articles” would nearly exhaust everything we produced. Instead, we decided to produce a list of our top recommended online articles for the year, as written by others. First, however, the big book publication of the year has to be Canada in […]

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Bagram Santa

Easily lending themselves to multiple forms of misunderstanding, the Pentagon nevertheless regularly produces images of military personnel dressed as Santa Claus. This too is a pattern, minor in terms of the number of such photographs, but still a recurring feature. The images in this third and final photo essay of this series, come out of […]

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The Babysitter

Big Chief, Big Daddy, Big Babysitter to the World If “winning hearts and minds” is at the top of your global campaign agenda for strategic communication, then you need to insert yourself into some of the most intimate, domestic, and familial places of restive, hungry, and increasingly angry populations. Getting all domestic is what the […]

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BDS, the AAA, and Academic Imperialism

We Disagree to Agree Support for a particular cause can come from numerous sources and points of view, each representing different interests. Similarly, people can arrive at the site of a demonstration, united in protest against an injustice, having arrived there from many different routes (whether the routes are understood in terms of physical transportation, […]

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The Dismal “Physics” of Blowback and Overstretch

Countering Scientism with Scientism Another sort of “physics” has emerged, right from within the same establishment of military and political institutions that produced “force multipliers”. If this other physics has attained the prominence that it has, such that it now has a foothold in academia and is a firm part of popular discourse in the […]

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Military Capitalism

Security for US Capitalists: The State Department and its Global Partners Very much in line in with the idea of “connected capitalism,” the US State Department created the office of advisor for global partnerships, a Senate-confirmed position (Stavridis & Farkas, 2012, p. 17; see also DoS, 2015, 2015/3/12). The Secretary of State’s Office of Global […]

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Connected Capitalism?

“The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist—McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps”. (Friedman, 1999/3/28) With keenly supportive interest from […]

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Empire’s “Mimic Men”

Imperialism by Invitation or Imitation? US efforts in remaking the international system according to an image reflecting the US are not usually in complete vain since the track has already has already been cut. To continue with the analogy, US policy planners and military analysts are concerned about widening and then paving the track so […]

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Force Multipliers and Stealth Imperialism

The force multiplier mechanism is not just something envisioned in military writing, but is instead a cornerstone of US intervention, both overt and covert. The CIA uses the term “disruption” when referring to the covert support of allied agencies who aid the CIA in the capture of so-called “terrorists”—collaborating security forces in other countries then […]

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Force Multipliers and Cuba

Much of what appears as “novel” thinking in US imperial strategies, masks deeper historical foundations. Numerous authors have already explained how Latin America and the Caribbean, from the early 1800s onward, have served as “laboratories” for incubating and developing strategies of destabilization, intervention, occupation, and counterinsurgency. More recently, counterinsurgency was being sold as a new […]

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