Kanishka Jayasuriya

This paper seeks to analyse the crucial mineral agreement signed by President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese within the context of the broader process of capitalist transformation and geopolitical rivalry. We seek to go beyond state-centric arguments about geoeconomic statecraft that merely reflect official pronouncements to situate the agreement in terms of the framework of militarised neoliberalism. We argue that, what we call the technology, mining, energy complex, is being constituted within new security cum economic institutions and arrangements, and that the reconstitution of state and capital is at the heart of the critical mineral agreement.

Indonesia’s success in building democratic institutions and sustaining economic growth has been punctured by the recent widespread protests in August 2025. Much ink has been spilled over the intra-elite conflicts and institutional dysfunction that have sparked the protests. Yet, little is understood: why did it take this form? Why are economic issues so prominent at this point of time despite the fact that income inequality has dramatically increased in the past few years? This essay seeks to better understand the root of the protest, which is linked to the crisis-ridden nature of the neoliberalisation process driven by a shifting geopolitical economy that has gradually increased levels of political disincorporation and normalised the authoritarian turn. We argue that it is precisely the authoritarian and coercive shift in state institutions and the failure of the political management of disincorporated classes of labour that provide the structural context for the Indonesian protests. Using the framework of authoritarian statism we argue that Indonesia exemplified an intensified state control over socio-economic life – with ostensible democratic institutions, that serves to exclude subordinate groups from formal and informal political channels. It is the failures of these mediating institutions that fuel protests and provoke an even more intense authoritarian reaction.

Jamie Doucette’s The Postdevelopmental State: Dilemmas of Economic Democratization in Contemporary South Korea is an outstanding account of democratic politics and the “post-development state” in South Korea. It takes up several issues that have broader relevance to those working on issues of capitalist and democratic crisis, including inequality, the failure of transformative progressive projects, and a deepening political crisis. The review essay argues that the crisis of the post-developmental state is the contradiction between capital accumulation and social reproduction that leads to growing unrest and an emerging form of authoritarian statism. This is at the heart of the democratic crisis in Korea.

The consensus on industry policy, state intervention and free trade that have been so central to the neoliberal international order of the past three decades has been fundamentally transformed over the past few years. The Biden administration has coined the term ‘New Washington Consensus’ to describe these transformations in the global political and economic order. The nub of our argument is that rather than being the start of ‘deglobalisation’, or a turn away from neoliberalism, it represents the emergence of a form of militarised neoliberalism that repurposes and reorganises security institutions and alliances to enable or facilitate global economic accumulation by states such as the United States and China, such that it leads to new forms of regulatory geographies. We contest the idea that this means a shift back towards more statist forms of development. State activism is an important dimension of the new conjuncture, but we see this as the emergence of a different and more militarised neoliberalism. It is not about disconnecting but reconnecting the global economy in a way that favours certain forms of social forces and interests.

Following the 1989 unified higher education reforms, the Australian academic research system was built upon the notion of depoliticisation (i.e., keeping the political character of decision at one remove from governance) to govern the contradiction between research credibility and governmental economic priorities. The article argues that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the tension between independent research and governmental economic priorities. The pandemic, also, weakened university autonomy via the closure of the national border, reducing overseas student fees, a significant source of research funding. The article maintains that the conservative Morrison government used the opportunity to politicise research around commercialisation and national sovereignty. The argument being that the pandemic exposed Australia’s research and development (R&D) dependence and with it the question of industrial sovereignty, prompting the government to couple academic research to industry policy. Secondly, the pandemic reinforced the conservative government’s aim to concentrate research in selected commercial areas and to exert this priority on to the research funding agency, the Australian Research Council (ARC). Lastly, the article contends that the COVID pandemic, originating in Wuhan, intensified the Morrison government’s geopolitical concerns over China, and this disquiet flowed into research policy, which problematised research collaboration with Chinese researchers.

This review essay examines two recent volumes on the clash between the USA and China: Clash of Empires by Hung (2022) and Trade Wars are Class Wars by Klein and Pettis (2020). These volumes make a significant contribution to our understanding of the current strategic competition between the US and China. They have the virtue of moving beyond the sterile international relations perspectives and locating these conflicts within the broader structure of capitalist transformation. The framework of inter-imperial conflict is found useful in understanding the conflict between the USA and China. However, a serious lacuna of these approaches is their economism which neglects the political effects of emerging inter-imperial rivalry or modes of geo-capitalist engagement. In particular, this essay argues that the key effects are found in the transformation of the political forms of the state that have enabled the rise of radical right-wing forces and new forms of authoritarian rule. In this new geo-capitalist era, there is likely to be a reassertion of the national state in various new or post-neoliberal guises but such forms are likely to take on the characteristic of deeply coercive authoritarian statism or even post fascism.

The term polycrisis has recently gained much interest in academia and policy-making circles as a perspective to understand the nature of ‘overlapping emergencies’ – geopolitical, ecological, pandemics and economic – that are disrupting policy and politics in the Global North and South. How do we understand the nature of these new forms of crisis? This provocation argues that polycrisis, while a good descriptive term for the overlapping emergencies that characterise the current conjecture, should be analysed in terms of the larger crisis of capitalist social reproduction. The polycrisis needs to be understood as a political crisis that arises from a contradiction between social reproduction and the crisis of capital accumulation. It leads to increasing authoritarian statist forms as well as the growing resistance and dissent that is a feature of the broken politics of time and distinguishes the multiple intersecting crises of the 21st century.

An alternative title for this book could be “From Frankfurt to Beijing: Deliberation and Democracy.” This is a bit tongue in cheek but underlines the fact that this book represents a new research program on the use of deliberative institutions and practices which is some distance from the original normative agenda of the Frankfurt School. This is a research agenda on actually existing deliberative institutions in democratic and authoritarian states such as China. There is a focus here on the use of deliberative polling and institutional experiments such as citizen assemblies in helping to incorporate expertise and build legitimation to solve policy problems...

The study and practice of Australian International Relations requires a geopolitical economy agenda so that some of the key political and strategic challenges we face can be adequately understood and theorised. This includes an understanding of new forms of geopolitical contests that are reconstituting the boundaries between economic and security domains. The understanding of these security and political challenges in Australian International Relations is tethered to a terminology such as containment borrowed from the cold war conceptual arsenal. It has driven the government research agenda to security and strategic issues. Such government agendas have a deeply problematic influence—not the least of which are through research funding policies on academic research in International Relations. A comprehensive understanding of these new modes of geopolitical contestation requires an examination of the interactive relationship between geopolitical and capitalist transformations. In order to understand transformations in the global capitalist economy and the emergence of new modes of geopolitics, we require a geopolitical economy research agenda. This paper proposes a framework of uneven and combined development (UCD) as one useful framework to understand the nature of geopolitical contests in the early twenty first century.

Policy advice in earlier times with respect to the linkage between integration and security was based on a positive effect from the former to the latter. Subsequent improvements in security would also lower the impediments to integration that might otherwise be present. Since the circle was a virtuous one, then policy advice on integration could rest on its positive consequences for security. Benefits of further integration if anything would be understated. Different ways of thinking about the relationship of trade to security are presented. The complicating factors which have not been sufficiently studied are related to domestic political processes. This chapter highlights the reciprocal role of geopolitical relations and global economic relations in shaping the interests of domestic social groups in relation to strategies of trade and regional integration. These issues have been neglected by much of the existing literature on regional integration and the economics-security nexus. Economic relations and security relations are always linked through their mediation by domestic social groups. This linkage is traced through the evolution of institutions in East Asia. More recently, there has been the appearance of the emergence of competing regional regulatory and infrastructure projects. This very much complicates the advance of integration in the region in future.