The April 21, 2005 issue of the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS carried a lead article titled ‘Blood for Oil?’ The paper is attributed to a group of writers and activists – Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts – who identify themselves by the collective name ‘Retort.’ In...

The recent shift from ‘global villageism’ to the ‘new wars’ revealed a deep crisis in heterodox political economy. The popular belief in neoliberal globalization, peace dividends, fiscal conservatism and sound finance that dominated the 1980s and 1990s suddenly collapsed. The early 2000s...

The paper offers a new theoretical framework for linking inflation and accumulation, with the Israeli experience as a case study. The focal point is the process of differential accumulation by the largest core firms. The theory of differential accumulation suggests that the relative power of...

This is the second in a series of two articles looking into the interaction between differential capital accumulation and Middle East “energy conflicts.” Examining the historical record since the late 1960s, we find US policies to have been increasingly consistent with the coinciding...

This paper offers a new approach to the political economy of armament, focusing on the relationship between military spending and differential accumulation in mature capitalist economies. Applied to the “model” case of Israel, our analysis suggests that the militarization of Israel’s...

This paper offers an alternative approach to the repeated occurrence of Middle East “energy conflicts.” Our analysis centres around the process of differential capital accumulation, emphasizing the quest to exceed the “normal rate of return” and to expands one's share in the overall flow...

Over the past century, the institution of capital and the process of its accumulation have been fundamentally transformed. By contrast, the theories that explain this institution and process have remained largely unchanged. The purpose of this paper is to address this mismatch. Using a broad...

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, we identified a new Middle East phenomenon that we called 'energy conflicts' and argued that these conflicts were intimately linked with the global processes of capital accumulation. This paper outlines the theoretical framework we have developed over the...

The unravelling of the Middle-East peace process continues to baffle the pundits. The early optimism of the Oslo peace accord has now turned into despair. Prime minister Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist. The Palestinians have embarked on a new Intifada. And Israel has re-occupied...

This article was commissioned by the French newspaper Le Monde. The newspaper was one of several sponsors of an International Conference on Global Regulation, held at the University of Sussex on May 29-31, 2003, where we presented a plenary paper. As part of its sponsorship, Le Monde agreed to...