With and Beyond the West: Multipolarity, War Regimes and Global Struggles – An Interview with Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson

Interview

Maheswaran: I would like to begin the conversation with the title of the book, which I find very pertinent and timely. Your book’s title deliberately inverts Stuart Hall’s famous formulation “The West and the Rest.” What was the thinking behind that choice? And why has the concept of multipolarity become so central to your work?

Mezzadra: I think it is important to emphasise that for us, the reference to Stuart Hall is foundational, precisely because it cautions us against the risk to simply flip the binary: On the one hand, the title takes stock of the powerful shift in the distribution of power and wealth in the world that has occurred over the last decade. At the same time, it resists the temptation to imagine a homogeneous 'rest' emerging as a new power poised to take the position long occupied by the West.

Poles are not states, or not simply states. Poles are complex, involuted, overlapping, nested kinds of spaces and structures of power.

Neilson: We are conscious that multipolarity is a term that was developed and hashed out primarily in the disciplinary spaces of political science and international relations. By putting the words capital and multipolarity together, we are trying to suggest a different perspective on the concept than the ones typically developed in those areas. To put it succinctly: we are interested not only in multipolarity, but in polarity itself — in what a pole is and might be. To be simple: Our argument is that poles are not states, or not simply states. Poles are complex, involuted, overlapping, nested kinds of spaces and structures of power, which certainly implicate and involve state power as it is typically understood and theorised. But they are also linked very strongly with geoeconomics [1] and the dynamics of capital.

Mezzadra: We look at multipolarity by emphasising the tensions and gaps between geopolitics and geoeconomy — or to put it in the conceptual language of Giovanni Arrighi’s world-system theory: between territorialism and capitalism. We think this provides a very effective point of entry into the analysis of contemporary conflicts and wars.

Maheswaran: For me, one of the book’s most striking and productive concepts is that of “war regimes” — a term with which you describe as “a militarisation of political and economic life that exceeds the actual engagement of military forces on the ground and may even exist independently from such mobilisations.” Can you unpack that connection and explain what distinguishes this frame of “war regime” from more conventional understandings of military conflict?

Mezzadra: Let me start by referring back to the tensions between geopolitics and geoeconomics. I was struck by reading the recent national security strategy released by the Trump administration. In Europe, the discussion of that document has centred upon its apparent emphasis on the division of the West. But I think it is worth focusing on the section dedicated to the Western Hemisphere. The document speaks of a Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine — and this is quite significant, because the only corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in history was made by Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, at the height of the so-called imperialist moment in US history. Trump seems to have a kind of attachment to that moment. In his inaugural address, he mentioned William McKinley, the president who initiated the Spanish-American War in 1898. What the document makes clear is that the aim of the Trump administration is, in a nutshell, to synchronise geopolitics and geoeconomics. Perhaps this is a useful definition of imperialism today.

Maheswaran: Can you explain what you mean by that?

Mezzadra: The document refers to foreign actors that have penetrated Latin America in recent years, particularly through large-scale infrastructural projects, and the aim seems to be to expel those actors from the region. The reference to China is clear. And interestingly, the document also recognises that this will be very difficult, precisely because of the depth of Chinese presence in the region — through infrastructural projects like, for instance, the port in Peru inaugurated last year, which promises to open new trade routes in the Pacific between South America and Asia. From this point of view, the notion of war regime has something to say. You have literal military operations off the coast of Venezuela, military pressure on Colombia, and a whole panoply of US interventions in Latin American politics, most notably in Argentina. But what the document emphasises is border control, the war on drugs, the war on migration — all of which foreshadow a militarisation of Latin American countries through the alignment of governments with the Trump administration. And this implies the possibility of large-scale military operations, as the one against Venezuela. But even more importantly, a proliferation of war regimes in precisely the sense we define in the book.

The aim of the Trump administration is, in a nutshell, to synchronise geopolitics and geoeconomics. Perhaps this is a useful definition of imperialism today.

Neilson: It is interesting that the tensions between the US and China do not play the central role one might expect in that document. It seems that there is an expectation on both sides that eventually, there will be a geoeconomic deal of some kind. The fact that US tariffs on India are currently higher than those on China is perhaps not something we would have anticipated a year ago. In the book, we discuss the US-China tension as an instance of a war regime, precisely because it is so clear that what is at stake is not a "hot" military conflict. The tension has played out through trade, technology, and infrastructure. Now we see a different kind of dynamic emerging, particularly visible in the world of AI and the so-called chip wars. Under Biden, there was a kind of tug-of-war between the government and chip-designing companies; every time a ban was imposed, they would develop another chip to sell to China. Now we seem to have entered a different logic, organised around the term AI sovereignty, where each country would somehow maintain dominion over its own technological systems. It’s good for chip manufacturers — they get to sell more to different places. But it is striking that this US-China axis is mutating. We can think about that in terms of this synchronisation of geoeconomics and geopolitics. And it is not given that some kind of deal between the US and China would constitute a détente in the old sense of the term.

Maheswaran: You argue that in order to understand global power relations, one should understand nations as designations of complex configurations involving firms, financial actors, digital infrastructures, and transnational circuits. In order to analyse this, you are proposing the concept of the pole. What does this concept allow you to see that more conventional frameworks of geopolitics or international relations do not? In what sense does thinking in terms of poles — rather than states or blocs — offer an alternative analytical lens for understanding the reorganisation of power and capital?

Neilson: What is interesting to us is that despite all the talk of unipolarity, bipolarity, and multipolarity, the concept of the pole itself is never really interrogated. To raise that question is, for us, a way of getting under these concepts as they are usually deployed — approaching them from a different angle. What we are trying to think through are the processes of crosshatching — the junctures that operative spaces provide between poles, and the dynamic relations between poles that are neither hierarchical nor stable. We want a more expansive understanding of what a pole is and can be. If you think about it metaphorically, the term comes from electromagnetics. Magnets have poles, they attract, and they repel. If you put a few magnets under a piece of paper with iron filings and move them around, you get distributed swirls and patterns that look nothing like the atlas of the world. Don't take the metaphor too seriously — but those are the kinds of patterns we are looking for.

Mezzadra: And what we emphasise is that you cannot think of the current state of the world in terms of neatly separated and bordered poles. We look at processes of pole formation from the angle of a nesting of spaces — that is precisely what the notion of operative spaces allows us to do. Focusing in particular on global China, China beyond China, on the Belt and Road Initiative, we describe these processes of nesting of different spaces. This matters because it gives us a vantage point for analysing current tensions and conflicts. As we argue in the book  there are powerful forces pushing toward what we call the transformation of poles into blocks. Latin America and the Western Hemisphere are a good instance of that tendency right now. And this is a crucial point: the tendency toward the formation of blocks is itself a tendency toward the proliferation of wars and war regimes..

Maheswaran: You describe current tendencies — poles turning into blocks— directly connected to the proliferation of wars. How do you think about the attempts to end military conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza in terms of war regimes? Does the concept help us to think about what comes after, or alongside, military conflict?

Neilson: Declarations of peace and the idea that geoeconomic exchange produces peace — that’s a kind of eighteenth-century European notion which has been proved wrong many times. One doesn’t want to quickly celebrate peace, whether it is done by the Norwegian Academy or by FIFA. The notion of war regimes offers a way of thinking not only about military conflict but also about the roles that military capacity can play in operations and exchanges that are not physical or kinetic war. This is something we will have to watch closely in so-called reconstruction efforts — which seem to be shifting in terms of what they are and how they work, particularly in the case of Gaza. We also have to turn this around and look at situations like those in the Pacific, where you don’t have hot wars but where the concept is equally pertinent. Take the political tension between Japan and China recently — that strikes me as very well suited to analysis in the frame of a war regime. And the militarisation of Japan, which is on the horizon, is significant for the role of the military beyond physical war. That region has arguably never exited the Cold War: you still have the Taiwan question, you still have a divided Korea.

In Gaza, the project of a spatial economic zone — a logistical and real-estate and extractive hub — takes the genocide as its condition of possibility.

Mezzadra: I think the notion of the transformation of poles into blocks is itself a tendency toward the proliferation of wars and war regimes — independently of whether Donald Trump presents himself as a president of peace. If you think about Gaza and Ukraine, they are completely different kinds of situations. But in both cases, war remains a kind of de facto state, a modus operandi for a process of reorganisation of global spaces that goes well beyond the territories in question. In Gaza, the project of a spatial economic zone — a logistical and real-estate and extractive hub — takes the genocide as its condition of possibility. It is quite difficult to imagine a state of "peace" in Gaza in the near future. But one always has to look at the regional dimension of these processes. In the case of Gaza, you have the big question of the Gulf states and the role of Saudi Arabia — the imagination of a space of capital accumulation traversed by logistical routes that, again, takes the war, the genocide, as its condition. Or look at the Gulf states and the role of the United Arab Emirates in the Sudan war. You get a very different map of the relations between capital, power, and war. In a very general sense, I think that this question of the reorganisation, the redrawing of global spaces, provides the background for any analysis of wars and peace.

Maheswaran: This brings us to the politically most urgent part of your book, which is the question of struggle. You introduce the concept of “poles of struggle,” and you show — particularly through the example of Latin America — how struggles around social reproduction have taken on an exceptional character over the last two decades, combining feminist, anti-racist, and anti-extractivist demands beyond borders and traditional frameworks. At the same time, we have seen a powerful, globally organized solidarity around Palestine that connects the demand to end the genocide with broader critiques of capitalism, settler colonialism, and imperialism. Looking at these mobilisations together, do you see in them the conditions for a new form of political organisation? 

Mezzadra: Let me begin by saying that Latin America is, for us, an important instance, but only one. In the final chapter of the book, we expand at length on the analysis of social struggles in Latin America over the last couple of decades. But we also engage with struggles from India, Hong Kong, the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, France, and elsewhere. Over the last two decades, struggles related to reproduction and circulation have been particularly relevant and strong in many parts of the world. These struggles serve as a kind of guiding thread for thinking about a politics of freedom and equality in the current conjuncture of multipolarity. 

We do not see any geopolitical power as offering a basis for anti-capitalist politics.

This leads us to talk about the need for a new internationalism very different from any form of campism. By emphasising the intertwining of capital and power in the current multipolar world, we do not see any geopolitical power as offering a basis for anti-capitalist politics. We are not naive — we do not think that current social struggles will spontaneously generate a new internationalism. We rather think of complex conjunctions in which a new internationalism has to be built, let’s say, both from below and from above. But the priority, the most relevant angle for us, remains the one provided by social struggles themselves.

And just not to pass over your mention of Palestine — I do think that mobilisations around global Palestine over the last years, as diverse as they have been in different parts of the world, have provided a kind of condensation of social struggles. Looking at the Italian situation, the two general strikes in September and early October 2025 highlighted logistical and production struggles. Those mobilisations were important in support of Palestine, but at the same time, they foreshadowed the possibility of a new internationalist politics.

Organisation has to mean thinking across struggles and working across struggles.

Neilson: The concept of organisation, when it comes to struggles, is obviously important — and yet, within activist circles and academic discourse alike, we often hear the term used as if nothing more needs to be said about it. People will say, 'We are organising,’ and the content and form of that organisation are taken as given. From the perspective we have developed, organisation has to mean thinking across struggles and working across struggles. That doesn’t mean people cannot be committed to local struggles — it doesn’t mean we are against that commitment. But if we ask the question of organisation in the context of a new internationalism, the content and meaning of the word starts to shift in terms of what political activity might be and look like as we confront the challenges of our very dark times.