Sowmya Maheswaran
Author
In their co-authored book The Rest and the West: Capital and Power in a Multipolar World, political theorists Brett Neilson and Sandro Mezzadra offer a sweeping analysis of contemporary capitalism's shifting political geographies. Moving beyond state-centric models of power, they develop a set of conceptual tools — from regimes of war to the transformation of poles — to grasp the crises embedded in today's processes of circulation, social reproduction, and transnational struggle. This interview was conducted before the most recent escalation of conflicts across the Middle East. Yet the questions and angles it raises are more urgent than ever: as war and militarisation proliferate — from Ukraine to Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Israel, and Venezuela — their framework offers a rare and timely lens for understanding the entanglement of capital, geopolitics, and violence. Together, Neilson and Mezzadra chart a framework that is as theoretically ambitious as it is urgently relevant.
