Empire

IRGAC's Monthly Newsletter

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Thank you for reading the IRGAC Newsletter. Each month, we share the latest news, articles, analyses, calls and information about our work.

Two decades after Hardt and Negri’s Empire mapped a deterritorialized sovereignty of global capital, the world has entered a new conjuncture — one marked by the crisis of neoliberalism, a renewed centrality of state power, the crumbling of Western hegemony and the rules-based global order, the resurgence of armed rivalry among great powers, and what has been termed a ‘war regime’ of neoliberal governance itself. The spaces of sovereignty and the territories of capital and of power are being radically redefined. Where — on which layers, in which realms, through which spaces and mechanisms — is Empire produced and enforced today? How are logics of imperialism and anti-imperialism, of coloniality and anti-colonial resistances being (re-)produced in this new, evolving constellation?

These questions are at the core of our current call for up to three postdoctoral fellowships on Rethinking Empire: War, Coloniality, and New Internationalism, funded by IRGAC at the University of Potsdam. The application deadline is March 10, 2026. We welcome proposals from scholar-activists from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe that go beyond traditional geopolitical frameworks to examine how empire, imperialism, and coloniality are produced and contested within social relations, cultural formations, and political praxis.

Few recent events have illustrated the logics of Empire more nakedly than the US military assault on Venezuela on January 3rd — the aerial bombardment of Caracas and several Venezuelan states, the killing of over a hundred people, and the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. No euphemism, no pretense of humanitarian intervention: this was a show of bare imperial politics. In his analysis Venezuela and the ‘Donroe Doctrine’: Military Intervention and Imperial Fascism, Pablo Uc situates the assault within a broader project of US imperial expansion — linking the geopolitical control of the Greater Caribbean, energy domination, extractivist capitalism, and the fascistic reconfiguration of governance under what he calls the “Trump–Rubio Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. Crucially, Uc also maps the fractures and resistance: from Indigenous and Afro-descendant territorial struggles to the No Kings movement and the general strike in Minneapolis.

In the days that followed the Venezuela attack, European attention was captured by Trump’s aggressive posturing over Greenland — a front that faded as quickly as it had flared up. Now, the war launched last weekend by the US and Israel against Iran has once again shifted the focus of imperial logics. While we share the desire of millions for the fall of the oppressive Islamic Republic, we have no illusions about the nature and motives of the powers waging this war. As two Berlin-based feminist collectives stated: “This war is not ours. It has been imposed on us by regimes of death that consider our lives disposable. Both sides of this machinery, the US-Israel and the Islamic Republic, have proved several times that people’s lives are the last thing they care about, and that there are no limits to their violence against civilians, as we have seen in the genocide in Gaza and the recent massacre in Iran.”

These imperialist aggressions do not unfold in isolation — they are part of an intimately related process of fascisation. In a new interview on our website, conducted by Melehat Kutun and Ali Yalçın Göymen, political scientist Şebnem Oğuz discusses the concept of late fascism to make sense of this conjuncture. Oğuz argues that unlike classical fascism, late fascism does not stabilize itself through institutional closure — it governs through permanent crisis, reorganizing accumulation around war, racialized violence, internal colonialism, and coercion. Police, borders, and military apparatuses are not merely instruments of political repression; they become mechanisms of accumulation. Empire, then, is not simply a geopolitical fact. It is a constellation that traverses states, societies — and bodies.

Finally, a reminder that our exhibition Beyond Molotovs — Reclaiming Antifascist Futures is currently on display at the Kulturzentrum Pavillon in Hannover and can be visited Monday to Friday, 10am–6pm, until March 23. Entry is free. On March 11 at 6pm, we will hold a book talk and discussion with IRGAC’s Börries Nehe at the same venue (in German) — reflecting on how authoritarianism works at the level of affect, and how antifascist counter-strategies can meet it there.

Take care!