Colonial slavery supercharged Europe’s prosperity in the eighteenth century. It was legally sanctioned, supported by state powers, and largely condoned by the public. Against this backdrop, Kant observed that “Negro slaves” functioned as money in trade, their number measured a nation’s wealth, and the slavery business was therefore intertwined with a competitive intra-European politics. Meanwhile, he racialized the “Negro” as uniquely suited for slave labor, indirectly benefited from such labor, refrained from calling colonial slavery an unjust institution, and occasionally signaled anti-abolitionist sympathies. Given these facts, what is the prospect of a deracialized, radical Kantian liberalism?

This article applies Critical School Finance theory to analyze the $543.9 billion in U.S. school district debt as a mechanism of racialized wealth extraction. Using the framework’s five core concepts—dispossession, kleptocracy, extraction/super-expropriation, racial capitalism, and inequality—we examine how debt systematically transfers educational resources from predominantly Black, Latino, and low-income students to financial institutions and bondholders. Case studies of Chicago, IL and Philadelphia, PA reveal how districts serving students of color carry disproportionate debt burdens, divert billions from instruction to debt service, and experience compounding educational disadvantages. We argue that school debt is not neutral fiscal management but represents organized theft that reproduces racial inequality across generations, demanding transformative rather than incremental reform.

The reproduction of the global agri-food system is, at a systemic level, conditional on the exploitation of migrant labour, raising the question of how exploitation became the default mechanism through which states regulate the sector. This paper disentangles the contingency between exploitation and border technologies through a critical policy analysis of the UK Seasonal Visa Scheme. The paper examines the governmentality of the border by identifying four colonial technologies that enable and sustain this exploitation: containment, malleable membership, liberal subjectivity, and a security paradox that legitimises nominal rights. I argue that whilst borders are reconfigured to facilitate capital accumulation, the origins of the visa regime are rooted in colonial statecraft designed to control and discipline subjects. Recentring the productive power of exploitative border regimes as artefacts of colonial governance, I show how the racial capitalist system of migrant exploitation is contingent on colonial statecraft, and that it is the state imperative to maintain the social racial order that motivates their reproduction. Whilst racial capitalism explains why migrant workers are exploited, it is state-constructed border regimes – and the technologies of racialised extraction – that explains how.

Recent scholarship has directed attention to how racial discourse, and colorblind racism in particular, influences urban redevelopment in U.S. cities. This study employs a theory of strategic racialization to better understand how developers use race-related discourse to seek public support for their projects and how community members respond. Focusing on a series of public meetings regarding three competing proposals to build a casino in the city of Chicago, we find that racial meanings and categories played a central role in efforts by developers and community members to characterize, support, and challenge the casino project. Comparing public interactions across three different communities, we argue that developers deployed a shifting array of discursive strategies—territorial ascription, multiculturalism, colorblind racialization, and a more novel variety of racial equity claims—to mobilize the unique geographic and organizational characteristics of their proposed projects as assurances of racial equity. We identify three distinct discourses that organized the racial equity claims of developers and community members: Black-led capitalism, racially representative capitalism, and spatially connective capitalism. We conclude that while community members actively contested developers’ claims and called for greater specificity concerning beneficiaries, they did not challenge the capitalist logic that merely redistributing the benefits of development among owners and workers—however racialized—could bring about racial equity.

This article demonstrates how political science, particularly the emerging field of American Political Economy (APE), can more robustly theorize and study the political economy of systemic racism by drawing on insights from critical race theories, including intersectionality and racial capitalism, and post/anti-colonial theory. A paired case study of the foreclosure “noncrisis” of the 1990s and the coerced sterilization of incarcerated women in California during the early 2000s highlights three key contributions of critical race theories: (1) intersectionality reveals nonuniformity, unintended consequences of purportedly progressive policy, and underscores the importance of margins-to-center resistance; (2) feudal-colonial roots illuminate how racialized hierarchies become institutionalized in law and policy, often without explicit racial language; and (3) racial capitalist logics explain how administrative tools, such as risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis, reproduce racial hierarchy through markets. This framework offers APE a more historically grounded, power-conscious, and theoretically expansive approach to systemic racism and underscores the urgency of resisting efforts to suppress such scholarship.

Since October 2023, residents of Gaza have been subjected to artificial intelligence (AI) target-generation systems by Israel. This article scrutinises the deployment of these technologies through an understanding of Israel’s settler-colonial project, racial-capitalist economy, and delineation of occupied Palestinian territories as carceral geographies. Drawing on the work of Andy Clarno, which demonstrates how Israel’s decreasing reliance on Palestinian labour made them inessential to exploitation, this article argues that Palestinians are valuable to Israel for another purpose: experimentation. For over fifty years, Palestinians have been rendered as test subjects for the development of surveillance and warfare technologies, in what Antony Lowenstein calls “the Palestine Laboratory.” AI introduces a dual paradigm where both Palestinian lives and deaths are turned into sites of data dispossession. This duality demands keeping Palestinians alive to generate constantly updating data for the lethal algorithmic systems that target them, while their deaths generate further data to refine and market those systems as “battle-tested.” The article describes this state as an algorithmic death-world, adapted from Achille Mbembe’s conception of necropolitics. This article concludes that as Israel exports its lethal AI technologies globally, it also exports a model of racialised disposability.

Existing studies of EU foreign policy often contrast its normative and geopolitical ambitions while overlooking its colonial entanglements. Although recent scholarship has interrogated the Union’s neo-imperial tendencies, the structuring role of race in external relations remains underexplored. This article introduces the concept of the “Mediterranean colour line” to capture how the EU’s relationship with its Southern Neighbourhood has consistently cast the region as politically marginal, economically extractable, and epistemically devalued. These hierarchies are not incidental: they are central to the reproduction of capitalism within racialized global orders. The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) provides a key site to examine these dynamics. Through a critical discourse analysis of the 2021 New Agenda for the Mediterranean, the article shows how colonial logics are retooled in the language of reform, resilience, and partnership. By focusing on digital transition and green growth—domains rarely read through race—the analysis demonstrates how racial capitalist governance persists precisely where its effects are most obscured.

In this article, we address the role that European bordering and migration policy play in the broader construction of the European project by defining who does and does not belong in Europe. This question, and the policy answers to it, are shaped by a variety of different political and economic interests and factors, such as racialized narratives of border protection, labor market needs, and the securitization of borders. We tackle this question by examining the role that categories and figures of migration—such as the “genuine” and “bogus” asylum seeker, the refugee, and the economic migrant—play in European border policy and how they are changing in the present conjuncture. We argue that a redefinition is taking place of who counts as a “good” and “bad” migrant, which responds to the changing political economy of contemporary European capitalism and is reflected in the growing prominence of the dichotomy of “legal” and “illegal” migration. This, we argue, reconfigures the existing categories of economic migrant and asylum seeker and speaks to the emergence of new forms of racialized disposability at Europe’s borders. We do this by developing a critical political economy perspective that builds on our previous work and draws on the literature on racial capitalism and the concept of disposability.

This study examines the absence and presence of race- and anti-Black-related issues in Canadian political science. This research employs a six-pronged mixed methods approach, combining quantitative data analysis with qualitative examinations of race debates within the discipline. It investigates introductory textbooks, Black Studies programs, graduate courses, comprehensive examination reading lists, the Canadian Journal of Political Science and academic awards. The findings reveal that Canadianists are not exempt from the effects of racism. The results highlight significant challenges in decolonizing Canadian political science, such as incorporating race into university curriculum and providing diversity training for editorial committees at major academic presses. This study underscores the pervasive reach of racism and anti-Blackness in the country and calls for adopting relational approaches to studying Black people in Canada. It contributes to the growing discourse on anti-Blackness, addressing crucial gaps in the discipline.

In Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks with conviction on the need for and importance of community. King depicts American society and modern civilization as a great “world house” that is inhabited, inherited—and imperiled. Behind the metaphor of the world house is a prophetic vision and dream—the realization of what he called the “beloved community.” In this article, the author considers King’s beloved community ideal through a housing lens. Engaging with King’s metaphor, the author frames the beloved community as an apologetic for integrated community. The author views the metaphor of the world house as a significant means to expand understanding of beloved community, elevate housing as a moral-ethical concern, and engender radical structural solutions that can be realized through racial justice in the housing sector.

The present article focuses on a place-based repertoire of contention known as Punto de Encuentro, designed to defend a rural-urban territory against racialized processes of economic globalization and armed conflicts in Colombia. The article suggests that citizenship becomes meaningful when Afro-Colombians exercise their rights to their territories. To support this argument, the article delves into the 2017 civic strike mobilizations that reclaimed the city space of Buenaventura as a territory of life where Afro-Colombians can live with dignity and in peace. As the article describes, the civic strike activists created four crucial social participation processes: the crafting of a social movement, the production of a place-based knowledge from past struggles, the construction of a common ethical and political framework, and Puntos de Encuentro as places of social and cultural resistance.

Contemporary racial theorization about American society assumes the universality of White dominance as its point of departure. We argue here that Hawai‘i is an exception, where White supremacy has given way to a multiracial mainstream, shared by the Chinese, Japanese, and Whites. This was a surprising development in a state founded in settler colonialism and racial capitalism, which was moreover a racially hierarchical plantation society until the middle of the twentieth century. The pivot, in Hawai‘i as on the mainland, occurred during the post-World War II period, when the economy underwent a transformation requiring a more educated workforce. On the mainland, this socioeconomic shift opened up the mainstream to the so-called White ethnics. But these were few in number in Hawai‘i, and so the Chinese and Japanese ascended socioeconomically and socially instead. The ethnoracial hierarchy created in this period is still in evidence, as shown by pronounced inequalities among Hawaiian groups. However, the end of White supremacy has been associated with very widespread ethnoracial mixing in families. We discuss some ways in which Hawai‘i may offer a preview of twenty-first-century changes in the U.S. as a whole.