Kai Koddenbrock and Carolin Fiete Norina Voß, “Walking a fine line: Germany and the question of imperialism”, New Political Economy, November 2025, pp. 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2025.2581605.
Imperialism is all around us again. Russia in Ukraine and the United States in Venezuela have shown everyone that we need to rethink global politics as a violent and expansionist affair. Western support for the genocide in Gaza has shaken the ability to look away. Liberal heads of state like Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney now even acknowledge that the elites and ruling classes in the West have actively peddled the lie that we have ever lived in a liberal world order.
In light of this new-found honesty and confronted with the steadfast loyalty to the genocidal and fascist Israeli government, how can we theoretically and empirically understand a militarizing Germany without falling into the trap of viewing violence, war, and the exploitation of the South as something that is merely committed elsewhere?
This is the guiding question Carolin Fiete Norina Voß and I have been working on for more than two years. The article is open access and invites readers to take a historical and self-critical look at our era of violence and the shifting relations of capitalist accumulation.
We argue that theories of imperialism can help us to make sense of Germany. These theories were actively forgotten in large parts of the academic world of the Global North, while scholars in the Global South never stopped theorizing and experiencing the actually existing imperialism. We suggest a conceptual focus on war and military violence, domestic state-capital relations, and the extraction of value from the Global South. Empirically, we investigate recent shifts in German security and economic policy, Germany’s corporate giants Volkswagen and BASF, as well as the quest for critical minerals from the Global South.
Our paper concludes that imperialism as an analytical term allows to tackle the geopolitics and geoeconomics of the present in a more holistic way and is generative and productive in dealing with a world engulfed in war and crisis.