At the intersection of Eurasia’s pre-modern empires, Transcaucasia has long been a battlezone. With the waning of American-led globalization, and its legacy of militarization, are their avatars—Russia, Turkey, Iran—re-emerging, equipped with Israeli drones? Georgi Derluguian locates the 2020 war for Nagorno Karabagh in the geopolitical longue durée.

A comparative engagement with Tom Hazeldine’s The Northern Question, setting the trajectory of England’s former industrial powerhouse against that of Belgium’s Wallonia. Rustbelt regions, embedded in national contexts beset by persistent geographical polarizations, yet stubbornly consequential for their political outcomes.

Marxism is premised on the possibility of a political economy structured to meet human needs, rather than generate private profit. Could a New Deal capitalism in principle be capable of satisfying them? Is it even possible to disentangle ‘real’ needs from socially constructed ones? Translation of two texts from a 1942 seminar on the question of need.

In the 1990s, the Hegelian notion of a struggle for recognition was reclaimed by critical theorists to conceptualize the politics of subaltern identities. But in platform-mediated civil society, even the powerful seem to feel under-recognized. What becomes of the struggle for recognition in the reputation economy?

What kind of judgment does the gimmick demand? What is the position of the aesthetic object in capitalist relations of production? Franco Moretti engages with Sianne Ngai’s Kantian-Marxist interrogation of the aesthetic and its limits.

In a probing contribution to NLR’s green strategy debate, Kenta Tsuda asks what growth is and whether humanity could do without it; how resource use might be measured; what political problems the implementation of degrowth would entail. In an era of stagnation and sputtering economies, can out-of-control growth explain the climate crisis?