Routledge The Crisis of the Twenty-First Century: Empire in the Age of Austerity

Empire is one of the oldest forms of political organisation and has dominated societies in all parts of the world. Yet, despite the emergence of nation-states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the apparent end of empire with the breakup of European colonial regimes and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century, empire remains powerful in the modern world. The EU’s accession policies, the United States’ War on Terror, China’s economic developments in Africa, among others, draw accusations of imperial agendas. Empire is no stranger to crisis but, in recent years, the effects of global austerity have forced states, both powerful and weak, to adapt, with varying degrees of success and failure. The confusions, contradictions, and contestations which emerge from imperial crisis point to a vital question – how is Austerity changing Empire and how will this shape tomorrow’s world? This book was published as a special issue of Global Discourse. About the Author Russell Foster is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a PhD student at Newcastle University. His work concerns the EU as a modern empire. He is the author of ‘Tabula Imperii Europae: A Cartographic Approach to the Current Debate on the European Union as Empire’, published in Geopolitics. Matthew Johnson is a Lecturer and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in Politics, Philosophy and Religion at the University of Lancaster. He is interested in the evaluation of culture and the effect of forms of intervention on wellbeing. He has authored Evaluting Culture (Palgrave) and edited The Legacy of Marxism (Continuum). Mark Edward is an independent researcher. He completed his PhD in politics at Newcastle University and is interested in popular culture and world politics, with a focus on future practices of consumerism represented in film.