Illiberalism, war, violence and authoritarianism: the current conjuncture – an interview with Professor Anthony Bogues

In this interview, Professor Anthony Bogues expands on his recent lecture at LSE examining authoritarian resurgence, the unravelling of the postwar order, and the entanglements of liberalism and illiberalism. Drawing on anti‑colonial thought, he reflects on how violence, disposability and elite power shape today’s political terrain.

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Anthony Bogues is the Asa Messer Professor of Humanities and Africana Studies at Brown University. A political theorist and intellectual historian, he has written extensively on Caribbean and African intellectual, cultural and literary history, and political thought. In Autumn 2025, he was Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. During his visit, Professor Bogues delivered a talk entitled “Illiberalism, war, violence and authoritarianism: the current conjuncture“. The premise of his talk was the following:

 We live in a tumultuous world in which there is the regularisation of death. We live in a world in which the stories of human life are told in tales of death. Is this a new conjuncture? Are we at the end of neoliberalism? How did we get here? Are there histories that have morphed into a dangerous present?

In this talk, Professor Bogues attempted to think through our current moment by arguing that the core of the present conjuncture is the ways in which the figure of the human and life itself has been configured. Drawing from various radical anti-colonial thinkers, the talk posited a history of liberalism and its deep relationship to illiberalism, raising questions of the figure of the human and of life itself.

In this blog post, we publish the original audio of the talk as a podcast – listen to the recording. Several months later, Neil Warner and Will Kendall sat down with Professor Bogues to discuss further the features of this new conjuncture, how it might differ from neo-liberalism, and the dialectical relationship between liberalism and illiberalism. Additional input from Maya Adereth.

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WK: In your talk, you argue that we are entering a new conjuncture. You also describe a series of letters between yourself and Stuart Hall, in which he urged you not to think in historical analogy. Instead, he encouraged you to do the hard work of thinking of the features of the present moment. How would you characterise the historical process we are watching unfold?

The first feature I see of our contemporary era is the erosion of the postwar international order that was formed to primarily advance the interests of Europe and the United States – the United Nations (UN), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and other international organisations.  We are witnessing a rapid unravelling of that world order. The WTO cannot stop the tariffs imposed by the United States. The UN has been revealed to be nearly impotent in its capacity to intervene in the world. In place of diplomatic rules of engagement, we see a shift towards practices of 19th century power politics and personalities. In particular, we can see this in the recent American removal of Maduro. Although his removal followed a lengthy tradition of American intervention in the region from the 19th century, after the declaration of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, the rhetoric around the intervention was crucial. This was not only about oil. Recall a member of the administration made it clear that the world today must be governed “by force”, and that these are the “iron laws of the world.”  If force is the order of the law, then any ruled-based structures have no place.

The second feature is the disintegration of the Keynesian social contract, which had begun to erode in the 1980s as neoliberalism consolidated, but has now been entirely done away with as a basis for political engagement. Inequality has risen to historical highs.

Third, we see deepening ties between technological elites and political elites. Giuliano da Empoli’s book, The Hour of the Predator, argues that technological elites are the new global bourgeoisie. Just look at how many billionaires are tied to tech companies. This changing character of elites has implications for the state. In the classic liberal model, the power of the economic elite was more subtle. It was exercised through institutions and through the construction of hegemony. By contrast, today, many elites – political and economic – are working hand in glove. That’s part of the reason why you see, certainly in the United States, the rise of authoritarianism. Because while the old liberal model called for some distance and some subtle relationships, the new arrangements call for people working in sync.

Fourthly, there has been the complete abandonment of the liberal narrative of racial progress. Racial domination was something that, the liberals argued, would be erased over time, in the so-called “long arc of justice.” In this new dispensation, white supremacy is naked and aggressive. And because it is naked and aggressive, you can see it not just in relationship to Black lives, but you see it also in relationship to immigration and the racialisation of migrants. And this is true across the political spectrum.

Finally, there is a matter of political terms. The term “fascism” is often used today to describe the conjuncture. I shy away from that term because, working through the moment with Hall’s injunction, I think we need to grapple hard with what is unfolding before us. Of course, there is, as Cedric Robinson notes, a tradition of radical black thought which addresses historical fascism, and in the middle of the 20th century writers like George Jackson worked through a political theory about America as fascist. However, while it is clear that in many countries, fascists are part of the ruling coalition sometimes informally, I think it is critical to grapple with the entire moment as one which is deeply authoritarian and illiberal and to understand that these are not breaks but rather re-emergences and new adaptations.

NW: You set up the construction of the western liberal democratic tradition via racialised exploitation and subjugation. How should we characterise the qualitative shift we see in relation to that tradition? Is it a return of a feudalist-aristocratic despotic ruling class or something fundamentally new and different?

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot in my current work. There’s no historical moment in which we return. We see something that, on the surface, appears a certain way. But we then have to dig under the surface to understand the nuances. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the emergence of liberalism in Europe coincides precisely with the European Colonial Project and the project of racial slavery. Liberalism and illiberalism are thus deeply intertwined. John Stuart Mill makes it clear in his essays on liberalism, for example, that in colonial societies, colonial subjects or natives cannot have rights until they have gone through a civilising process, what I like to call the “great ladder of civilisation.”  He was a major liberal reformer in Western political thought and history.

We cannot think about the United States’ constitutional formation without recognising the coinciding genocide of native indigenous persons. We can’t think about liberalism in the United States without thinking about settler colonialism. We can’t think about liberalism in the United States without thinking about the racial order that was created there and how it was buttressed by economic life and activity across the country.

My view is that this intimacy between liberalism and illiberalism means that, at any moment, you can have – in a kind of dialectical relationship – certain parts of the illiberal system suddenly emerge and become dominant. Many contemporary commentators argue that we have shifted between two distinct phases, from liberalism to illiberalism.

Instead, what I want to argue is that these two systems are cojoined, and at any specific moment, the underlying illiberalism upon which liberalism is founded can emerge and predominate. In the lecture, I suggested that we have to see history as a kind of sedimentary deposit. The residues of what is not dealt with always come back to haunt us.

WK: The other metaphor you used in the talk was that liberalism has always had an “underbelly” of illiberalism – of war, of violence, of authoritarianism. Why do you still see value in making a contrast between liberalism and illiberalism, and what is the nature of that entanglement?

I’m not arguing for liberalism. What I’m arguing is that the political terrain changes with the relative influence of different parts of the entanglement. When the underbelly is dominant, it’s a different kind of politics that you have to practice. There are different questions on the table that you have to think about.

Let me give you a complicated example that I saw this morning on TikTok. Here is a Somali American who was, sometime this week, picked up by ICE. He’s an American citizen. He was picked up, chucked into a van, and left in the snow to walk for miles. When they finally let him go, because he is able to prove his citizenship, he appears at a press conference. Who is beside him in the press conference? The chief of police of Minneapolis city. This struck me because it indicates a division within the security forces. The liberal security forces, who have long been accused of mistreating Black folks, are now finding themselves defending the rights of people of colour.

This debate taking place within police departments regarding collaboration with ICE is one thing that to me marks the difference between liberalism and illiberalism. Not that the police are not the repressive apparatus of the state. But if we take a concrete moment, we see these agents distinguishing themselves from authoritarianism.

NW: You have also talked about the history of neoliberalism and its relationship to the current conjuncture. Neoliberalism’s enemies were organised labour and the social movements of the twentieth century. Which enemies does this underbelly of illiberalism seek to defeat?

If we take Donald Trump as an example, the line between friend and foe has been drawn very narrowly. It includes not only the entire left –  social democratic, liberal Democratic, Marxist – but even those who might have disagreements within Trump’s own party, like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

At first, the enemy was the administrative state. That’s what Steve Bannon, Steve Miller, and others talked about. Today, the enemy is not just the state. The enemy is any opposition at all. And that I think is a different political terrain.

It means that Trump exercises power against anybody who says anything against him. If you’re in the media, he will lock you down or sue you. If you are in his political party, he will run you out of that political party. I have never seen a political situation where grievance is actually such a deep political practice. Neoliberalism does not operate that way in political terms. It recognises friends, recognises foes, but it also, I think, recognises the so-called liberal rules of the game.

This form of illiberalism recognises no conventional rules of the game. Instead, there is a certain aggressive grievance which is part of a political practice, which I think is not the conventional way – the liberal way, or even neoliberal way – in which people think about and practice politics.

WK: You have mentioned a tightening between the technological and political elite. Could you talk a little bit about the changing composition of capital in this new conjuncture – are there any divisions emerging within the ruling class?

What we are seeing, with things like AI, is the development of technology at a rapid speed. Manufacturing has now declined almost 40 per cent as a share of global GDP, and the manufacturing elite is being replaced with a technological elite. What does that mean? Banks had also been central pillars of the capitalist order alongside manufacturing. But to some degree, banks are no longer the core actors in global markets. We need to do some more work to think about the ways in which, what Marx would’ve called fictitious capital, stock markets and stock exchanges, generate and produce wealth.

Someone can borrow money against their own company shares to do something and then will actually sell those shares higher than the borrowed sum. The tech sector in this way becomes economically more significant than the banks. We need to empirically study that and see what is happening. And, as Stuart Hall would have suggested, we need to understand the ideology that comes alongside these new structures of capital accumulation. What do these structures create for us as human beings? What I see in this political moment is not just a drive to construct the human as primarily homo economicus. We are now entirely disposable.

WK: You describe this new conjuncture as being built through violence and war, with rights displaced by might. But does this new conjuncture also speak to imagination and desire? Can you identify a new kind of common sense that is trying to construct a new hegemony?

The common sense that is emerging from the top, in my view, is a common sense of disposability. A common sense that there is no need for people to have “rights.” One response to that is the return to a notion of popular sovereignty. As it is organised within a diaspora, this involves trying to make sure that sovereignty has certain claims or can engage in certain practices that they think would continue to make them human.

Quite frankly, I think the left has a great deal of work to grapple with the conjuncture in any profound way. We need to find the spaces of the imagination that desire a different order. That begins with a certain understanding that we are living in a totally different world, in a conjuncture that is not reducible to Trumpism, but of which Trumpism forms an important part.

I would argue that when the resistance comes, it will not take the familiar form of a general strike or other conventional forms we are used to. Those forms will be there, but what are the forms of resistance which work through disobedience? This is something we will need to pay attention to.

NW: You spoke in your talk about the important role that the construction of fantasies and narratives that are impervious to evidence has played, firstly in birtherism and the Tea Party, and then in the Trump movement. But does the left also need fantasies? If so, what might they look like?

I would argue, no, I don’t think we need fantasy. I think we need serious doses of reality, quite frankly, and we need to work to try and penetrate and understand what it is that’s before us.

What we need to do is to think really hard. How can we begin to think about the work of the imagination? And how can we begin to develop programmes and political practices that will facilitate what people are aiming for?

There is really no master key. The problem with all forms of fantasy is that they hide a certain reality. If we are developers of a certain left fantasy, what is the reality we are hiding? I don’t want to give a left programme because I would argue that the programme in the United States is different from the programme in England, is different from the programme in the United Emirates, is different from the programme in Gaza. But I would say, as a general principle, that the issue is around encouraging a set of political and cultural practices that might eventually evolve into a social movement. This is not a simple crisis to just wait out. We are not in a civilizational or typical capitalist crisis – we are in a dangerous moment for the human species.

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All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of the Department of Sociology, LSE Human Rights, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credit: SWinxy via Wikimedia Commons

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