Oliver Villar

Oliver Villar, a political scientist at Charles Sturt University in Australia, discusses his research on US imperial power and Latin American politics, covering his co-authored book, Cocaine, Death Squads and the War on Terror: US Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia (Monthly Review, 2011). Villar historicises the role that the US-led counternarcotic policies, specifically Plan Colombia, have played in serving as a pretext for advancing imperialist interests and undermining popular, leftist movements in the country and how the official “wars” on drugs and terror in Colombia are a pretext for the US to maintain an imperialist relationship while ensuring its business interests, as well as the local “narco-bourgeoisie,” can monopolise the cocaine trade. Exploring how US strategy intensified violence by supporting state-linked paramilitary forces, ultimately suppressing domestic labour and peasant struggles, Villar observes that it was during the Clinton administration “where everything starts to unravel” and when the US began to propagandise and brand the revolutionary armed forces of Colombia, leftist guerrillas, as the new “narco-terrorists.” He assesses how the US narrative surrounding Maduro flows in the same direction as propaganda from this earlier era, whereby anyone who “gets in America’s way is now fair game for the narco-terrorist label”, underscoring, “It has nothing to do with drugs.” Oliver relates what is happening in Latin America in conjunction with China’s rapid trajectory as a superpower and its clash with the United States over the control of resources (e.g., minerals and metals in Latin America) and its augmenting global influence. He dissects how the cocaine drug trade and the US-China rivalry in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the globe form part of a larger picture of US global hegemony while offering a critical history of US imperialism, its hegemonic decline, and the so-called “rising threat” of China to explain recent events. Responding to events in Venezuela, Greenland, and the “great power competition” that is unfolding between the US, China, and Russia, Villar elaborates on research from his most recent book, The Political Economy of Dissent (Routledge, 2026), in critically analysing 21st-century imperialism—that is, capitalism in its most aggressive and developed form, which is the driving force behind an intensifying rivalry between the US and China. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Saskia Garner, Head of Policy and Campaigns at the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, the UK’s leading personal safety and stalking charity, covers the charity’s history and work in research and policy advocacy across stalking, harassment, online harms, bystander intervention and workplace safety. Recounting the challenges faced in getting stalking recognised in law after the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 (PHA) failed to capture the fixation and obsession towards an individual, she describes the efforts to push for the legal recognition of stalking, which was finally realised through the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 that made stalking a specific criminal offence and by adding new sections (2A and 4A) to the PHA. Chronicling her charity’s work in gathering evidence that demonstrates the lack of identification and recognition of a range of stalking behaviours which cause a range of damage in the victims, Garner notes how sometimes police officers will downplay the risk if the stalking does not manifest itself with direct threats or harm. She describes the Trust’s super-complaint, made in collaboration with the Stalking Consortium in 2022, which led to an official investigation into the super-complaint which found “clear evidence” of systemic failures in the police response to stalking in England and Wales, resulting in a total of 29 recommendations which the Suzy Lamplugh Trust has endeavoured to ensure will be implemented. Covering the newer frontiers of stalking through technological forms of electronic surveillance and control—deep fakes, social media, smart home devices, and tracking software—Garner discusses how today stalkers can readily find a way into an individual’s digital and physical life in their endeavour to obsessively surveil, track, and obsess over their victims. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Ricardo Gómez-Carrera, a research economist at the World Inequality Lab and co-editor of the 2026 World Inequality Report, discusses his research on the benefits of early schooling and how early human capital investment closes the “inequality gap” and the effects of such research within current Mexican educational policy. Focusing on the finding of this year’s World Inequality Report, Gómez-Carrera elaborates on the increasing wealth disparities on a global scale such that wealth is becoming even more concentrated, as demonstrated by the fact that the top 10% earn 53% of the global income, “the top 10% own three-quarters of global wealth, while the bottom half holds only 2%,” and, for the top .001%, the distribution of wealth growth is as high as 8% per year. Gómez-Carrera argues that if we don’t address inequality, only the privileged will have rights, opportunities, assets, and control over politics. Ultimately, even if 90% or 99% of the population are paying their taxes and contributing to society, the top 1% maintain a disproportionate influence over politics and access to opportunities, which in turn influences the decisions that ensure they maintain their privilege. While power, as Gómez-Carrera clarifies, is becoming more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the negative effects of such power, such as ecological damage, will be felt disproportionately by the poor, as they are more vulnerable to the impacts of global warming, despite their contributing less to this damage. Examining one of the more surprising aspects of the 2016 World Inequality Report, he notes how the top .001% increased in their charitable donations since 1960, a gesture which moves the wealthy beyond strictly economic realms of power. Noting how the economic patterns suggest a rising top-end inequality, Gómez-Carrera claims that this not only translates into ideological capture and unequal influence over philanthropy and politics, but it invariably translates into public policy, law, campaigning, and, invariably, political choices, or lack thereof. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Diego Sequera, award winning journalist and writer based in Caracas, Venezuela, discusses the recent kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and former member of the National Assembly, Cilia Flores, delving into Venezuela’s complex historical landscape. He begins with the Caracazo uprising of 1989, which revealed deep socioeconomic inequalities while uniting the working class against President Carlos Andrés Pérez’s austerity measures. Sequera notes that this context set the stage for the rise of Chavismo, notably through Hugo Chávez’s transformation from a coup leader to an elected president by 1999. Sequera critiques the neoliberal policies, growing foreign debt, and the resulting polarization exacerbated by anti-Communist sentiments while linking Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution to contemporary global conflicts, scrutinising political figures like Maria Corina Machado for their role in societal divisions. Furthermore, he addresses the role of US foreign policy, detailing the sanctions imposed, starting with the Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Act of 2014 and culminating in the 2015 “Obama decree” (Executive Order 13692), which targeted the Venezuelan oil industry ultimately aiming to destabilise the country both economically and politically. Sequera critically analyzes the rhetoric of US politicians who categorize Venezuela as a “narco-state” and suggest foreign interference in the 2020 US elections, as he draws parallels between Venezuela, Iran, and Gaza in critiquing the selective moral blindness of Western nations towards their participation in human rights abuses and loss of life in these regions, reflecting on the broader implications of foreign policy decisions on Venezuela's plight. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Vivek Chibber, Professor of Sociology at New York University, discusses neocolonial history and the formation of anti-colonial movements, which effectively began as an elite-dominated push for power, to widen the colonial apparatus for more participation by wealthy Indians. Historicising how anti-colonial, national liberation movements only took off when the internal agendas of national liberation struggles were set as the people unified their narrow struggles to join the mass struggle, Chibber notes that the modern identitarian left has failed in assessing and addressing class struggle. Moving between decolonising countries and the United States, Chibber tells the story of how, in the neoliberal era, as all the institutions of ordinary people were dismantled—bowling alleys, civics centres and neighbourhood organisations—there is no longer a sense of a collective endeavour. As a result, the groups best positioned to get something for themselves were all upper-middle-class and upper-class citizens who sought positions in the halls of power. Chibber narrates how these groups, having abandoned collective struggles, chose to access social power through a language that drew upon identity—gender and race—cashing in on identity while parsing out the universe into smaller and smaller slices, with each group staking claims to being “the most oppressed.” Appraising how such a tiny, minoritarian movement like the transgender movement was given such an enormous amount of power in the United States by the Democrats, Chibber maintains that this adornment of power from above immediately absolved that lobby of the responsibility or necessity of having to seek alliances, thus leading to a toxic political culture of calumniation and slurs.  Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Almut Rochowanski, a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, critiques the “NGO-industrial complex,” particularly concerning the impact of foreign funding on civil society development within new democracies. Covering her testimony at the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in the US Congress, on the topic of “Laws Regulating Foreign NGOs: Human Rights Implications,” Rochowanski draws from her experience with NGOs in former Soviet states, including Russia and Ukraine, and discusses the structural realities of foreign-funded NGOs at the intersection of class, education, nepotism, and accountability failures. Rochowanski highlights the complex relationships between foreign donors, governments, and NGOs, stressing how the actual beneficiaries often become secondary to donor agendas. She argues that foreign funding cannot be neutral, as it embeds donor priorities into recipient countries, corrupting local policies and necessitating NGOs to align more with Western mandates than local needs. This tendency results in NGOs, widely deemed “foreign agents” by domestic authorities and citizens, undermining local governance and democratic sovereignty, ultimately harming the societies they aim to assist by displacing state roles in service provision and policy development, while these bodies often encroach on democratic sovereignty. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Marta Havryshko, a historian specializing in Holocaust Pedagogy and Antisemitism Studies at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, examines Ukraine's ethno-nationalist legacy and its anti-Semitic past. She highlights instances of anti-Jewish violence and pogroms, noting that many Ukrainians, including prisoners of war, collaborated with German auxiliary units during World War II, particularly in the formation of a Ukrainian SS battalion within the Waffen-SS. Havryshko points out a significant gap in the national memory of Ukraine, where the suffering of Jewish individuals is acknowledged only superficially, while Ukrainian involvement in pogroms remains largely unrecognized. She critiques the portrayal of Ukrainian nationalist heroes—freedom fighters who often engaged in ethnic cleansing—as central figures in history, with their narrative overshadowing the suffering they inflicted on others, thus creating a hierarchy of suffering in the retelling of Ukraine's past. Havryshko traces the revival of historical celebrations of ethno-nationalists, such as Stepan Bandera, while noting the reluctance of contemporary Ukrainian leaders to confront the existence of neo-Nazi elements within the military. Referencing her research on the Waffen-SS Galicia Division, Havryshko discusses how Ukraine's neo-Nazi groups have historically found support in the West, largely due to their value as intelligence sources during the Cold War, despite being specifically labeled as “fascists” and “murderers” in CIA reports. Similarly today, Havryshko notes how the mythology of the Ukraine hero continues within the current war with Russia, as the stories of the sexual violence perpetrated by Ukraine forces are elided, not least because the victims of sexual violence in this conflict are primarily men and boys. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Volodymyr Ishchenko, currently at the Institute for East European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, discusses his latest book, Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War (Verso, 2024) and forthcoming paper “Post-Soviet vicious circle: revolution as a reproduction of a crisis of hegemony” (co-authored with Oleg Zhuravlev). Historicising how post-Soviet revolutions in Ukraine have functioned, Ishchenko considers how the 2014 Euromaidan revolution produced a weaker state whose fate, instead of being decided by Moscow, has been directed by Washington or Brussels. Delineating how the 2022 war is, in part, the culmination of Ukraine’s history in relationship to Russia, where cross-national capital allied itself with the local professional middle classes and where anti-nationalist arguments clashed with the tendency to understand the war within the context of Ukraine’s perceived colonial struggle, Ishchenko observes how these primordial, ethno-nationalist readings lend themselves to a larger teleology. Detailing how the war in 2022 becomes the culmination of this story, a sort of parable of the struggling, emerging nation, Ishchenko explores how the narrative construction of Ukrainian nationhood mirrors the creation of the nation-state, like many countries from the 19th century onward. He also interrogates the various theories that proffer origins of the war as being rooted in the Russia-NATO conflict, as maintained by Jeffrey Sachs and John Mearsheimer. Instead, Ishchenko considers an alternative reading of this history, positing that the war in Ukraine has little to do with the inclusion of Ukraine within NATO, nor is it about NATO's inclusion of neighbouring countries. Instead, Ishchenko contends that the 2022 war is a culmination of Russia’s exclusion from the process and dialogues by and around NATO. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Nidhi Srinivas, Professor of Management at the New School, discusses his latest book, Against NGOs: A Critical Perspective on Civil Society, Management, and Development (Cambridge University Press, 2025), which brings together management and development studies to offer a critical perspective on NGOs, describing how they emerged as key agents of development. Analysing the historical and shifting roles that NGOs play as agents of development and disseminators of management doctrines, Srinivas elaborates how these organisations function in this current epoch of capitalist crisis, where universities today retain direct links to NGO managerialism and policy creation. He reviews the current age where we are on the verge of another global recession and world war while relying on Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks as a beacon for reading how we might see the world “differently” which he views as a political task, stating: “I would argue that the problem today is that a lot of education and the spheres of civil society where NGOs are based are not actually eager to offer that kind of a critique.” Observing how NGOs are often intimately connected to the system of power and delineating how the earliest definition of an NGO had nothing whatsoever to do with international development, Srinivas examines the mechanisms between governments, international agencies and civil society interrogating the relationship each holds to power, shying away from simplifying the role of NGOs as merely bad actors or glorifying the role of civil society. Srinivas emphasises the importance of critical theory and the Frankfurt School in his analysis of NGOs, confirming how ideas are shaped by history and that, in order to tackle the stages of capitalism, it is incumbent upon us to interrogate capitalism’s commitment to wealth, inequality, and how these ideas work within our souls. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe

Alison Gaffney, a mother of two from Corby, Northamptonshire, discusses how she and her partner, Andy Hinde, learned in 2018 that their seventeen-month-old son was diagnosed with a rare cancer, which they believe was caused by the botched disposal of millions of tonnes of contaminated waste after the closure of Europe’s largest steelworks in Corby, Northamptonshire, in 1980. While a 2009 civil case linked the council’s negligent clean-up of the site to a cluster of birth defects in local children in the 1980s and 1990s, dramatised earlier this year in the Netflix series Toxic Town, Gaffney tells a different part of this story which addresses the environmental contamination in Corby and those who have experienced childhood cancer dating back to 1984. Now, leading a campaign which represents approximately 50 families, Gaffney recounts the group’s struggle to access environmental information and how recently these families have been denied valuable data by the council after requesting a list of sites in Corby that were potentially contaminated following the steelworks’ closure in 1980, through the reclamation of the steelworks that began in 1984 and continued through the 1990s. Expounding the group’s ongoing struggle to have the local council cooperate with the parents’ request to reveal the areas of contaminated land in and around Corby, to test for contamination, and for the government to create a national registry that records the precise locations of environmental damage as per Zane’s Law, Gaffney maintains that her mission is to ensure that there will never again be cases of childhood cancer due to preventable ecological damage such as that which occurred in Corby. Get full access to Savage Minds at savageminds.substack.com/subscribe