Radhika Desai

Radhika Desai (born 1963) is a Canadian political scientist of Indian origin, who is currently serving as a professor at the University of Manitoba in Canada., and is also the director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group. She is the Convenor of the International Manifesto Group.

Desai is best known for her book Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire, in which she puts forward the concept of geopolitical economy, an historical materialist approach to the understanding of the international relations of the age of capital, which Marx called ‘the relations of producing nations’.

Biography After successfully completing her bachelor's degree in political science at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in India, Desai continued her academic education at Queen's University in Canada, where she completed her master's degree in 1986 and received her Ph.D. in 1992. From 1992 to 2006, she taught at the University of Victoria, and since 2006 she has been at the University of Manitoba.

Radhika Desai has served as the Treasurer (2014–16) and then president (2016-2020) of the Society for Socialist Studies

Positions In her 2013 book, Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire she proposed geopolitical economy as a new and more accurate approach to the understanding of the international relations of the world of capitalism, drawing chiefly on the Marxist and other compatible traditions. In doing so, she was also quite critical of ‘Marxist economics’ and ‘Western Marxism’ which tend not to understand the necessary relation between capitalism and imperialism theoretically. In place of these, she returns to Marx and Engels’s original understanding of capitalism as contradictory value production. The contradictions of capitalism require an interventionist state, both to develop capitalism and to stabilize it on an ongoing basis, whether through domestic or international actions, the latter amounting to imperialism.

In her work on India, she has proposed a new way of understanding the transition from Congress to Hindutva in Indian politics through a multilayered analysis, founded on the political limitations of the post-Independence Nehruvian project. They led to the progressive marketization of economic policy since the late 1960s, including in agriculture. The social result was the expansion of the capitalist class. In party politics, it has led to a decline of Congress, the rise of parties of the provincial propertied classes and the electoral success of the party of Hindutva. Desai has demonstrated the viability of this framework in the case of the 2004, 2009, 2014 and the 2024 General Elections.

Selected publications

Books

2023. Coronavirus and Capitalism: A Geopolitical Economy, Routledge 2022. Beyond the Global Crisis: Noonomy, Creativity, Geopolitical Economy. With S.D. Bodrunov and Alan Freeman, S.Y. Witte INID St. Petersburg. 2022. International Economic Governance in a Multipolar World, Routledge, 2022 2021. (Co-edited) Revolutions, Routledge, 2021, (with Henry Heller) 2020. (Co-edited) The Enduring Legacy of Karl Polanyi, Geopolitical Economy series. Manchester: Manchester University Press. (with Kari Polanyi Levitt). 2017. (Co-edited) Russia, Ukraine and Contemporary Imperialism, with Boris Kagarlitsky and Alan Freeman, London: Routledge, 2017, being a reprint of Russia, Ukraine, and Contemporary Imperialism, Special issue of International Critical Thought, Vol 6, no. 4, December 2016, co-edited by Boris Kagarlitsky and Alan Freeman 2016. (Edited) Analytical Gains in Geopolitical Economy: Volume 30-Part B of Research in Political Economy, 2015, Bingley: Emerald, 2016. 2015. (Edited) Theoretical Engagements in Geopolitical Economy, Volume 30-Part A, Research in Political Economy, Bingley: Emerald, 2015. 2013. Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire, Future of World Capitalism series, London: Pluto Press, 2013. (with Paul Zarembka) 2008. (Edited) Developmental and Cultural Nationalisms, Routledge, London, 2009 (reprint of Developmental and Cultural Nationalisms, Special Issue of Third World Quarterly Guest Editor, Vol. 29, No. 3, 2008. 281 pp.) 2004. Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics, Second Revised Edition, Three Essays, New Delhi, 2004.