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    Caravanserai   The Use of Islands in the Capitalist World-System      Marina Karides July 1, 2026  Islands appear to have stirred the global contemporary zeitgeist. Pacific Islanders who have been tending to the dangers and disappearance of their homelands by sea level rise for decades, have gained international attention. More recent is the preoccupation with Kharg island, Iran’s port for crude oil export. “Kharg Island Obliterated” was the headline of a White House social media post, dismissing, as often occurs, island worlds, in this case people with livelihoods and an ancient autochthonous population. Trump’s imperialism manifests in his preoccupation with islands. It is evinced by his relentless pursuit to acquire Greenland and his obsession with the Chagos Islands especially Diego Garcia, where a US run military facility sits (BBC 2026). In addition, Trump has requested $152 million to reopen Alcatraz as a maximum security prison extending ...
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briCs+, and Changing Geopolitics in the Twenty-First Century

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                     Caravanserai   briCs+, and Changing Geopolitics in the Twenty-First Century [1] Ravi Arvind Palat       June 2, 2026 [T]he day when the cosy club of the rich—the United States, the strongest economies of Western Europe, and Japan—sets the pace for the rest of the world, passing out instructions and assigning grades, is fast drawing to a close (French 2005) .   In 2023, two Bloomberg correspondents wondered how the “BRICS group of emergent market nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—has gone from a slogan dreamt up at an investment bank two decades ago to a real-world club that controls a multilateral lender” when the group was about to add four new members (Hancock & Cohen 2023) . This was astonishing because when Jim O’Neill (2001) of Goldman Sachs coined the acronym BRIC—South Africa was not in the original formulation—his purpose was to advocate the inclus...
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