In their latest article in Jacobin Magazine Mitchell Institute Fellow Dr Tristan Sturm and co-author Rory Rowan, argue that Peter Thiel’s apocalyptic geopolitics delegitimizes international law, legitimizes violence against racialized others, and sanctifies elite tech wealth as a last bulwark against a coming apocalypse.  By remapping material power structures onto a metaphysical struggle, Thiel mystifies US imperialism, class privilege, and his own corporate interests as divine vocation.

His Armageddon is not so much a prophecy of world’s end as a rhetoric to legitimize the sovereignty of technocapitalist elites against the moral claims of the global majority and the planetary commons.  Nor is the one-world government he fears a coherent political project; it is rather a condensation of reactionary anxieties about perceived loss of sovereignty, moral relativism, and technological democratization.

Read article here.

Dr Tristan Sturm

Dr Tristan Sturm is a Mitchell Institute Fellow and Reader in Geography at Queen’s University Belfast. Most recently he is co-author of Apocalyptic Conspiracism: American Evangelicalism in an Age of Climate Crisis (Bloomsbury 2024).

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