EMPIRE AS A CONCEPTUALIZATION OF ‘INTERNATIONAL’ IN THE AGE OF GLOBALISATION

The primary objective of this article is to present an up-to-date and analytically valid conception of contemporary international politics by mainly drawing on the seminal work of Hardt and Negri (2000) called Empire. In line with this objective, this study argues that Empire, as a theoretical framework, provides a more comprehensive analysis of today’s globalising world. However, rather than explaining the constitution of Empire in mainly juridical and political terms, as Hardt and Negri did, this study aims to present a slightly different reading of the conception of Empire by associating the matter with the transnationalization of capital, state and social relations of production widely labelled as globalization. To that end, the article puts the conception of Empire into a more concrete economic context by placing particular emphasis on factors such as capital accumulation process, class formation and state-capital relations as understood in the theory of Global Capitalism.