The Capitalogenic Security Trilemma
Ecological (In)security as a Structural Condition of the Modern World-System
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2026.1435Keywords:
Balance Of Payments Constraint, Capitalocene, Core-Periphery, Metabolic Rift, Militarization, Unequal Ecological Exchange, World-Ecology, World-Systems Analysis, Cheap NatureAbstract
This article introduces the capitalogenic security trilemma, that is, a reconceptualization of the tension among social, trade, and national security in which ecological (in)security figures as a constitutive structural condition of the modern world-system rather than a contextual backdrop. Drawing on Moore’s world-ecology, we locate the source of ecological (in)security in capitalism’s appropriation of unpaid natures, and we specify two transmission mechanisms through which this contradiction stratifies the trilemma across the core-periphery hierarchy: the balance of payments constraint—the monetary form through which peripheral states are disciplined into extractivism—and unequal ecological exchange—the biophysical form through which the material preconditions of security are transferred to the core. Core militarization is the coercive technology through which the frontiers of appropriation are held open. The contribution to the world-systems literature is a unified theoretical model in which the monetary and biophysical asymmetries of the world-system, hitherto theorized in parallel, are shown to be two forms of a single circuit of appropriation, such that core security and peripheral insecurity are jointly produced rather than separately determined, with direct implications for the (in)efficacy of reform.
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