news feature Europe could be a battlefield this weekend, but future casualties may likely far outstrip those of the present. Two international summits this week could prove to have a huge impact on global politics and the environment.

Leaders of the group of seven most industrialised countries and Russia gather this weekend in Genoa, Italy accompanied by selected champions of the developing world. They are also expected to encounter up to100,000 protestors, largely from the G8 nations.

Authorities have ringed the airport with anti-aircraft missiles and newspapers have circulated rumours of large police orders of body-bags and the preparation of a mass grave outside the city (which I now duly circulate to you, dear reader).

Simultaneously, in Bonn, Germany the Kyoto process on climate change is set to continue or collapse. Having failed to reach an agreement in the Hague last November, the United Nations (UN) secretariat has called for a resumed session in order to rescue the talks before the next full round in Marrakech this November.

In contrast to last November, negotiators now face the fossil-fuel friendly Bush administration and increased resistance from Australia and Japan.

What we are presented with in both cases is the political rift emerging at the top tier of the global order, their reluctance to pursue equitable and responsible global solutions, and the potentially horrific consequences of this reluctance.

What do I mean by this? Two recent books will illustrate my point.

Empire

How could a book written by a left-wing American academic and an Italian political prisoner possibly be held up as recommended reading for G8 leaders in Genoa?

This is precisely the suggestion of the London Observer regarding Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. This is a book that, since its publication in March 2000 (in simultaneous French and English editions), has raised waves and vigorous debate in academic and cultural circles.

When a 500-page book spanning disciplines ranging from juridical theory to the rise of modern humanism to an attempted rehabilitation of communism is selling like proverbial hot cakes and one 'can't find a copy in New York for love nor money', there is obviously something afoot in the popular imaginary.

Empire sets out to describe the conceptual framework of our present global order and how it differs from its predecessor, imperialism. It does not stop there, it also claims that the present period offers greater opportunities than ever for insurrection and an humanist revolution. It is thus of interest to both the eight leaders of the most powerful nations and the 100,000 protestors planning to greet them.

In fact, it is such a pyramidal structure that authors Hardt and Negri claim characterises global order. Drawing by analogy on the structure of the Roman empire they point out that the present Empire is a hybrid structure of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy.

Peace and slaughter

The uppermost tier is occupied by the United States, the premier hegemon of force, although it prefers to conduct collaborative efforts through the umbrella of the United Nations or Nato.

Immediately underneath, and still within the monarchic tier are the small groups of largely ex-imperial nation-states who collectively control the global monetary instruments and regulate international exchanges.

They gather in a variety of forms: the G7 nations, the Davos World Economic Forum, Bilderberg, the Paris and London Clubs and so forth. Although the practice of the Empire is 'continually bathed in blood', it is ostensibly dedicated to the pursuit of peace. "They make slaughter and they call it peace."

The second tier is occupied by the networks and markets erected by transnational corporations along which flow capital, technology and populations. Also on this tier are the 'lesser' sovereign nation-states who act as 'filters of the flow of global circulation and regulators of the articulation of global command; in other words, they capture and distribute the flows of wealth to and from the global power, and they discipline their own populations as much as this is still possible'.

The third and broadest tier of the pyramid consists of groups that represent popular interests in the global order. Democracy is not direct, rather it is at one or several removes.

Here the authors declare their disavowal and hostility towards attempts at representation. A 'People' or 'the People' is a representational construct which is at best imperfectly simulated in forums such as the United Nations General Assembly or through civil society (media, religious institutions and non-governmental organisations).

Earth's wretched

The global peoples, what Hardt and Negri call the 'multitude', are by process absent from the pyramid. As a French philosopher famously remarked: "The people no longer exist, or not yet ... the people are missing."

In contrast to the Roman or previous empires, in the present Empire there is no singular edifice that is the symbolic storehouse of power. No Bastille, no Winter Palace, no Rome.

Instead, the command apparatus shifts nomadically, the WTO may gather in Seattle or elsewhere, the G8 meets in Genoa but not exclusively, the EU Summit was held in Gothenburg but will now gather in Brussels. The monarchic body is spatially diffuse.

The body of Empire is thus in contact with the entirety of the multitude and explosions of their dissatisfaction can immediately pierce the virtual centre of Imperial command. The authors point to the Los Angeles riots and recent Seattle protests as examples, although such insurrection is by no means exclusive to the G8 nations.

Protestors converging on Genoa this week, sometimes disparagingly described as a 'travelling anarchist circus', come to bring voice to the wretched of the earth, challenge the shackles of debt, and halt cultural and ecological ruin.

Many will pursue this peacefully, others more aggressively. These are demands that exceed the capacity of Empire to stage-manage with its media apparatus. Those who manufacture consent have hit the brick wall of the Unrepresentable.

Theoretical ecstasy

'The people are missing' precisely because they cannot be represented within the framework of Empire, for to do so would explode its contradictions and entail the realisation that the apparatus is dedicated to anything but the pursuit of peace and happiness.

It was never designed for the global multitude, but rather for the few. Here lies the basis for Battlefield Genoa. It is less about the spectacle of street confrontations than the deep inequalities of power in our world.

Empire is a complex and wide-ranging work and there is not space here to detail all that is productive or contentious about it. The writers tend to indulge in theoretical ecstasy, if one can imagine communism as a romantic discourse then this may be an example of it, and they also often fail to duly acknowledge those from whom their theories are cannibalised.

They have nonetheless reinvigorated a somewhat tired debate and brought it back into the mainstream. Yet, sometimes there is no substitute for sober yet impassioned scholarship, in this respect Mike Davis is exemplary.

Late Victorian Holocausts

Davis' book has been described as a 'veritable black book of liberal capitalism' detailing the 'unfettered violence of primitive accumulation'. Sixty million Asian, Latin American and African peasants perished in 'colonial genocides' between 1870 and 1906.

The expansion of the world market coincided with one of the most severe El Nino Southern Oscillations (Enso) of the last two centuries.

The drought developed into a sustained period of famine, sustained by imperial expansion of the world market, peasant commercialisation, declining terms of trade, distortions around the Gold Standard and the harsh strategic reckoning of the colonial state apparatuses.

The ensuing holocaust, Davis argues, paved the way for the formation of a 'Third World' crippled beyond the point of recovery. It is here that a decisive break enters between North and South that produces the 'champagne glass' distribution of wealth we have today. In 1700, Timbuktu and Oxford were comparable centres of cosmopolitan learning, by 1900 the gulf between them was immeasurable.

While peasants starved to death in the Indian agricultural heartland, British-run railways continued to ship grain to the coast for export to London. Between 1875 and 1900 Indian cereal exports trebled from three to ten million tons a year.

Ecological collapse

A not dissimilar arrangement exists now, as critics such as Vandana Shiva have pointed out. India produces more than enough grain for its own consumption, subsistence should theoretically not exist.

However, trade agreements ensure that much grain is exported to the United States (US), leaving inadequate amounts to feed India. Consequently, India needs to purchase grain - grain that it produced - at terms of trade favourable to the US.

Food relief in Brazil was corrupted by local elites; drought was good business. The British Raj, under the command of Lord Lytton, Victoria's favourite poet, merely gnashed its collective teeth in frustration as they sought to milk the maximum tax revenue from the starving millions. Peasants in India and North Africa were already immiserated by a long depression from the 1870s.

The upshot of such approaches as these were mortality rates of 30-40 percent in Southern India, occasional cannibalism and slavery in Africa and China, cholera epidemics following food shortages, and ecological collapse.

In addition to the investigation into political ecology detailed above, Davis also charts the scientific advances leading to the discovery of the coupling between the tropical Pacific and the world climate system and their relation to the warm (El Nino) and cold (La Nina) cycles of Enso which readers should remember from the 1990s.

Interestingly, tropical meteorology had its roots in the East India Company who early on recognised the commercial imperative to predict weather cycles.

Indian over-breeding

Market, climate and imperium. All three proved key factors in determining who starved and why. The Lytton administration were devout followers of Thomas Malthus; famine was seen as a result of Indian over-breeding, drought was nature's will, to intervene would encourage the notion amongst the starving that they would be entitled to relief at all times.

Davis does not let us escape from the realisation that a merciless imperial market-mindedness was the over-determining factor in the late Victorian Holocausts.

Davis' intervention attempts to redress a gaping hole in the popular history of the West. An obsession with twentieth century holocausts has led to an eclipse of past holocausts.

At a recent lecture in London Davis noted that the history of the great famines was still taught in Indian schools, in Britain it is conspicuously absent. His thesis furthermore denies the liberal encouragement to acknowledge empire's economic benefit for the colonised.

Welcome 'deduction'

If we are to fruitfully combine some of the theses of Davis, Hardt and Negri we can see that we are faced with similar factors today. We have a single-minded market prone to sudden fluctuations, an Imperial apparatus that sustains and manages it, and the as-yet unresolved issue of climate change.

The Malthusian policies of Lytton re-emerged in the twentieth century with the structural adjustment and austerity programmes of the IMF and World Bank, and any sober analysis of the present international political order reveals that our age is far from guided by moral virtue.

The Imperial apparatus only stirs itself when its own immediate self-interest is at stake. The issue with Kosovo, Rwanda and Sierra Leone is not whether intervention was the right thing to do, but rather such questions were already too late and they furthermore tended to subsume the colonial-era problems under the glory of waging a 'just war'.

If a climate-related disaster occurs, such as a famine, we can be sure that its roots will not be strictly ecological, as Davis has shown we must account for inexorable logic of the world market and the harsh Malthusian view of human nature taken by the Imperial apparatus.

Where some might see people, others may only see proliferating numbers, such that a famine becomes a welcome 'deduction'. Holocausts are an organised business, in their modern form they require a techno-scientific competence and a blunt indifference to the suffering of a nominal Other (call it racism if you like). In the Kyoto process this is also accompanied by a selfish reticence on the part of market interests.

Battle for life

Tens of millions have already perished in the last century through such politics, their deaths have clearly not made an impact on the countries obstructing the Kyoto process, the US chief among them. What are we to infer from this?

Two important threads in the fate of this world are tied together by Genoa and Bonn. Genoa could well prove to be a battleground this weekend, although many hope that this will not be the case.

Bonn will likely be much quieter, but the eventual consequences could be a horrific repeat of the late Victorian holocausts. Currently 840 million people are so deprived of food that they suffer calorific undernourishment. Global media and civil society notwithstanding, theirs is largely a slow silent death. This is a persistent violence that outstrips the clashes that have marked summits of late.

The gap between North and South is already insufferably wide, it must not become irretrievably so. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has observed that economic disparity and political disempowerment are the crucial factors at stake. In Bonn and Genoa this weekend is a battle over the future of life itself.

YIN SHAO LOONG is presently studying a masters in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, London. The writer's articles examine contemporary debates on power, freedom, history and globalisation in the new world order.