This book includes five articles published in recent years at the New Left Review about the behavior of three important countries in their respective areas of influence: Egypt, India and Turkey. Given a very diverse weight on the world board, India displays a truly decisive impact on the Asian board and is in its own right a global actor, who struggles for rearranging at full speed to the changing international environment. The other two unequal medium rank actors have different geopolitical and political characteristics. Turkey, the case of the most powerful of them, has regional hegemonic claims in part real and partly reminiscent of his Ottoman past, while Egypt is prey to a design design to the western order without further pretensions than fulfilling the function of protecting the western flank Israelí and take care of the uninterrupted flow of merchandise through the Suez Canal, according to the United States designs in the region.

The specific issue raised by the book is, on the one hand, the authoritarian orientation that these three countries acquire in the current political cycle and the modalities and specificities that each of them assumes according to their respective historical trajectories, as well as, on the other , the finding that the current phase of systemic chaos and the usual reduction of any postwestphalian and postneoliberal horizon of political organization have meant the resurgence of the most authoritarian and reactionary characteristics at the scale of the capitalist world-system and of almost all of their units political-state.