Mohammed Elnaiem is a PhD Candidate in Sociology who is training to become a historical sociologist with a focus on the history of capitalism and the global reparations movement. His project is to investigate whether capitalism, patriarchy and slavery can be seen as disparate phenemona or different facets of the same totality. To address this question, he puts various sociological and historiographical traditions into conversation with one another including – but not limited to – works from the black radical tradition, dependency theory, political Marxism, and feminist political economy.
He is also studying the CARICOM reparations commission, which he sees as a unique policy case study, primarily because it begins with a causal claim on the relationship between industrial capitalism and slavery, and takes state-level legislative action from there. It is the first, transnational and state-level body to advance claims for reparations. In its connection to the question of patriarchy, he is particularly interested in how the CARICOM reparations commission focuses on gender. Mohammed Elnaiem’s other research interests include imperialism, settler colonialism and racial capitalism.
