Boris Kagarlitsky, born in Moscow in 1958, was a dissident and political prisoner in the USSR under Brezhnev, then a deputy to Moscow city council (arrested again in 1993 under Yeltsin). Since 2007, he has run Institute for Globalization Studies and Social Movements in Moscow, a leading Russian leftist think tank. He is the editor of the online magazine Rabkor and an author of numerous books, of which the two most recent to appear in English are ”Empire of the Periphery” (Pluto) and “From Empires to Imperialism” (Routledge).