Kees van der Pijl (born 15 June 1947) is a Dutch political scientist who was professor of international relations at the University of Sussex.
In 1983 he received his doctorate at the University of Amsterdam on a thesis titled Imperialism and Class Formation in the North Atlantic Area, supervised by Gerd Junne.
With Henk Overbeek, Ries Bode, Otto Holman, Bastiaan van Apeldoorn and others, this created a tentative Amsterdam School of global political economy.
[2][3] In 2000, Van der Pijl moved to the United Kingdom to take up the chair in international relations at the University of Sussex, vacant after the retirement of Professor Michael Nicholson.
It built on the writings of Christian Palloix, Nikos Poulantzas, Alfred Sohn-Rethel and on the materialist Cold War history in the United States (Joyce and Gabriel Kolko).
In Transnational Classes and International Relations (Routledge 1998), neoliberalism is identified as the hegemonic concept of control in the closing decades of the 20th century.
The Lockean heartland has interacted with rival states seeking to impose themselves on their societies, to balance and withstand the influence of the liberal West and avoid colonisation.
This line of analysis, developed in Transnational Classes and International Relations and more recently in Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq (Pluto and Sage-Vistaar 2006, Turkish trans., Imge 2014) leads to the identification of China as the current primary contender.
Just as Marx developed a critique of equilibrium economics by claiming that this was only one ‘mode of production’, which had been preceded and would be followed by others, Van der Pijl in this project challenges the 'IR' paradigm.
In 2018, Van der Pijl said that Israelis brought down the Twin Towers during the 9/11 attacks "with help from Zionists in the US government", leading to condemnation by Jewish groups and others.