You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In the last thirty years bouncers have emerged as iconic gatekeepers of contemporary cool, exclusivity, and social capital in urban centres around the world. In this groundbreaking empirical study, Rigakos critiques the supposed liberating and expressive potential of nightclubs by theorizing them within the linked themes of risk, consumption and security in late capitalism. People attend nightclubs to be seen and see others, to consume others as aesthetic objects of desire and to elicit desire in others – the desire to be desired. This 'synoptic frenzy', according to Rigakos, fuses surveillance and aesthetic consumption. It fetishizes bodies and amplifies social capitals, producing optic v...
Security has reached an analytic blockage. The more security seems post-political, post-social, or even post-modern the more it escapes analytic scrutiny. The more security attaches itself to innumerable social relationships the more it becomes the very glue that binds social reality. Social problems become security problems while projects of pacification continue to be legitimized under the rubric of security. To be against security today is to stand against the entire global economic system. If security has become the dominant, perhaps impenetrable concept of our times, then we must start entertaining the impossible. We must begin asking: what would doing anti-security look like? Also cont...
What is security, and what is its relationship to capitalism? George S. Rigakos' explosive treatise charts the rise of the security-industrial complex. Starting from a critical appraisal of 'productive labour' in the works of Karl Marx and Adam Smith, Rigakos builds a conceptual model of pacification based on practices of dispossession, exploitation and the fetish of security commodities. Rigakos argues that a defining characteristic of the global economic system is its ability to productively sell (in)security to those it makes insecure. Materially and ideologically, the security-industrial complex is the blast furnace of global capitalism, fuelling the perpetuation of the system while feeding relentlessly on the surpluses it has exacted.
Security has become the pre-eminent organising principle of modern life, inextricably bound up with capital accumulation and Empire. This is the first sociological treatise on the security-industrial complex, offering a general theory of security based on a critical engagement with the works of Marx and Foucault.
Rigakos argues that for-profit policing and security companies adopt many of the tactics and functions of the public police, and are less distinguishable from the latter than has been previously assumed in the criminological literature.
The United States has poured over a billion dollars into a network of interagency intelligence centers called “fusion centers.” These centers were ostensibly set up to prevent terrorism, but politicians, the press, and policy advocates have criticized them for failing on this account. So why do these security systems persist? Pacifying the Homeland travels inside the secret world of intelligence fusion, looks beyond the apparent failure of fusion centers, and reveals a broader shift away from mass incarceration and toward a more surveillance- and police-intensive system of social regulation. Provided with unprecedented access to domestic intelligence centers, Brendan McQuade uncovers how the institutionalization of intelligence fusion enables decarceration without fully addressing the underlying social problems at the root of mass incarceration. The result is a startling analysis that contributes to the debates on surveillance, mass incarceration, and policing and challenges readers to see surveillance, policing, mass incarceration, and the security state in an entirely new light.
Public police forces are a regular phenomenon in most jurisdictions around the world, yet their highly divergent legal context draws surprisingly little attention. Bringing together a wide range of police experts from all around the world, this book provides an overview of traditional and emerging fields of public policing, New material and findings are presented with an international-comparative perspective, it is a must-read for students of policing, security and law and professionals in related fields.
The 2008 economic and financial crisis marked the beginning of a period of social transformation and uncertainty that continues to characterise present and future social development in unplanned and unexpected ways, with frequently harmful effects. It has highlighted the need for a deeper understanding of crises phenomena and how these affect the overall course of human development. On the one hand, the social sciences constitute a means for acquiring a better understanding of the character of the rapid and complex social transformations associated with crises. On the other hand, they can orientate people and social practices on how a greater degree of collective and democratic control can b...
The Routledge Handbook of International Critical Social Work is a companion volume to the Routledge Handbook of Critical Social Work. It brings together world-leading scholars in the field to provide additional, in-depth and provocative consideration of alternative and progressive ways of thinking about social work. Critical social work is increasingly involved in a global conversation, and as a subfield of social work it is rapidly becoming an interdisciplinary field in its own right and promoting novel forms of political activism. The Handbook showcases the global influences and path-breaking ideas of critical social work and examines the different stances taken on important political and ...
In spite of its widespread use within criminology, the term ’criminological imagination’, as derived from C. Wright Mills’ classic The Sociological Imagination, has yet to be fully developed and clarified as an analytic concept capable of guiding theorizing or empirical enquiry. This volume, with a preface by Elliot Currie, engages with and reflects on this concept, exploring C. Wright Mills’ work for criminological enquiry. Bringing together the latest work of leading scholars in the fields of criminology and sociology from around the world, C. Wright Mills and the Criminological Imagination investigates the emergence and lineage of a criminological concept indebted to Mills’ thou...