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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...
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.
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.
This book offers fresh perspectives on issues of food justice. The chapters emerged from a series of annual workshops on food justice held at Michigan State University between 2013 and 2015, which brought together a wide variety of interested people to learn from and work with each other. Food justice can be studied from such diverse perspectives as philosophy, anthropology, economics, gender and sexuality studies, geography, history, literary criticism, philosophy and sociology as well as the human dimensions of agricultural and environmental sciences. As such, interdisciplinary workshops are a much-needed vehicle to improve our understanding of the subject, which is at the center of a vibrant and growing discourse not only among academics from a wide range of disciplines but also among policy makers and community activists. The book includes their perspectives, offering a wide range of approaches to and conceptions of food justice in a variety of contexts. This invaluable work requires readers to cross boundaries and be open to new ideas based on different assumptions.
In the landmark Lavallee decision of 1990, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that evidence of "battered woman syndrome" was admissible in establishing self-defence for women accused of killing their abusive partners. This book looks at the trials of eleven battered women, ten of whom killed their partners, in the fifteen years since Lavallee. Drawing extensively on trial transcripts and a rich expanse of interdisciplinary sources, the author looks at the evidence produced at trial and at how self-defence was argued. By illuminating these cases, this book uncovers the practical and legal dilemmas faced by battered women on trial for murder.
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.
While contemporary inquiries into theoretical linkages between political economy and security are rare, the exploration of these connections formed the cornerstone of political, social and economic philosophy during the upheavals of post-feudal Europe. "A General Police System", a term borrowed from the late eighteenth century thinker Patrick Colquhoun, examines the overlapping genealogies of commerce, security, surveillance and the problem of poverty in the works of foundational English and Continental thinkers of the 17th to early 19th centuries. The authors thus revive the epic project of police and critically re-examine its drive to classify, regulate and control populations, providing a renewed materialist contribution toward a contemporary critique of security.
Excavates a global archive of refusal and ungovernability which challenges the statist political imagination of our time.