Accumulating Insecurity: Violence and Dispossession in the Making of Everyday Life

by Shelley Feldman (Editor), Charles Geisler (Editor), Gayatri A. Menon (Editor), Amy Siciliano (Contribution by), Anna Zalik (Contribution by)

Overview

Accumulating Insecurity examines the relationship between two vitally important contemporary phenomena: a fixation on security that justifies global military engagements and the militarization of civilian life, and the dramatic increase in day-to-day insecurity associated with contemporary crises in health care, housing, incarceration, personal debt, and unemployment.

Contributors to the volume explore how violence is used to maintain conditions for accumulating capital. Across world regions violence is manifested in the increasingly strained, often terrifying, circumstances in which people struggle to socially reproduce themselves. Security is often sought through armaments and containment, which can lead to the impoverishment rather than the nourishment of laboring bodies. Under increasingly precarious conditions, governments oversee the movements of people, rather than scrutinize and regulate the highly volatile movements of capital. They often do so through practices that condone dispossession in the name of economic and political security.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820338736
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	03/15/2011
Series:	Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation Series , #9
Pages:	318
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

SHELLEY FELDMAN is a retired professor of sociology at Cornell University. She is author or editor of three previous books including Unequal Burden: Economic Crises, Persistent Poverty, and Women’s Work.

CHARLES GEISLER is a professor of sociology at Cornell University. He is the author or editor of eight previous books including Property and Values: Alternatives to Public and Private Ownership.

GAYATRI A. MENON is a visiting assistant professor of sociology at Franklin and Marshall College.

Shelley Feldman (Editor)
SHELLEY FELDMAN is a retired professor of sociology at Cornell University. She is author or editor of three previous books including Unequal Burden: Economic Crises, Persistent Poverty, and Women’s Work.

Charles Geisler (Editor)
CHARLES GEISLER is a professor of sociology at Cornell University. He is the author or editor of eight previous books including Property and Values: Alternatives to Public and Private Ownership.

Gayatri A. Menon (Editor)
GAYATRI A. MENON is a visiting assistant professor of sociology at Franklin and Marshall College.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A New Politics of Containment
Shelley Feldman, Gayatri Menon, and Charles Geisler

Part One. Rights In Suspension

Martha McCluskey
From The Welfare State to the Militarized Market: Losing Choices, Controlling Losers

Julie Nice
Poverty as an Everyday State of Exception

Paula Johnson
Beyond Displacement: Gentrification of Racialized Spaces as Violence—Harlem, New York, and New Orleans, Louisiana

Deborah Cowen and Amy Siciliano
Schooled in/Security: Surplus Subjects, Racialized Masculinity, and Citizenship

Tyrell Haberkorn
Dispossessing Law: Arbitrary Detention in Southern Thailand

Part Two. Fugitive Corporeality

Nicholas De Genova
Spectacle of Terror, Spectacle of Security

Claudia Aradau
Securing life: Human Trafficking, Biopolitics and the Sovereign Pardon

Shelley Feldman
Surveillance and Securitization: The New Politics of Social Reproduction

Part Three. Displacement of Politics

Zakia Salime
Securing the Market, Pacifying Civil Society, Empowering Women The Middle East Partnership Initiative

Charles Geisler
Accumulating Insecurity: The Dispossession of Immigrants

Anna Zalik
Protest-as-Violence in Oilfields: The Contested Representation of Profiteering in Two Extractive Sites

Melissa Wright
National Security versus Public Safety: Femicide, Drug Wars and the Mexican State

Pheng Cheah
Capitalizing Humanity: The Global Disposition of People and Things

Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

An excellent and timely collection of essays written by some of the most innovative scholars in critical legal and security studies. It will be of interest to senior undergraduate and graduate students and researchers in sociology, political science, geography, and law.

coeditor of Remapping Gender in the New Global Order - Janine Brodie

Does a superb job at investigating the diverse practices and contexts whereby the conditions of social reproduction have been rendered insecure. It will be of interest to scholars working in critical security studies, legal studies, terrorism studies, international political economy, critical geography, and sociology.

author of Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency - Peter Nyers

An excellent and timely collection of essays written by some of the most innovative scholars in critical legal and security studies. It will be of interest to senior undergraduate and graduate students and researchers in sociology, political science, geography, and law.”—Janine Brodie, coeditor of Remapping Gender in the New Global Order

“Does a superb job at investigating the diverse practices and contexts whereby the conditions of social reproduction have been rendered insecure. It will be of interest to scholars working in critical security studies, legal studies, terrorism studies, international political economy, critical geography, and sociology.”—Peter Nyers, author of Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency

From the Publisher