Description:
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.Brief description: 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.
Review Quotes:
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"