At the Margins of the Global Market

Contemporary scholars debate the factors driving despotic labour conditions across the world economy. Some emphasize the dominance of global market imperatives and others highlight the market's reliance upon extra-economic coercion and state violence. At the Margins of the Global Market engages in this debate through a comparative and world-historical analysis of the labour regimes of three global commodity-producing subregions of rural Colombia: the coffee region of Viejo Caldas, the banana region of Urabá, and the coca/cocaine region of the Caguán. By drawing upon insights from labour regimes, global commodity chains, and world historical sociology, this book offers a novel understanding of the broad range of factors - local, national, global, and interregional - that shape labour conditions on the ground in Colombia. In doing so, it offers a critical new framework for analysing labour and development dynamics that exist at the margins of the global market.

The Problem of State Violence

When violence occurs, the state has an obligation to respond to and reduce the impacts of it; yet often the state originates, or at least contributes to, the violence. This may occur in a variety of ways, including through the use of force by police, pretrial incarceration at local jails, long periods of incarceration in prisons, or abuse and neglect of people who are incarcerated. This essay explores the role of the state in responding to violence and how it should contribute to reducing violence in communities, as well as in its own operations. Finally, it explores what the future of collaboration between state actors and the community looks like and offers examples of successful power-sharing and co-producing of safety between the state and the public.

Memory, Imagination, and Resistance in Canada’s Prison for Women

A group of women who were incarcerated at Canada’s first federal Prison for Women (P4W) have been fighting to create a memorial garden since the prison closed in 2000. In 2017, the prison was sold to a private developer who plans to convert the historic building and grounds into condos, retail, and office space. What does it mean to remember the dead, and to fight for the living, at a time when neoliberal common sense demands the efficient conversion of a place of suffering and death into a “heritage building” on “prime real estate”? How might a collective practice of radical imagination help to resist the commodification of memory into a tourist attraction or an aesthetic improvement of private property? And what is the relation between memory, healing, and accountability in a place where state violence, gender domination, and settler colonialism intersect?

The Necropolice Economy: Mapping Biopolitical Priorities and Human Expendability in the Time of COVID-19

Necropolitics centers on the dark side of biopolitics, but if we are to take seriously Jacques Ranciere’s reassignment of ‘politics’ and ‘police,’ then what is revealed by necropolitical analysis is not simply the capacity to ‘make and let die’, but also the policing of a contingent order sustained by necropolitics. I describe this process as the necropolice-economy, and in this paper demonstrate its contours with reference to the COVID-19 pandemic which, I argue, has revealed the expendability of particular populations under conditions of risk and uncertainty. My analysis proceeds in three parts. First, I present the thesis of necropolice economy, arguing that the capitalist system has historically produced not simply a political economy, but a policed economy that induces a necropolitics of dispensability for unproductive or replaceable populations. Second, I develop this thesis by examining the relegation of society in relation to the economy amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Third, I argue that the inability of states to be decisive in the pandemic reveals that the sovereign prerogative to decide on the exception is constrained by capitalist forces. This suggests that the world market is itself a sovereign force, though it is one that remains ever dependent on state violence. To conclude, I ask whether we can channel the trauma of death made visible into processes of memorialization that might catalyze revolutionary action, rather than accelerating the evolution of our necropolice economy into its next capitalist guise—I ask, provocatively, whether an emancipatory necropolitics might yet result from the contemporary moment.

Political geography II: Violence

This report focuses on the diverse and multiple manifestations of political, state, and counter-state violence. Many of the examinations of political violence in this report highlight the continued need for disparate methodological and analytic lenses towards robust understandings of political violence across scales. Displacements and mobilities associated with flight from conflict are discussed in relation to the institutionalization of harm, trauma and containment through various state and supranational mechanisms of control. These mobilities include border crossings and associated violence against vulnerable populations seeking refuge. This is buttressed by discursive binary logics, such as us/them categorizations, which remain endemic to both structural and physical violence and foundational to right wing populism, jingoism, and other forms of political extremism. This report concludes by arguing the peace is not the opposite of war but rather its temporal substitute and partner in an assemblage of political and economic co-dependence.

South Sudan

When South Sudan gained independence in 2011, the whole world rejoiced. The country marked 10 years of independence on July 9, 2021, but on that occasion, as was the case for the previous decade, its people had very little to celebrate. The country had been gripped by both state violence and deadly ethnic feuds. The intense rifts in ethnic relations emanating from this cycle have become a major risk factor for mass atrocities. This paper aims to chronicle the atrocity crimes that have happened in South Sudan in the past 12 years, what drives them, and how they can be mitigated or stopped. It will also suggest what the international community can do to assist the South Sudanese to find justice, accountability for atrocity crimes and above all, how to reduce or end violence. The paper is based on a review of reports by human rights agencies, the United Nations agencies operating in South Sudan, independent researchers, academics and think tanks. It is also based on the author’s first-hand knowledge of the context and on numerous interviews with South Sudanese. The goal, however, is not to ask: what lessons have been learned from the ongoing efforts in the country?