Search the archive.

The building of resilient places also lies at the core of many bottom-up initiatives focused on the development of alternative economic practices and spaces. Initiatives such as community agriculture and barter economy movements are typically focused on creating more robust economic and social spaces by empowering producers and consumers to interact locally, seeking to reduce dependence upon distant and larger scale agents, namely non-local and large corporations and the nation state (Leitner et al., 2007). However, the discourse of resilience features most prominently in the Transition Towns movement that provides a useful means of illustrating what strategies for regional resilience might look like and how they might be progressed.

The Transition Towns movement seeks to encourage communities to explore methods for reducing energy use in the era of peak oil, as well as increasing their economic, political and social self-reliance through a variety of place-based initiatives. These range from the development of local currencies to encourage the reduction of food miles and support local businesses through the retention of wealth and spending power locally (e.g. the Totnes pound in Devon, UK), as well as community gardens for food production, and various initiatives supporting waste reduction, re-use and recycling. The movement has spread quickly from its origins in Kinsale, Ireland, and there are now estimated to be over 100 communities recognised as official Transition Towns across the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, Chile and parts of Europe.

Rufaro Hamish Mushonga and Vupenyu Dzingirai, “Cosmopolitanism ‘from below’ and claim-making in the Global South,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 49, no. 1, 2023, pp. 157-159, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369183X.2021.2012138.

The notion of cosmopolitanism has many interpretations and genealogies. However, its many inflections from history, political theory, cultural studies and philosophy must be rethought from a postcolonial perspective (Appiah 2006; Balakrishnan 2017). Cosmopolitanism takes on various meanings, including, as a political project, a condition, an attitude, a practice and a worldview (Vertovec and Cohen 2002; Anderson 2004; Delanty 2009, 2012). The etymology of cosmopolitanism can be traced back to ancient Grecian philosophy, with cosmos denoting ‘world’ and polites denoting ‘citizen’. It refers to an individual who is a ‘world citizen’, who identifies in one way or another with ‘boundarylessness,’ and who has ‘an everyday, historically alert, reflexive awareness of ambivalences in localities of muddling differentiations’ (Beck 2006, 3, cited in Tzaninis 2020).

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center), vol. 30, no. 1, 2007, pp. 63-65, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40241677

SUBALTERN COSMOPOLITANISM

Tamara Caraus and Elena Paris, “Introduction: Migrant Protests as Radical Cosmopolitics,” Migration, Protest Movements and the Politics of Resistance: A Radical Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, Routledge 2019, pp. 9-10.

The Trap of Methodological Nationalism

So far, biopolitics has been examined in relation to supporting and promoting the life of population. Foucault has pointed out, however, that biopolitics contains a fateful paradox. At the same time as fostering life, biopolitics also has the ability to disallow life ‘to the point of death’ (Foucault [1976]: 138). Death in this sense can be both literal and, importantly, indirect and metaphorical. As well as forms of social death through marginalization and exclusion, this can include, for example, the regular exposure to risk associated with the way of life within mass consumer society (Foucault [1975–6]: 256; Beck 1992). While Western states support and promote life to the full, through mass transport systems, centralized food chains, agribusiness, manufactured vulnerabilities, carbon emissions or pollution, people are also directly or indirectly exposed to unprecedented risk and violence ‘in the most profane and banal ways. Our age is the one in which a holiday weekend produces more victims on Europe’s highways than a war campaign’ (Agamben 1998: 114). In decoding life itself, bio- genetics is creating the potential for new and far-reaching forms of social exclusion that can as yet only be glimpsed. As Harvey, Bauman and Agamben would no doubt agree, this is possible because we are now all potentially surplus to requirements.

The paradox of biopolitics is graphically expressed in the emergence of total war in Europe at the same time as the appearance of social insurance and the welfare state. During the nineteenth century, as the state began to consolidate its ability to promote and support life at the level of population, the simultaneous modernization of warfare was exposing that same population to death on a widening scale. The great world wars of the twentieth century not only established the paradigm of total war, they were formative events in the spread of social insurance and the emergence of a centralizing welfare state (Thane 1989). The biopolitical tension between the state’s increasing power to optimize collective life and its ability to wage war at the level of entire societies is expressed in Foucault’s often quoted argument that wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended, ‘they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital’ (Foucault [1976]: 137).

Unlike many environmental problems where the cause Unlike many environmental problems where the causes and impacts are distributed more locally, climate change is a true global challenge making GHG emissions a global externality. GHG emissions contribute to damages around the world regardless of where they are emitted. The global nature of GHGs means that U.S. interests, and therefore the benefits to the U.S. population of GHG mitigation, cannot be defined solely by the climate impacts that occur within U.S. borders. Impacts that occur outside U.S. borders as a result of U.S. actions can directly and indirectly affect the welfare of U.S. citizens and residents through a multitude of pathways. Over 9 million U.S. citizens lived abroad as of 2016-17 and U.S. direct investment positions abroad totaled nearly $6 trillion in 2019. Climate impacts occurring outside of U.S. borders will have a direct impact on these U.S. citizens and the investment returns on those assets owned by U.S. citizens and residents. The U.S. economy is also inextricably linked to the rest of the world. . . . The global nature of GHGs means that damages caused by a ton of emissions in the U.S. are felt globally and that a ton emitted in any other country harms those in the U.S. Therefore, assessing the benefits of U.S. GHG mitigation activities will require consideration of how those actions may affect mitigation activities by other countries since those international actions will provide a benefit to U.S. citizens and residents.74

This analysis emphasizes (and specifies) the interconnectedness argument and also nods in the direction of the reciprocity argument. As we shall now see, these arguments have played an important role in federal court.

There are obvious and (to some people) surprising similarities between climate change and inequality. First, both are obviously global problems. Neither can be solved by a single country, group or individual. In both cases, there are significant externalities and, consequently, coordination problems. Both issues are even formally linked (that is, not only conceptually): On average, carbon emissions increase at the same rate as economic activity grows. This means not only that if a person’s (or country’s) income increases by 10 percent, emissions will also increase by 10 percent, but that the distribution of emitters mimics the distribution of income. Since in the global income distribution the top decile receives at least 50 percent of global income, it is also responsible for at least one half of all emissions. But there are also significant differences. The effects of global inequality are in part the product of high within-country inequalities that obviously have to be dealt with at the level of nation-states. There are only two parts of rising inequality that are truly global. The first is that high global inequality also means high global poverty; the second is that high global inequality is to a significant extent the result of high inequality between countries’ incomes, which in turn fuels migration. The issue of global poverty is an ethical issue for all those who are not poor, but does not otherwise affect those who are not poor in their daily lives. Moreover, since the non-poor do not share the same space with the global poor, they tend to ignore them in their daily lives. Migration is thus the only concrete manifestation of global inequality that affects people in rich countries. The benefits and costs of migration are unevenly distributed within the populations of rich countries. Some groups, for instance employers and workers with complementary skills, gain from migration, while others who compete with migrants lose. Global climate change is different, in the sense that its effects are mostly more remote in time and uncertain—its not clear who the winners and losers will be. Combating climate change requires individuals and countries to adjust their behavior (reduce their “footprint”) in order to forestall effects that lie in the future. The benefits of this adjustment are not always clear, however, while the costs of adjustment are obvious and present. Individual adjustment, while entailing often significant monetary or convenience cost for the person who does it, has close to zero effect on climate change and is therefore irrational to undertake from a purely personal perspective. Changing the behavior of larger groups, induced by taxation of especially “bad” activities, can produce effects, but the distribution of benefits from these adjustments is unknown. Even if the benefits were somehow equally distributed, a group that adjusted its behavior would receive a very small share of all benefits. It is a typical externality problem. This implies that no group of people and no individual country has an incentive to do anything to combat climate change by itself: they have to be roped into an international framework where everyone is compelled to reduce emissions and where, in the case of success, net benefits would most likely be distributed unequally. Indeed, this is what happened with the Kyoto and Paris accords, in which nearly every country in the world committed itself to explicit targets of reducing emissions. Nation-states are not the best units to combat climate change, because the emitters who should be targeted are the rich, regardless of where they live. A much more appropriate approach would be an international (global) taxation of goods and services consumed by the rich. But for that, one would need to have an international authority that would be allowed to tax citizens of different countries and collect revenues globally. Given the current global governance structure, such an agency is extremely unlikely to be created, since it would involve nation-states giving up a part of their monopoly on taxation of their citizens. As I mentioned above, there is a formal equivalence between global inequality and climate change. Migration, which to some is the strongest “negative” effect of global inequality, also requires international coordination. For example, the increased migration of Africans into Europe cannot be solved by any individual country alone—it can only be “solved,” or rather managed, by a joint action (distribution of quotas) involving both the emitting and receiving countries. Yet unlike climate change, which is basically considered an overall “bad,” migration is not an overall “bad” but rather an overall global good that reduces global inequality and global poverty, even if it may in some cases produce negative effects. Because of these real or putative negative effects (economic and social), we need rules that would assuage some people’s fears, lest these people stop and wreck the whole process of migration. This is where the idea of “circular migration” and differentiation between job-related rights (equal for all) and civic rights (not available to migrants) comes from (I discuss both in my book Global Inequality, as well as in my forthcoming book Capitalism, Alone). In the case of climate change, we are dealing with something that is essentially a “bad”, but we have trouble forcing those who are generating the bulk of this “bad” to pay for it and change their behavior. Thus, in one case (inequality) we cannot fully benefit from what is globally good (migration) because of the political power of some groups that are opposed to migration at the level of recipient nation-states. In the case of climate change, we cannot efficiently fight this “bad” because nation-states are unwilling to share their power of taxation with anybody else. In both cases, we are thus left trying to devise what may be called “second-best” solutions, mostly because of a political limitation called the nation-state.

Inger-Johanne Sand, “From National Sovereignty to International and Global Cooperation: The Changing Context and Challenges of Constitutional Law in a Global Society,” Scandinavian Studies in Law, 2012, pp. 276-279, https://www.scandinavianlaw.se/pdf/52-15.pdf.

2 Cross-boundary Dynamics and Problem Solving

This revision enables a better understanding of the “labor” dimension of the current crisis. By introducing the problematic of male domination and women’s emancipation, we can grasp crucial aspects of the present constellation that are occulted in more orthodox Polanyian accounts. It is true, of course, as these accounts suggest, that wage labor is everywhere in crisis as a result of neoliberal globalization–witness astronomical rates of unemployment, attacks on unions, and the involuntary exclusion of roughly two-thirds of the world’s population from official labor markets. But that is not all. In a further turn of the screw, much of the formerly unwaged activity of social reproduction is now being commodified– witness, the burgeoning global markets in adoptions, child-care, babies, sexual services, elder care, and bodily organs. Now add to this the fact it is increasingly women who are being recruited today into waged work. Thus, neoliberalism is proletarianizing those who still do the lion’s share of the unwaged work of social reproduction. And it is doing so at the very moment when it is also insisting on reduced public provision of social welfare and curtailed state provision of social infrastructure. The overall result is a deficit of care. To fill the gap, global capitalism imports migrant workers from poorer to richer countries. Typically, it is racialized and/or rural women from poor regions who take on reproductive and caring labor previously performed by wealthier women. But to do this, the migrants must transfer their own familial and community responsibilities to other, still poorer caregivers, who must in turn do the same–and on and on, in ever longer “global care chains.” Far from filling the care gap, the net effect is to displace it–from richer to poorer families, from the Global North to the Global South.

Here we see a new, intensified form of fictitious commodification. Activities that once formed the uncommodified background that made commodified labor possible are now themselves being commodified. The result can only be intensified crisis, as the tiger bites ever more deeply into its tail.

Judith Butler, “1: Nonviolence, Grievability, and the Critique of Individualism,” The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind, Verso 2020, non-paginated epub.

Let us now move from dependency to interdependency, and ask how that alters our understanding of vulnerability, of conflict, adulthood, sociality, violence, and politics. I ask this question because, at both a political and an economic level, the facts of global interdependency are denied. Or they are exploited. Of course, advertisements for corporations celebrate a globalized world, but that idea of corporate expansion captures only one sense of globalization. National sovereignty may be waning, and yet new nationalisms insist upon the frame. 11 So one reason it is so difficult to convince governments such as that of the United States that global warming is a real threat to the future of the livable world is that their rights to expand production and markets, to exploit nature, to profit, remain centered on the augmentation of a national wealth and power. Perhaps they do not conceive of the possibility that what they do affects all regions of the world, and that what happens in all regions of the world affects the very possibility of the continuation of a livable environment, one on which we all depend. Or perhaps they do know that they are in the midst of a globally destructive activity, and that too seems to them like a right, a power, a prerogative that should be compromised by nothing and no one.

A clear distinction must be made, therefore, between the reality of social inequality and the political problem of social inequality. National boundaries draw a sharp distinction between politically relevant and irrelevant inequality. Inequalities within national societies are enormously magnified in perception; at the same time inequalities between national societies are faded out. The ‘legitimation’ of global inequalities is based on an institutionalised ‘looking the other way’. The national gaze is ‘freed’ from looking at the misery of the world. It operates by way of a double exclusion: it excludes the excluded. And the social science of inequality, which equates inequality with nation-state inequal-ity, is unreflectively party to that. It is indeed astonishing how firmly global inequalities are ‘legitimated’ on the basis of tacit agreement between nation-state government and nation-state sociology – a sociology programmed to work on a nation-state basis and claiming to be value-free! My point is that while the performance principle legitimates national in-equality, the nation-state principle legitimates global inequality (in another form). How? The inequalities between countries, regions and states are ac-counted politically incomparable. In a perspective bounded by the nation state, politically relevant comparisons can only be played out within the nation state, never between states. Such comparisons, which make inequality politically ex-plosive, assume national norms of equality. Yet that is precisely what the national gaze fades out: the more norms of equality spread worldwide, the more global inequality is stripped of the legiti-mation basis of institutionalised looking away. The wealthy democracies carry the banner of human rights to the furthest corners of the earth, without noticing that the national border defences, with which they want to repel the streams of migrants, thereby lose their legitimation. Many migrants take seriously the pro-claimed human right of equality of mobility and encounter countries and states which – not least under the impact of increasing internal inequalities – want the norm of equality to stop short at their fortified borders. Put in other words, the conception of social class, based on principles of nationality and statehood, mis-leads analysis. Most theorists of class, including Bourdieu (1984), who thought so extensively about globalisation in his final years, identify class society with the nation state. The same is true of Wallerstein (1974, 1980, 1989), Goldthorpe (2002) and, incidentally, also of my individualisation thesis.

Pogge maintains that abject global poverty offers evidence of what he refers to as ‘radical inequality’. For Pogge, it is not only the extreme (both absolutely and relatively), pervasive, and persistent characteristics of global poverty that make it unjust, but most importantly that it is avoidable.57 As Pogge notes, if global poverty were simply a matter of ‘bad luck’, of the uncontrollable consequences of natural events and simple chance, then while it might be unfortunate it would not be unjust. Contrary to this, he counters that while it ‘is bad luck to be born into a family that is too poor to feed one . . . the fact that a quarter of all children are born into such families is not bad luck but bad organization’.58 Advancing what he calls an ‘institutional’ understanding of human rights, Pogge argues that the injustice of global poverty arises from the fact that it is produced by shared global institutions with which, under conditions of economic globalisation, we all are engaged in some form. In other words, within the global political and economic order we are all connected to extremely powerful institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO, which determine and mediate our relationships to one another to a significant degree insofar as they govern markets, trade, and foreign affairs. Because these institutions and the governments through which they operate constitute a highly integrated whole that designs and coordinates policies, decisions, and actors for the purpose of producing specific consequences, the outcomes of this scheme must be ascribed to identifiable social structures and agents.59 Hence, Pogge contends that radical inequality is an extreme injustice in that it foreseeably and avoidably results in the severe impoverishment of billions of human beings. Global poverty is not due simply to unavoidable extrasocial factors (although such factors, like natural disasters, may exacerbate the conditions of poverty) but most fundamentally to institutional design, decisions, and actions. What is crucial to note here is that feasible alternative decisions and actions can be taken; alternative institutional schemes can be implemented which do not produce pervasive, persistent, and radical inequality.60 That such alternatives are not adopted means that the worse-off are knowingly being starved and impoverished, as the foreseeable and avoidable conditions of extreme poverty are imposed upon them and they are coercively excluded from the benefits of economic globalisation. To put this all another way, the foreseeable and avoidable infliction of the ongoing harm of global poverty is a political evil, in the sense that it arises from a coordinated institutional scheme the effects of which make human beings superfluous. While it may not be the explicit intention of political leaders, and heads of multinational corporations and transnational financial institutions such as the World Bank and IMF to make a large portion of humanity superfluous, the fact that such a systemic outcome is knowingly perpetuated allows us to judge as radically unjust the institutional design and policies of the current global politico-economic order. For this reason, global poverty cannot be regarded as a ‘non-moral’ form of evil, that is, as a terrible event ‘that is not caused by human agency’ or that results from ‘unchosen’ human action.61 Given the case put forward by Pogge and others, this is a conclusion that has become difficult if not impossible to sustain. Rather, as George Kateb has argued, ‘deliberate impoverishment or neglect or correctable misery’ may be properly regarded as a moral and political evil.62 It is the structural nature of global poverty today that makes it possible to trace back to specific institutional contexts the agents and policies responsible for continuing radical inequality. And insofar as these structural conditions can be identified as the products of human agency, they may also be avoided through systemic change. Change may be difficult, of course, since structural violence becomes normalised in institutional conditions that produce or reinforce social, economic, and political disparities. In most cases the institutions that contain elements of structural violence are long-standing, giving these forms of violence an appearance of normality and even acceptability. As such they are ‘symptoms of deeper pathologies of power and are linked intimately to the social conditions that so often determine who will suffer abuse and who will be shielded from harm’.63 Those on the disadvantaged side of structural inequalities often are rendered voiceless as their suffering and concerns go unheard, and they remain invisible within a stratified social order.64 In effect, gross social inequalities inhibit the establishment of, in Arendt’s terms, a common world where each person is able to see this world ‘from the other person’s standpoint’.65

The appalling effects of global poverty have become crucially intertwined with contemporary economic globalisation, and should be seen against this background. I am not attempting to demonstrate here that global poverty is the only possible causal effect of globalisation. My point in what follows is to focus attention on the superfluity or dehumanisation of large segments of humanity which is manifested as one component of the globalisation of capitalism. Whatever else might be said about the potential benefits of economic globalisation - for clearly it has generated great wealth for some - it is also politically imperative to diagnose the worst offences of global capitalism as being none other than making numerous human beings superfluous. With this in mind, we must consider that globalisation has been accompanied by growing inequality, both between nations, in terms of the gap between the rich and the poor world, and within nations, as the rich get richer and the poor poorer. At present, around 1.2 billion human beings live on less than $1 a day, and another 1.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day. Further, around 850 million people are chronically malnourished, although 80 per cent of the malnourished in the developing world live in countries with food surpluses, and 1.3 billion people lack access to clean water.40 The global distribution of income reveals an extraordinarily high degree of structural inequality. The richest 20 per cent of the world’s population hold 75 per cent of the world’s income, while the poorest 40 per cent hold just 5 per cent. Nine out of every ten of the citizens of affluent countries are among the world’s richest 20 per cent, and ‘the gap between the average citizen in the richest and in the poorest countries is wide and getting wider’.41 In addition, the UN estimates that income, life expectancy, and literacy declined in 21 countries during the 1990s, this being a particularly dismal decade for sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.42 Roughly one third of all human deaths, some 50,000 daily, are due to poverty-related causes, and of these more than 10 million annually are children under five; in fact, ‘98% of children who die each year live in poor countries’.43 100 million children live on the streets; half a million women die during pregnancy or in childbirth every year; one million a year die of malaria and two million of tuberculosis; 44 and more than 40 million people are ____________ 39. Carlos Santiago Nino, Radical Evil on Trial (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), vii. 40. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2005 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 24. 41. Ibid., 36–7. 42. Human Development Report 2005, 21–3. 43. Ibid., 24. 44. World Health Organization, World Health Report 2004 (Geneva: WHO infected with HIV/AIDS, nearly two-thirds of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa.45 Despite such widespread yet preventable misery, total external debt for the world’s poorest countries in 2003 stood at a shocking $2.43 trillion,46 preventing any chance of addressing many of these issues. In light of this radical inequality, Manuel Castells speaks of the emergence within the global economy of a new ‘fourth world’.47 This refers to the emergence of an ‘underclass’ of ‘millions of homeless, incarcerated, prostituted, criminalized, brutalized, stigmatized, sick, and illiterate persons’ across every country, who are excluded from the benefits of globalisation and marginalised in terms of political participation and social belonging.48 A stark example of this underclass of humanity is the swelling numbers of the world’s urban poor, indicative of a shift in the locus of poverty from rural areas to urban centres. In its recent report,49 UN-HABITAT estimates that nearly 17 per cent of humanity - about one billion people - now live in urban slums; 72 per cent of the world’s slum dwellers are in sub-Saharan Africa. Globally, the slum population is expected to grow at a rate of 27 million people per year over the next 15 years. Despite their proximity to services, durable housing, and government institutions, the UN report concludes that the urban poor are almost wholly excluded from access to them and thus suffer from a systemic ‘urban penalty’. The ‘multidimensional nature of poverty experienced by the urban poor’ includes environmental degradation, discrimination, violence, chronic malnutrition, disease, a high, premature mortality rate, and recurrent dispossession. Yet notwithstanding their rapidly growing numbers, the urban poor remain ‘hidden’ and slums ‘largely ignored’.50 Zygmunt Bauman discusses the problem of global poverty in terms that help to illuminate how Arendt’s characterisation of political evil as making human beings superfluous may be applicable here. For Bauman, poverty takes on an intense significance today in a globalising world. We have moved, he argues, from a social order in which people were engaged primarily as workers, and where the non-working population existed as a reserve army of labour, to a society where people are engaged withinsocial orders primarily as consumers.51 Unemployment and insecurity become permanent for hordes of the ‘redundant’. The main figure of the poor today, then, is as ‘flawed consumer’. In Bauman’s view, the poor today are regarded as having no function, and they tend to be blamed for their condition. Their plight is no longer viewed as a collective social problem; rather, it is linked with criminality in that the poor are regarded as a ‘nuisance and worry’. The only role left to the poor is invisibility, to behave as if they do not exist. Much like Arendt, Bauman argues that modernity is characterised by instrumental rationality and a drive towards bureaucracy and technological order, with a resulting emptying out of moral responsibility. The era of neoliberal globalisation, Bauman contends, exposes how the project of modernity - or more accurately, of compulsive modernisation - necessarily produces ‘human waste’.52 Here three historical strands of modernisation converge: order-building, economic progress, and capitalist globalisation. For Bauman the modernisation process is defined by the drive to design, engineer and administer society, most fundamentally in terms of the ‘freedom’ to consume. The corollary of this process is that whatever cannot be assimilated into the model of modernisation (or ‘development’) as consumption must be treated as unfit, undesirable, redundant, useless, and disposable. Immigrants, refugees, and the impoverished are simply superfluous populations who, if they cannot be directly eliminated in the ‘post-totalitarian’ era, at least can be made to disappear from our consciousness. In Bauman’s words, we ‘dispose of leftovers in the most radical and effective way: we make them invisible by not looking and unthinkable by not thinking. They worry us only when the routine elementary defences are broken and the precautions fail.’53 The wasted lives of human refuse are stripped of dignity, driven to the furthest margins of society and eradicated from public space while hidden in plain sight. Bauman’s argument, couched in language that evokes the parallels drawn by Arendt between totalitarian systems and the basic conditions of modern capitalist society, lends support to the central claim of this article: that global poverty ‘erases’ the global poor, excludes them from recognition as fellow human beings, and denies them standing as equals within a shared public world. Simply put, global poverty makes a vast portion of humanity superfluous. The global poor have become, to borrow Arendt’s phrase for those deprived of their human rights, ‘the scum of the earth’, because of who they are (or where they are born) rather than what they have done.54 As Dana Villa asserts, in today’s world ‘untold millions will have to suffer the crushing fate of being no use tothe world economy’.55 Along these lines, Thomas Pogge has proposed that extreme global poverty may constitute ‘the largest crime against humanity ever committed, the death toll of which exceeds, every week, that of the recent tsunamis and, every three years, that of World War II, the concentration camps and gulags included’.56

The earliest bronze age, dated around 3500 is for us shrouded in an antiquity that is all but impenetrable. Yet, if we were to take as our standard for the mortal span the biblical three score and ten, the bronze age began considerably less than a hundred lifetimes ago, and all that we moderns call history has occurred since. We are separated from the time of Jesus by thirty lifetimes, from the first formation of the modern state by seven, from the American Revolution by little more than three. Humans are not fruit flies; mutations are impossible to detect in the handfuls of generations between then and now. The wonder is that particularist sentiments and yearnings have been as quiescent as they have been during the few centuries in the lives of Western states. Existence as a member of a prenational community, at least from the perspective of those who share the nostalgia for it, was sweet: secure, unambiguous, free of risk, steeped in the familiar. Everywhere we look we see ourselves. The faces of our neighbors mirror our own, thereby rendering any search for an individual identity superfluous if not ridiculous. I had been born at least a hundred times before, had died as many times, what had been, is, and what is now, will be, forever. Never mind the realities. There is no more unreliable witness than nostalgia. In the course of its development, so the story goes, the nation-state ruthlessly swept away such primary relationships, destroyed the true basis of community, set sibling against sibling and the devil take the hindmost. The predictable outcome, and the modern intellectual had the precise term for it, was alienation. Released from the warm security of cottage and commons, the once contented soul was now doomed to wander the earth as a stranger to all others, even to itself. As the life of the individual becomes more and more abstract, the measure of control one exerts over one’s own destiny wanes, identity itself becomes fragile, one feels rootless, at home nowhere. Alexis de Tocqueville thought he perceived this symptom at large in American life well over a century ago. Driven or enticed from the land, the erstwhile peasant or freeholder enters a world so remote from corporeal experience as to be almost unrecognizable. Men and women are now given tools to work with that bear no comfortable connection to the external human body. Hammers and pliers, scales and calipers are obvious extensions of our physical equipment. Hammers are our pounding fists, pliers our grasping fingers, scales our hefting hands, calipers the span of thumb and forefinger. If the computer has an analogue in the human body, it is one that is not visible— synapse, neural net, or cortex—one that we have never seen and hope never to see. The introduction of money into trade, especially paper money, was an enormous abstract leap. What then do we make of abstractions for money itself, checks and drafts, plastic credit cards, wages deposited to our accounts electronically? How certain are we that twenty generations of peasants have successfully and, more important, definitively, made the leap into abstraction? The voice of nostalgia can be as alluring as the sirens’ song. Yet there is another side to it, to some the more persuasive side. The organization of the modern nationstate has released incredible quanta of energy from its members and placed much of it at their disposal. The process by which that has been accomplished is properly that of alienation. The energies released by making particular existence an anachronism, by directing erstwhile parochial passions to more secular projects, and by subduing particular cultures to a national superculture have been enormous. One of the chief instruments in this process of alienation, an instrument not originally or even consciously designed for the purpose, has been migration. The modern internal migrations of European peoples, mostly northward, both east and west, were sometimes invasions, sometimes flights, at other times responses to the invitations of governments short of labor or capital or skilled management. Special benefits were often conferred upon migrants and their families, in the form of tax incentives or exemption from military conscription for their children. More dramatic by far was the external migration of the nineteenth century, when in the space of three generations, between the Congress of Vienna and the outbreak of the First World War, more than fifty million Europeans left their homelands for residence in North, Central, and South America; Africa; Australia; and New Zealand. It marked the greatest migration in recorded history. And the migration continues from the four corners of the earth. Most immigrants to the new nations lived exemplary alienated lives. Many changed their names, their style of dress, their religious affiliations: they learned new languages, new trades, and new living arrangements. The benefits accruing to the host nations were staggering. Migrations spurred the accumulation of capital, the ingenuity of entrepreneurs, and the skills of labor, all of which enhanced the power of the nation. If there is anything at all in what I have been saying so far, there arises an intriguing, and possibly tragic, paradox: the more individual alienation, the more power generated for the state; the more state power, the more rootlessness. People grow weary of trying to cope in a world that seems ever wider and more chaotic. They feel distanced from both the political institutions and the markets that control their destiny, without special regard for their own travails and felt needs. The resulting experience of powerlessness finds expression in political apathy, social irresponsibility, and rage. In this circumstance it is hardly surprising that more of us should seek security in either flight from responsibility altogether, or an effort to reassert control in associations of the like-minded: in religion, in culture, in ethnicity, in race. Where once it was the family that was thought the refuge from the wounds of modern industrial society, a haven in a heartless world, now it is the single-identity collective, however abstact in itself, that strikes many as the bearer of the ethos of community against alienation, cooperation against ruthless competitiveness, friendship against mere aggregation. ‘‘Are you lonesome tonight?’’ Who isn’t. Another factor: The events of the sixties, which gave an enormous boost to the search for single-identity associations, from social or ethnic to gender-oriented, revealed the fragility of established institutions, for the most part a well-kept secret in the history of the nation-state. Trumpets were blown, walls came tumbling down. Possibilities undreamt of for generations now seemed to open up. The impending deconstruction of the state in an age of deconstruction came as such a shock, especially to those busily tapping, tapping at the foundations, that nobody seemed to know what to do next. Two American presidents were brought down, and in 1968 political power lay in the streets of Paris apparently at the disposal of the daring. No one had a plan. The sixties, as was everything else, were late in arriving in the closed societies of Eastern Europe. There the fragility of existing arrangements (which, from the outside, seemed unshakable), once revealed, created a domino effect—the only time in my judgment the domino theory has made any sense. As might be expected, the domino theorists of the West were all taken by surprise. How is it that shared reactions to questions of state legitimacy can surface in such a short period of time in societies remote from one another, with diverse histories, cultures, economies, and religions? Historians used to attribute such upheavals to the spirit of an age, and to talk about them the way epidemiologists talk about the spread of disease. In the latter case, it is the human constitution that is at risk, in the former the body politic as it is represented in the nation-state. Today the agents of contamination are the mass media, particularly television. The burning question obviously is the prospect for democracy in the new single-identity states, or those that will soon be such by suppressing the accursed Other, murdering him, or driving him beyond the borders. In terms familiar to movie buffs, democracy has a way of reading better than it plays. In reality, democracy is an inconvenient system of organization, encompassing as it does plurality, diversity of opinion, protection for the rights and interests of minorities. There is something else at work as well: the misleading example of our own revolutionary experience. America had presented to the world a case study in what appears the necessary relationship of self-determination to democracy. Following a long war for independence a liberal democratic entity emerged as the United States. Simplistic interpretations of what had happened began simultaneously with that event, in the Declaration of Independence and the writings and orations of the leading actors, later reinforced by doctrines of self-determination confidently fostered by American presidents. But there appears no necessary relationship between self-determination and the prospects for democracy. Especially when there emerge single-identity states inhospitable to difference and unwilling to exhibit the patience and forbearance demanded for the maintenance of mechanisms that safeguard human rights. One people, one language, one culture, one religion—who needs democracy? Particularly when new and pressing considerations of political economy and national defense seem so urgent. It is at just such a time that mediating influences are at a premium, from international confederations for certain purposes to internal constitutional guarantees. The eruption of enmities long suppressed, accompanied by cries for vengeance, are horrifying to all who value common decency, let alone democracy. A dozen years ago Vaclav Havel, poet, playwright, political martyr, then astonishingly president of Czechoslovakia, wrote these mournful words about his recently liberated nation (note how his opening passage resembles that toward the beginning of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract): We are witness to a bizarre state of affairs: society has freed itself, but in some ways it behaves worse than when it was in chains. Criminality has grown rapidly, and the familiar sewage that in times of historical reversal always wells up from the nether regions of the collective psyche has overflowed into the mass media, especially the gutter press. But there are other, more serious and dangerous symptoms: hatred among nationalities, suspicion, racism, even signs of fascism; vicious demagogy, intrigue, and deliberate lying; politicking, an unrestrained, unheeding struggle for purely particular interests, a hunger for power, unadulterated ambition, fanaticism of every imaginable kind; new and unprecedented varieties of robbery, the rise of different mafias; the general lack of tolerance, understanding, taste, moderation, reason. And, of course, there is a new attraction to ideologies, as if Marxism had left behind it a great, unsettling void that had to be filled at any cost. In the terms I have been using, that ‘‘great, unsettling void’’ is the anxiety produced by alienation. Give us new masters, take back the accursed freedom we had only yesterday dreamed of; we can’t stand the uncertainty of multiplying choices. We were led to believe that democracy would be heaven; instead we find the chill of isolated, autonomous identities, of a lack of direction and directives; we were not meant for such chaos but for serenity and like-mindedness; we wanna go home. President Havel entitled his lamentation ‘‘Paradise Lost.’’ Paradise lost? Havel could not possibly be referring to the desultory state of Czechoslovakia under the recently deposed Communists. Paradise lost: the opportunity to erect in its place a beautiful model of democracy, serene, loving, singleminded? I don’t think so. By the paradise that was lost Havel means, at least I hope he does, and his prescriptions later on in the essay seem to bear this out, the relinquishment, however reluctantly, of the dream of such a state. Consider the indictment: increased criminality; editorial ambition; rivalry; politicking; the agitation for particular interests; hunger for power; lack of taste, moderation, and reason. From the time of Plato to the present these have been seen as the constant unrestrained companions of political freedom. We are forever linking the words law and order, but however paradoxical it may sound, where there exists in reality the rule of law, order has rarely been the outcome. Social and political order—that is, quiescence—is more to be expected in authoritarian and totalitarian states than in democracies. Release us from an oppressive order, and we are capable of all sorts of extravagances. Life in a free society has always borne the anxiety of risk. It is some of the other ills to which Havel refers—hatred among ethnic groups, racism, fanaticism, suspicion, intrigue, and lack of tolerance and understanding—that are always and everywhere the foes of democracy. Recent reports from Moscow, Warsaw, and Budapest confirm Havel’s observations. In our, quite understandable, joy at the collapse of tyrannies in Europe, we perhaps ought not expect that those who only yesterday burst their chains will exult in their newfound freedom. The void left by the collapse of Marxism may be so horrifying to contemplate as to lead its former subjects to seek substitutes for wholeness in associations based on ethnicity, religion, or a common exclusive culture. And in certain cases, those associations will be coexistent with the state itself. In such an eventuality, the lengthy, excruciating process of wider nation building might be doomed to repeat itself. Remembering its cost, perhaps the least we can do in the circumstance is to offer compassion and to counsel patience. Bolstering the delusions of others about the functions democracy was never designed to perform, and never could perform, might give us the selfsatisfied feeling of I told you so, but delusions have a way of being unmasked sooner or later by reality. Then disillusion comes in their train, followed by intense rage and yet another search for scapegoats. Liberal democracy is no cure for alienation; it is an acceptance of a world in which our most cherished fantasies will most likely never be realized. Democracy does have its own rewards, but foremost among them is not an end to alienation. Perhaps there is a practical joke buried beneath all this posturing about one culture, one religion, one people, and it just might be a joke in favor of democracy. Once the institutions designed to suppress and control differences begin to languish, for the very reason that there appear no differences any longer to suppress and control, the single-identity advocates might discover, one hopes to their eventual delight, just how many differences, on practically everything, actually do exist even among an otherwise homogenous population. After all, no one with a serious claim on the attention of one’s fellows throughout the history of political thought has ever suggested that we mortals are by nature creatures who harbor exactly the same dreams and expectations. Some have celebrated the differences, more have condemned them. Still, it is safe to say that where freedom is, differences persist. To discover this for oneself can come as a shock, true. But some shocks are bracing to the spirit, and can breathe new life into an otherwise dull and predictable existence.

Fear of contagious disease was a key element in the process of establishing the Westphalian nation-state order. Political authorities in the early modern period sought to control the spread of contagious disease through the implementation of emergency measures targeted toward migrants. Practices such as quarantine, sequestration of infected property, and the establishment of cordons Sanitaires targeted migrating populations and were designed to prevent the spread of disease (; ). As a result of repeated bouts of contagious disease, these emergency measures gave way to more permanent institutionalized measures in the form of boards of health and legal requirements governing various “health-related issues” such as street cleaning and sewage disposal (; ). The early bureaucratization process around the issue of health was key to the emergence of the nation-state as the preeminent political authority in Europe.

The expanding bureaucracy of the state also sought control over human movement. demonstrates that states sought to monopolize the capacity to authorize the movement of persons to extract military service, taxes, and labor; to control the loss of labor and brain drain; and for the exclusion, surveillance and containment of undesirable elements of ethnic, national, religious, ideological, and medical character (2000:7). The multitude of undesirable and threatening “others” served to justify the expanding bureaucratic control over human migration through the use of passports and other identity documents. The early modern state's growing control over the legitimate use of violence and the monopolization of the means of production were made possible partly by the elaborate bureaucracy devoted to controlling and limiting human movement (Torpey 2000:167). As the nation-state emerged as the legitimate form of political community in Europe, two of its primary rationales, and among its most developed permanent institutionalized presences, concerned the regulation of health and human movement.

The production of insecurity is a preeminent, though contested, area of concern in security studies. A central area of contestation concerns the relative importance of the anarchic international structure and domestic identity construction. In the structural-realist tradition, insecurity is an intrinsic feature of life in an anarchic international system in which all states engage in self-help behavior to ensure survival (). Insecurity is produced through the security dilemma—wherein insecurity stems from a fear of being attacked and through efforts to enhance one's security (). Conversely, in some constructivist scholarship, insecurity is less a product of international structure than of certain types of identity configurations. Because “anarchy is what states make of it” (), the international system of states is not inherently insecure; and more peaceful anarchic structures are made possible through changes in collective identity and interests (for example, see ; ; ; for a good overview see ). In this liberal-constructivist view, certain types of relationships lead to insecurity and conflict, while others are more conducive to peace and security. Treating insecurity as a product of state relationships privileges a narrow understanding of security as equivalent to the potential use of violence between states. Furthermore, it ignores how the society of states relies on the insecurity within anarchy—even in Wendt's “Kantian anarchy”—to legitimate, sustain, and protect differentiated states and the state system. Critical-constructivist scholars (for example, ; ; ; ) challenge this narrow understanding of insecurity and identity by showing how the maintenance of boundaries and identity requisite in a system made up of distinct nation-states necessarily produces insecurity. For example, explain that “insecurity is not external to the object to which it presents a threat, but is implicated in and an effect of the process of establishing and reestablishing the object's identity” (1999:11). Consequently, insecurity is not a result of an anarchic system, nor of antagonistic identity formations, but of a system comprised of and created by differentiated nation-states.

While the prioritization of identity in the production of insecurity marks an important shift, this has come at the expense of understanding how anarchy functions in and through the production of identity and insecurity. The division of modern political life into differentiated nation-states is achieved through the construction of an insecure anarchic international realm and a safe domestic realm. Understanding the production of insecurity requires analysis of both the production of the international/domestic binary that renders differentiated nation-states both possible and necessary, as well as particularistic identities that differentiate these states and identify the threatening other. This happens in multiple fields of human activity, and exploring all of these would require much more space than I have here. In this paper, I restrict my focus to two fields of practice that have played a prominent role in the production of the state system: the regulation of health and human movement.A second contribution of this paper to the study of the production of insecurity is to further explore the relationship between public and private actors in this process, which has emerged as one of the central themes around which the field of security studies is organized (). Though the institution and bundle of practices known as the state is a primary site where insecurity is produced (Weldes 1999:18), critical security scholars have drawn attention to how actors such as the media (; ; ; ; ), private security firms (; ), and specialized security bureaucracies and intellectuals (Luckham 1984; ; ; ; ) reproduce state-based discourses of danger. In this paper, I draw on the Canadian case to show how the migration and health bureaucracies of the state and private travel insurance corporations reproduce the international/national binary and construct the national “self” through the regulation of cross-border movement and contagious disease. I focus on these actors to further demonstrate the myriad sites in which security is reproduced, and because they are privileged in the production of insecurity in this particular domain even as they remain under studied in the field of security studies.Contagious Disease and Migration in the Study of InsecurityMost scholars addressing the construction of insecurity associated with contagious disease and migration examine them separately, though this article takes up Mary Douglas' call to study classifying symbols not in isolation, “but in relation to the total structure of classifications of the society in question” () that include international and national, secure and insecure, clean and dirty, rational and irrational. Nonetheless, it is useful to examine how these issues have been incorporated in security studies. As with many other “new” threats, contagious disease has been brought into the field of security studies by those seeking to broaden the field beyond military security. Problematically, these security broadeners tend to treat disease as an objective threat to either national or human security. For example, some security scholars (Lillibridge 2000; ; ) contend that epidemic disease endangers national security because it induces violent conflict or reduces the ability of the military to defend the state. Alternatively, human security scholars (; ; ) contend that disease is a threat, not because it contributes to the outbreak of violent conflict, but because of the sheer number of preventable human deaths they cause. While usefully identifying some of the practical problems posed by contagious disease, the broadeners neglect the profound implications of treating it as a security issue. For instance, demonstrates that the securitization of health-related issues since the end of the Cold War challenges alternative, more productive strategies for the provision of health and humanitarian assistance. Others (; ) point out that the recent securitization of health has produced an international health regime that prioritizes the interests of Western states.The importance of these de-securitizing works lies in showing how the securitization of infectious disease has contributed to unexpected, negative outcomes; issues often overlooked by proponents of broadening the security agenda. However, the de-securitizing critique ignores how disease functions as a boundary-defining concept and how the securitization of infectious disease is a foundational component of the identity of individual states and the state system. It is not a new, nor a post-Cold War phenomenon; it has been an integral part of the nation-state building process since its inception. In Western states, health of the population is an important component of the nation's identity, and providing protection against the diseased other a key role of the state and international entities. That this manifests itself in the intensified securitization following the end of the Cold War, and the privileging of certain states should not come as a surprise.Provision of healthcare is an integral component of Canadian identity and other Western states and is produced through the identification of locations of disease and vulnerability against which the state must be secured. Consequently, migration into and out of the state becomes a source of insecurity, as citizens of the secure state are exposed to dangers associated with foreign spaces either via immigration or through international travel. The regulation of health and cross-border movement represent distinct strands of a larger set of practices that reproduce national/state identity and the dangerous other, in turn reifying the territorial nation-state as the natural, safe and secure mode of organizing the anarchic and dangerous international realm. Migration has also been drawn into the realm of security studies, most notably following the restrictive turn in immigration policy in Western states after the Cold War (see ; ; ; ; ). Much of this work addresses how migration has been perceived as a threat to societal identity, demography, or culture, exemplified by the rise of xenophobic, anti-immigrant parties and social movements and the increased surveillance of certain minority groups. Fears over the cultural impact of migration are intertwined with other distinct concerns as well, such as public order and labor market stability (). contends that these three interrelated concerns play an integral role in the Europeanization process and the identification of Europe as a distinct political community. In this paper, I point to a fourth concern that is inter-twined with migration and the production of identity and insecurity—that of health and disease. As noted earlier, health is a key component of national identity and converges on two axes of differentiation: culture/race and just desert based on contribution. Identification and exclusion of the other is based on dual claims: that other cultural practices are unhealthy and need to be kept out of the healthy body politic () and that the welfare state requires protection through the exclusion of those who have not contributed to it or who endanger it. These two mutually reinforcing concerns are evident in the processes that gave rise to the modern nation-state in Europe.

Finally, the intimate connections between nationalism and militarism are worth noting. In a Westphalian world-system, interstate struggles are ultimately settled through military competition. Not surprisingly, therefore, nationalism tends to be deeply intertwined with militarism and frequently glorifies war and “national sacrifice” as admirable and necessary. Nationalist militarism produces moral geographies of similarity and difference designed to dehumanize the Other, to legitimate military conquest, and to excuse the most horrific of human-rights violations in the name of national defense. Nationalists typically hold the military, whether in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, World War II Japan, or the contemporary United States, to be sacrosanct. Love of the military often pervades popular culture and shapes government spending priorities: Nothing stirs national pride and hatred of Others like a good war. The United States, which, with 5 percent of the world’s population, spends almost 50 percent of the world’s military expenditures, well exemplifies this tragic pattern (Olson 2010). One need only think of the intimate ties between nationalism and militarism over the last fifty years: To win Congress’s approval of highway funding, President Dwight Eisenhower proposed the Na- tional Defense Highways Act in 1956. Even today, global warming often receives the most serious attention among policymakers only when it is couched in national security terms.

The hegemonic status of competitiveness is clear. In spite of its confused theoretical and conceptual basis, the discourse of competitiveness has come to dominate the thinking and practice around regional economic development in recent years. This thinking asserts that competitiveness is an abstract and malleable concept equivalent to ‘attractiveness’ or the capacity of the region to compete with other places for globally mobile capital and labour. While the discourse embraces the quality of place as part of the growing emphasis on the social and cultural environment and its role in shaping competitiveness, it is a narrowly conceived notion of ‘place’ that elides place liveability with place marketability. It thus is ostensibly driven by an economic rationale—that is the attraction of investors and people (Jarvis, 2007).

Thus, the strategic imperative is to take the requisite steps to attract and retain innovative firms, skilled labour, mobile investment and central and supranational government subsidies and funds, with particular emphasis being placed on the relevant conditions in the microeconomic environment within which productive firms can prosper. Not surprisingly, this also impels regions to benchmark and adopt ‘best-practice’ lessons from elsewhere, while periodically measuring their competitive ‘success’ relative to other regions or ‘rivals’ (Bristow, 2005; Kitson et al., 2004).

cosmopolitisation: the ‘global other’ is in our midst,” Irish Journal of Sociology; 2011; ; //ghs-eo

Studying the cosmopolitisation of social inequality – and, indeed, across the globe inequalities seem to have increased – it is less clear that social class is the principal unit of analysis and investigation. I rather provocatively developed the argument that ‘social class’ is too soft a category to study social inequalities in the twenty-first century.

Domopolitics implies a reconfiguring of the relations between citizenship, state, and territory. At its heart is a fateful conjunction of home, land and security. It rationalizes a series of security measures in the name of a particular conception of home. Of course there is a history to the understanding of homeland and a notable variance in its meaning across countries (Robin and Stra˚th, 2003). However, in a great many of these uses it has powerful affinities with family, intimacy, place: the home as hearth, a refuge or a sanctuary in a heartless world; the home as our place, where we belong naturally, and where, by definition, others do not; international order as a space of homes—every people should have (at least) one; home as a place we must protect. We may invite guests into our home, but they come at our invitation; they don’t stay indefinitely. Others are, by definition, uninvited. Illegal migrants and bogus refugees should be returned to ‘their homes’. Home as a place to be secured because its contents (our property) are valuable and envied by others. Home as a safe, reassuring place, a place of intimacy, togetherness and even unity, trust and familiarity. Hence domopolitics embodies a tactic which juxtaposes the ‘warm words’ (Connolly, 1995, p. 142) of community, trust, and citizenship, with the danger words of a chaotic outside—illegals, traffickers, terrorists; a game which configures things as ‘Us vs. Them’ (Stasiulis, 1997, p. 203). Bigo is right to suggest that the politics of internal and transnational security both mobilizes and plays upon fear and unease to legitimate itself (Bigo, 2002). But 241 Downloaded by [Acadia University] at 01:10 08 October 2013 William Walters besides these negative forces, it also plays upon the positive image of home. These are some of the contours of the domological.

But there is a second aspect to domopolitics—domo as conquest, taming, subduing; a will to domesticate the forces which threaten the sanctity of home. Domopolitics is not reducible to the Fortress impulse of building walls, strengthening the locks, updating the alarm system. It contains within itself this second tendency which takes it outwards, beyond the home, beyond even its own ‘backyard’ and quite often into its neighbours’ homes, ghettos, jungles, bases, slums. Once domopolitics extends its reach, once it begins to take the region or even the globe as its strategic field of intervention, then the homeland becomes the home front, one amongst many sites in a multifaceted struggle.4