1st Edition
The Politics of Evasion A Post-Globalization Dialogue Along the Edge of the State
Burgeoning national security programs; thickening borders; Wikileaks and Anonymous; immigrant rights rallies; Occupy movements; student protests; neoliberal austerity; global financial crises – these developments underscore that the fable of a hope-filled post-cold war globalization has faded away. In its place looms the prospect of states and corporations transforming a permanent war on terror into a permanent war on society. How, at the critical juncture of a post-globalization era, will policymakers and power-holders in leading states and corporations of the Global North choose to pursue power and control? What possibilities and limits do activists and communities face for progressive political action to counter this power inside and outside the state?
This book is a sustained dialogue between author and political theorist, Robert Latham and Mr. V, a policy analyst from a state in the Global North. Mr. V is sympathetic to the pursuit of justice, rights and freedom by activists and movements but also mindful of the challenges of states in pursuing security and order in the current social and political moment. He seeks a return to the progressive, welfare-oriented state associated with the twentieth century. The dialogue offers an in-depth consideration of whether this is possible and how a progressive politics might require a different approach to social organization, power and collective life.
Exploring key ideas, such as sovereignty, activism, neoliberalism, anarchism, migration, intervention, citizenship, security, political resistance and transformation, and justice, this book will be of interest to academics and students of Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Law, Geography, Media and Communication, and Cultural Studies.
1. SECURITY, CIRCULATION, AND THE LIMITS OF LIBERAL ORDER "New forms of disruption" "We can label this logic, evasion" "Bringing risk into the picture" "Openness and closure produce one another" "Deepening security and the possibilities of protest" "The nature of the target matters" "The relationship between anonymity and liberalism" "Disorder as an evasive tactic" "No pure, angelic form of liberalism" 2. RESISTANCE, TIME, AND THE STATE IN QUESTION "Between permanence and temporariness" "Enduring and transient structures" "A standpoint from which to question the state" "The melting of all that is solid" "Alongside permanence is the possibility of non-permanence" "Creating new meanings and framings" 3. NEOLIBERALISM, HYPER-SECURITY, AND THE BOUNDING OF POLITICAL LIFE "The desirability of publicness" "The external versus internal divide" "A range of interventions and forms of presence" "Looking at the interspatial logics of deployment" "What sort of power comes along with evasion?" "The state is a deployment machine" 4. TOWARD A PROGRESSIVE POLITICS OF EVASION "Lapsing into a defeatism" "Evading deployments" A "progressive politics of evasion" "Entering a trajectory of transformation" "Leave it up to the people?" "What kind of new collectivities are in play here?" "Closure is needed to create passages" "The battle within societies over collectivity can’t be avoided" "Making passage and re-collectivity constitutional logics of the state"
Biography
Robert Latham teaches in the Political Science, Communication and Culture, and Social and Political Thought programs at York University in Toronto, Canada. He has published widely on topics including political economy, security, digital activism, technologies of border surveillance, critical theories of sovereignty, transnational relations, migration, and multiculturalism.
