The Prison Industrial Complex and Social Division in Market Societies: The Hyper-Security State, Crime and Expendable Populations

Issues surrounding mass incarceration and the rise of racialized prison populations in the USA and Canada have been increasing with the expansion of neoliberalism and the growing economic class divide. Although the disturbing phenomenon of mass incarceration has been an academic concern for some time, there is today a greater public interest in it as evidenced in part by the popularity of documentaries such as The 13th and the many recent books that address the topic.… Read More

Security, Life and Death

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Theorizations of power through a Foucauldian conceptual paradigm continue to predominate critical analyses of the present geopolitical order. Michel Foucault’s concepts of “governmentality” and “biopower” have been central to critical understandings of the new world order of the post 9/11 era. With the fall of the Berlin wall, the 1990s were quickly characterized as a post-communist era with the promise of a burgeoning global civil society. Conversely, geopolitics at the start of twenty-first century took a new turn with the September 11 terrorist attacks on American soil and the Western world’s subsequent captivation with the war on terror.… Read More

Agon Culture

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Agon Culture offers an analysis of the human condition through an examination of the way in which the cultural ideology of competition operates as a mode of rationality that underpins the order of domination. By combining insights from Theodor Adorno’s critical theory with a reconstruction of the philosophy of the agon, the book formulates a novel critical theory of cultural domination that offers insights into our “winner-loser” culture and a renewed intensity of its social Darwinist tendencies.… Read More