Security/Capital: A General Theory of Pacification (book review)
Today, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, sites of increasing global inequality and laboratories for new forms of surveillance, policing and security. Yet, unlike our nineteenth century predecessors, deindustrialization has rendered a large part of the world’s population superfluous from the formal labor market, all the while forcing many others to accept low wages and a precarious existence. As capitalist classes scramble to maintain previous rates of profit, security has emerged as both an important political project, and site of conflict for millions whose very existence is closely monitored and surveilled by the various appendages of the security industrial complex. In recent years, George S. Rigakos and other scholars have contributed to a robust Marxist and materialist analysis of security through a critical examination of its role in forging a social order that is conducive to capitalist accumulation. In this process, pacification emerges as an alternative concept to the security project of capitalist elites, which helps us to make sense of how social order is maintained and reproduced. The theme of pacification is taken up in previous collaborative efforts, such as in a special volume of Socialist Studies (2013), select journal articles published by Rigakos, and more recently in his new book Security/Capital: A General Theory of Pacification (Rigakos 2016).
