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This book presents a passionate defense of radical ecology that speaks directly to current debates concerning the nature, and dangers, of sovereign power. Engaging the work of Bataille, Arendt, Levinas, Nancy, and Agamben, among others, the book reconnects the political critique of sovereign power with ecological considerations, arguing that ethical and political responsibilities for the consequences of our actions do not end with those defined as human. The book turns Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty and biopolitics toward an investigation of ecological concerns. In doing so, it exposes limits to that thought, maintaining that the increasingly widespread biopolitical management of human populations has an unrecognized ecological analogue—reducing nature to a “resource” for human projects. The book contends that a radical ecological politics must resist both the depoliticizing exercise of sovereign power and the pervasive spread of biopolitics in order to reveal new possibilities for creating healthy human and nonhuman communities.

Bargaining for Women’s Rights: Activism in an Aspiring Muslim Democracy asks why a Muslim-majority democracy, the Republic of Niger, adopted some gender equality reforms and rejected others. It argues that Niger’s seemingly inconsistent policies on gender equality can be explained by the mobilization of women and conservative and the political context. Governments are more likely to adopt gender equality reforms when women mobilize for them. Women’s activists are not the only ones who care about the regulation of gender relations. Conservative activists may mobilize as well. In democratic contexts where public opinion polling is limited, women’s and conservative activists must use other tactics to convince government officials that their demands represent the will of the electorate. The activists who succeed use locally salient symbols and public rituals to draw the line between policies that are thinkable and unthinkable. Thus, Islam does not have a uniformly negative effect on women’s rights policy adoption, contrary to the conventional wisdom. Further, government concerns about international funding and reputation, even for countries as poor as Niger, are mediated by the demands and power of domestic groups.

In contemporary politics, nature is generally assumed to be a commitment of the political left and restrictionism a commitment of the right. The reality, however, is significantly more complicated: in the United States, environmentalists have argued for immigration restrictions since the movement first began in the last 1800s; many of the so-called fathers of American environmentalism were immigration restrictionists; and the argument continues to attract vocal adherents among mainstream and radical greens.This book seeks to explain these seemingly paradoxical commitments by grounding them in contemporary debates over the relationship between sovereignty and nature. It observes that – amid the ruptures of neoliberal globalization – restrictionist and their opponents seek to reconfigure the relationship between sovereignty and nature toward what they believe to be a sustainable end. Through this analysis, it makes the case that nature is increasingly being deployed as a form of "walling"-enabling restrictionists to subtly reinforce territorial boundaries and identities without having to revert to racial and cultural logics that are unpalatable to the political left. This phenomenon has major implications on the prospect for justice an inclusion in the 21^st century; well-intentioned environmentalist efforts to “green sovereignty” are actually serving to reinforce exclusionary forms of political community.It argues that attention to the realities of transnational migration could provide an alternative perspective upon which to construct a very different brand of socio-ecological activism – one that might be our only chance of effectively confronting the powerful forces and structures producing ecological devastation and social injustice.

In the first sustained examination of disability through the lens of political theory, The Capacity Contract shows how the exclusion of disabled people has shaped democratic politics. Stacy Clifford Simplican demonstrates how disability buttresses systems of domination based on race, sex, and gender. She exposes how democratic theory and politics have long blocked from political citizenship anyone whose cognitive capacity falls below a threshold level⎯marginalization with real-world repercussions on the implementation of disability rights today. Simplican’s compelling ethnographic analysis of the self-advocacy movement describes the obstacles it faces. From the outside, the movement must confront stiff budget cuts and dwindling memberships; internally, self-advocates must find ways to demand political standing without reinforcing entrenched stigma against people with profound cognitive disabilities. And yet Simplican’s investigation also offers democratic theorists and disability activists a more emancipatory vision of democracy as it relates to disability⎯one that focuses on enabling people to engage in public and spontaneous action to disrupt exclusion and stigma. Taking seriously democratic promises of equality and inclusion, The Capacity Contract rejects conceptions of political citizenship that privilege cognitive capacity and, instead, centers such citizenship on action that is accessible to all people.

Catastrophes such as refinery explosions, accounting scandals, and bank meltdowns might rightfully be blamed on corporations. In response, advocates have suggested reforms ranging from increased government regulation to corporate codes of conduct to stop corporate abuses. This book states that these reactions, which view law as a limit on corporations, misunderstand the role of law in fostering corporate power. This book argues that corporate power should be rethought as a mode of political sovereignty. Rather than treating the economic power of corporations as a threat to the political sovereignty of states, the book shows that the two are ontologically linked. Situating analysis of U.S., British, and international corporate law alongside careful readings in political and social theory, it demonstrates that the Anglo-American corporation and modern political sovereignty are founded in and bound together through a principle of legally sanctioned immunity from law. The problems that corporate-led globalization present for governments result not from regulatory failures as much as from corporate immunity that is being exported across the globe. There is a paradox in that corporations, which are legal creations, are given such power that they undermine the sovereignty of states. The book notes that while the relationship between states and corporations may appear adversarial, it is in fact a kind of doubling in which state sovereignty and corporate power are both conjoined and in conflict. Our refusal to grapple with the peculiar nature of this doubling means that some of our best efforts to control corporations unwittingly reinvest the sovereign powers they oppose.

Three decades of biodiversity governance have largely failed to stop the ongoing environmental crisis of global species loss. Yet that governance has resulted in undeniably important political outcomes. In Counting Species, Rafi Youatt argues that the understanding of global biodiversity has produced a distinct vision and politics of nature, one that is bound up with ideas about species, norms of efficiency, and apolitical forms of technical management. Since its inception in the 1980s, biodiversity’s political power has also hinged on its affiliation with a series of political concepts. Biodiversity was initially articulated as a moral crime against the intrinsic value of all species. In the 1990s and early 2000s, biodiversity shifted toward an association with service provision in a globalizing world economy before attaching itself more recently to the discourses of security and resilience. Even as species extinctions continue, biodiversity’s role in environmental governance has become increasingly abstract. Yet the power of global biodiversity is eventually always localized and material when it encounters nonhuman life. In these encounters, Youatt finds reasons for optimism, tracing some of the ways that nonhuman life has escaped human social means. Counting Species compellingly offers both a political account of global biodiversity and a unique approach to political agency across the human–nonhuman divide.

This book investigates the world of logistics, tracing its movement over the last 60 years from the battlefield to the boardroom, and back again. With a focus on chokepoints - national borders, zones of piracy, blockades, and cities – this book tracks contemporary efforts to keep stuff circulating and the new spaces of security and forms of violence they produce. This is the first book to analyse both the military and civilian world of logistics, refusing the usual segregation of these interlinked fields. Rough Trade considers contemporary logistics in the context of its long history and is centrally concerned with the role of war in trade. This is the first book to investigate the revolution in logistics outside the applied field of business management. This book draws on 7 years of fieldwork in many sites around the world while also offering a rich theoretical engagement with debates in political economy, science and technology studies, geography, security studies, and queer theory.

The book is an analysis of political inclusion and mobilization of South Asian immigrants- focused primarily on Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi communities- in the United States. It situates their experiences in the larger context of the scholarship that has emerged from studies on European immigrants in early 20th century as well insights from African American, Latino, and Asian American groups. It is one of the first studies that analyze South Asian immigrants’ involvement in American politics, particularly electoral politics. It brings together distinct literatures from Political Science, Ethnic Studies, Asian American Studies and South Asian studies and combines both quantitative as well as qualitative approaches of analysis. It includes the study of three major South Asian communities: Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi.

Until recently, policy evaluation has mostly meant assessing whether government programs raise reading levels, decrease teen pregnancy rates, improve air quality levels, lower drunk-driving rates, or achieve any of the other goals that government programs are ostensibly created to do. Whether or not such programs also have consequences with respect to future demands for government action and whether government programs can heighten—or dampen—citizen involvement in civic activities are questions that are typically overlooked. This book applies such questions to local government. Employing policy feedback theory to a series of local government programs, the book shows that these programs do have consequences with respect to citizens’ political participation. Unlike other feedback theory investigations, which tend to focus on federal government programs, this book looks at a broad range of policy at the local level, including community policing programs, economic development for businesses, and neighborhood empowerment programs. The book suggests that local governments’ social program activities actually dampen participation of the have-nots, while cities’ development programs reinforce the political involvement of already-privileged business interests. Meanwhile, iconic urban programs such as community policing and broader programs of neighborhood empowerment fail to enhance civic engagement or build social capital at the neighborhood level; at worst, they have the potential to deepen divisions—especially racial divisions—that undercut urban neighborhoods.

This book develops a conversation between Marxist theories of everyday life and recent work in urban political ecology, arguing for a philosophy of praxis in relation to the politics of urban environments. Grounding its theoretical debate in empirical studies of struggles to obtain water in the informal settlements of Durban, South Africa, as well as in the creative acts of insurgent art activists in London, the book builds on the work of key Marxist thinkers to redefine “environmental politics.” A Marxist philosophy of praxis—that world-changing ideas emerge from the acts of everyday people—undergirds the book. Our daily reality, states the book, is woven out of the entanglements of social and natural relations, and as such a kind of environmental politics is automatically incorporated into our lives. Nevertheless, one effect of the public recognition of global environmental change, asserts Loftus, has been a resurgence of dualistic understandings of the world: for example, that nature is inflicting revenge on arrogant human societies. The book reformulates—with the assistance of such philosophers as Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Henri Lefebvre, and others—a politics of the environment in which everyday subjectivity is at the heart of a revolutionary politics.

Few studies reflect the critical need to study gangs across time and space. Most investigations focus on a single gang or gangs in a single community, and present the gang in a “snapshot” manner, reflecting the nature of the gang at a specific point in time. More importantly, few collections offer comparative studies of gangs across cultures. This volume uniquely offers a thematic approach to engage in concrete comparisons, both contextually and transnationally, of gangs In Brazil, China, El Salvador, France, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, the Russian Federation, Sierra Leone, South Africa, the USA. Each chapter is based on direct primary empirical research, and the collection is framed by a critical Introduction by the editors and an Afterword by renowned US gang researcher Sudhir Venkatesh. The volume is likely to reach a wide-ranging audience across disciplines, including: anthropology, criminology, development studies, geography, history, international studies, law, political science, sociology, and urban studies. It could serves as a foundational text for advanced undergraduate level courses on conflict and violence, urban security studies, or informal politics, for example, as well as a useful resource at the MA level..

Holidays in the Danger Zone traces the usually overlooked connections between warfare and tourism. It shows how a tourist sensibility shapes the behaviour of soldiers in war – especially the experiences of Western military populations deployed in ‘exotic’ settings. This tourist sensibility certainly includes the familiar military rotations of ‘Rest and Relaxation’ (R&R), but also more mundane episodes when soldiers transition from the battlefield into landscapes of leisure and tourism. The book also explores how a military sensibility shapes the development of tourism in post-war contexts, from the immediate instances of ‘Dark Tourism’ to the more established displays of conflict in museums, galleries and memorial sites. By focusing on the practices of soldiers as they become tourists and the experiences of tourists as they engage in representations of conflict, Holidays in the Danger Zone exposes the mundane and everyday entanglements between these two seemingly opposed worlds. It is primarily concerned with the extent to which war and tourism reinforce prevailing modes of domination within historically constituted global orders. To that end, it critically examines the war-tourism nexus as it developed through 19th Century Imperialism, the ‘total wars’ of WWI and WWII, the Cold War stalemate, Globalization in the 1990s and the recent War on Terror.

For three centuries the rational and disembodied state has been animated by one of the most powerful metaphors in politics: the body-politic, a claustrophobic and bounded image of the collective, the state, the nation, of the sovereign alienated among sovereigns. Drawing sources from continental philosophy, science and technology studies and world politics, this pathbreaking book challenges the body-politic on the grounds of its materiality. Just as the human body is not whole and separate from other bodies, but populated by microbes, bacteria, water and radioactive isotopes, Stefanie Fishel argues that the body-politic of the state exists in dense entanglement with other communities and forms of life. Yet rather than follow the nihilistic critiques of biopolitics and sovereignty into their political and metaphysical dead ends, Fishel challenges us to think and live hopefully beyond the body-politic: to think of bodies and states as lively vessels, living harmoniously coevolved with multiplicity and the biosphere. From global trade to people movements and climate change, this radical shift in metaphors promises to open up new forms of global political practice and community and challenge a politics based on fear and survival. Fishel concludes that we should not aim for mere living: we need to set our sights on building a world for thriving. This book will be of interest to a range of scholars in the humanities and the social and natural sciences. Fishel provides connections between the political and practical in clear terms using multiple approaches and disciplines.

As the seriousness of planetary climate change becomes more acknowledged, American and global security institutions are responding by taking a prominent role in the governing of environmental concerns—engaging in “climate change war games” and ramping up efforts to militarize the future of the planet’s ecosystems. This aggressive and combat-oriented stance, Marzec argues, stems from a self-destructive pattern of thought that has been influencing human-environmental relations from the seventeenth century to the present. Militarizing the Environment traces the rise of this pattern of thought, now an accepted and highly influential geopolitical attitude supplanting ideas of sustainability with the demand for “adaptation.” In this extensive historical study of scientific, military, political and economic formations from the seventeenth century to the present, Marzec reveals how the discourse of environmentality has been instrumental in the development of today’s security society—informing the creation of the military-industrial complex during World War II and the National Security Act that established the CIA during the Cold War. Now an embedded part of human existence, these relations have thoroughly infiltrated new scientific endeavors like “natural security,” which transform Darwinian insights into a quasi-theology making security the biological basis of existence and political ground of life itself. To counter these efforts Marzec reveals the self-destructive nature of this worldview and in the process offers alternatives, in the hopes that fundamentally rethinking human-environmental relations can work against the dead-end restrictions and illusions of national and global security.

This book is an analysis of the complex but hierarchical global nuclear order produced, maintained, and obscured by the workings of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime. Using an analysis heavily influenced by postcolonial International Relations theory, the book examines the interstate inequalities that sustain this order, the mechanisms that produce a (mimetic) desire for nuclear weapons, the neoliberal interests that drive the production of nuclear power, and the communities and bodies made vulnerable by nuclear pursuits. Making a case for nuclear abolition, the book suggests that the path to nuclear zero is more effectively traversed through the political economy of injustice rather than the prism of “security”. This book is unique in bringing a Postcolonial approach to the study of the global nuclear order. The book is aimed primarily at scholars and students of International Relations (IR). In terms of its academic genealogy, it is situated within two areas in IR – Postcolonial International Relations and Critical Security Studies.

The writings of a small group of scholars known as the ilustrados are often credited for providing intellectual grounding for the Philippine Revolution of 1896. This book shows that the ilustrados’ anticolonial project of defining and constructing the “Filipino”-involved Orientalist and racialist discourses that are usually ascribed to colonial projects, not anticolonial ones. According to the text, the work of the ilustrados uncovers the surprisingly blurry boundary between nationalist and colonialist thought. By any measure, there was an extraordinary flowering of scholarly writing about the peoples and history of the Philippines in the decade or so preceding the revolution. In reexamining the works of the scholars José Rizal, Pardo de Tavera, Isabelo de los Reyes, Pedro Paterno, Pedro Serrano Laktaw, and Mariano Ponce, the text situates their writings in a broader account of intellectual ideas and politics migrating and transmuting across borders. She reveals how the ilustrados both drew from and refashioned the tools and concepts of Orientalist scholarship from Europe.

When leaders and citizens in the United States articulate their core political beliefs, they often do so in terms of parenthood and family. But while the motives might be admirable, the results of such thinking are often corrosive to our democratic goals. This book reveals how efforts to make the experience of parenthood inform citizenship contribute to the most persistent problems in modern democracy and democratic theory. The book explains how influential theories of democratic citizenship rely on the experience of parenthood to help individuals rise to the challenges of politics, and demonstrates that this reliance has unintended consequences. When parenthood is imagined to instill confidence in political virtue, it uncovers insecurity. When parenthood is believed to inculcate openness to change, it produces fundamentalism. The book develops this argument through original readings of four theorists of citizenship: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Rorty, and Cornel West—readings that engage the ways in which these theorists incorporated their personal history into their political thought.

This book explores the rise of the Predator Empire, the name for the contemporary “dronified” U.S. national security state. Moving from the Vietnam War to the “war on terror,” it investigates how changes in military strategy, domestic policing, and state surveillance have come together to enclose the planet in a robotic system of control. It argues that we are witnessing a transition from a labor-intensive “American empire” to a machine-intensive Predator Empire. Following philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Peter Sloterdijk, the book argues that the nonhuman environment directly influences who we are, and therefore goes beyond considering drone warfare as a purely military concern. The rise of drones present a series of “existential crises” that are reengineering the spaces of violence, domestic policing, and even the character of modern states.

This book examines housing debates in Chicago that go beyond black and white politics, and shows how class and factional conflicts among African Americans actually helped to reproduce stunning segregation along economic lines. Class and factional conflicts were normal in the rough-and-tumble world of land use politics. They are, however, often not visible in accounts of the postwar fight against segregation. The book outlines the ideological framework that black civic leaders in Chicago used to formulate housing policy, both within and outside the black community, to reveal a surprising picture of leaders who singled out racial segregation as the source of African Americans’ inadequate housing rather than attacking class inequalities. What are generally presented as black positions on housing policy in Chicago, the book makes clear, belonged to the black elite and did not necessarily reflect black working-class participation or interests. This book details how black civic leaders fought racial discrimination in ways that promoted—or at least did not sacrifice—their class interests in housing and real estate struggles. And, as it demonstrates, their accommodation of the real estate practices and government policy of the time has had a lasting effect: it contributed to a legacy of class segregation in the housing market in Chicago and major metropolitan areas across the country that is still felt today.

In July 1999, Canadian authorities intercepted four boats off the coast of British Columbia carrying nearly six hundred Chinese citizens who were being smuggled into Canada. Government officials held the migrants on a Canadian naval base, which it designated a port of entry. As one official later recounted during research for this book, the Chinese migrants entered a legal limbo, treated as though they were walking through a long tunnel of bureaucracy to reach Canadian soil. The “long tunnel thesis” is the basis of this investigation into the power of states to change the relationship between geography and law as they negotiate border crossings. The book draws from many sources to argue that refugee-receiving states capitalize on crises generated by high-profile human smuggling events to implement restrictive measures designed to regulate migration. Whether states view themselves as powerful actors who can successfully exclude outsiders or as vulnerable actors in need of stronger policies to repel potential threats, they end up subverting access to human rights, altering laws, and extending power beyond their own borders. Using examples from Canada, Australia, and the United States, this text demonstrates the centrality of space and place in efforts to control the fate of unwanted migrants.