Crime and Security in the Global City

• In Event: International Law, Policing and Security

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship changes that have occurred in the cultural political economy of contemporary capitalism and new types of social and spatial arrangements and relationships that define contemporary cities. I am particularly concerned with how processes of neoliberalization and globalization have engendered a substantial and growing population of ‘marginalized’, ‘devalued’, and/or ‘superfluous’ individuals who collectively constitute ‘risky’, ‘suspect’ or ‘dispossessed and dishonored’ populations. As such, their regulation and maintenance, not only in the United States but across the world, has required new techniques and strategies rooted in punishment and exclusion rather than the more inclusive and welfare-oriented posture exhibited in the decades immediately following World War II. My concern is to examine strategies and processes of social control in what is variously referred to as the global, neoliberal, and post/late Fordist, post/late modern city, with special attention directed to questions about whose behavior is perceived as “threatening” and how that threat is monitored, policed, and controlled.

Author

• Frank Hughes, Binghamton University