South Africa: capital accumulation and violence

This article analyses the conditions of capital accumulation in South Africa, and seeks to explain the authoritarian and racially discriminatory features of the South African social structure in terms of (a) the specific historical processes of change (mercantile colonial conquest, primitive accumulation in mining and farming) and (b) the specific features of contemporary capitalism, notably the capital-intensive structure of industry. The authoritarianism embodied, for example, in the extra-economic coercion of black labour is seen as reflecting the circumstances of the struggle between capital and labour under conditions where capital-labour contradictions exist alongside the contradiction between South African capitalism and the ‘dependent’ societies it has preserved/recreated. The implications of this situation for strategies of socialist change are briefly evaluated.     

Six propositions on the poor and pollution

The effect of improving the environment may be greater inequities in our society. Current environmental programs maintain this inequity, proposed environmental programs may make things worse, and even if we do improve the environment, contentment may decrease. A political coalition of environmental and equity enthusiasts may provide a viable way out of these dilemmas.     

A Formula for Disaster: The Department of Homeland Security's Virtual Ontology

This paper focuses on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in order to theorise the spatialities of post-9/11 security knowledge and practice in the US. It analyses the organisational discourses that animate homeland security work, such as preparedness, vulnerability, the new threat environment, risk analysis and capabilities-based planning, and considers the implications of these practices for contemporary geographies of security. It is argued that DHS operates through a virtual ontology of threat, whereby potential, future threats are addressed as present possibilities that emerge in the spaces of everyday life. The sources of American freedoms and insecurities, the everyday, emerging circulations of goods and people, present DHS with a terrain of shifting threats from which both emergencies and preparedness may materialise. Disaster looming, the potential suspension of everyday life forms the basis for security practice as the emergency becomes a fact of life itself. The spatialities of this environment of imminent threat are considered and it is argued that the everyday emergency operates topologically as a continuous process of spatialisation.     

The ‘Sword and Shield of the Party’: how the Vietnamese People’s Public Security Forces portray themselves

This paper shows that since the beginning of the reform period in 1986 the regime in Hanoi has taken great pains to create the image of the state having legitimate and, indeed, heroic security organs that acted as the ‘saviors of the Vietnamese revolution’ and still serve as the ‘shield and sword’ of the Vietnamese Communist Party. I argue that while previously the socialist state used to regard the history of its security organs as top secret, over the last few years, a huge amount of resources have been mobilized to actively propagate a sacred and romanticized image of the security apparatus.