Many thanks to Niklas Damiris, Helen Epstein, Sara Fadabini, Alessandra Giannini, Loren Landau, Sara Vigil, Helga Wild, and Rea Zaimi, who provided critical insights, data, and sources for this article. We also would like to thank Ousmane Ndong, Sayba Soumano, Molly Teague, and Gabriella Bianchi for their research assistance and Ousmane Diouf Sané and Oumar Mamadou Dieng for helping to organize the

Author(s): Rubio, Fernando Dominguez; Wharton, Glenn | Abstract: Impermanence and fragility have become the defining conditions of the digital age. Technologies that were ubiquitous barely a decade ago, like floppy disks, now look like archaeological relics. It takes only a few years, if not months, before software environments are replaced by newer versions, often with limited backward compatibility

In Fall 2011, an American marine — who was involved in the brutal 2004 assault on Fallujah, Iraq — excoriated the NYPD for getting rough with Occupy protesters in Times Square, New York City. Standing in his fatigues and occasionally pointing at the medals pinned to his chest, Sergeant Shamar Thomas chided the police repeatedly, “This is not a war zone!” He paced back and forth in front of a cluster

I think that one thing that remains constant for me is that the system — the prison industrial complex — isn’t broken. The system of mass criminalization we have isn’t the result of failure. Thinking in this way allows me to look at what’s going on right now in a cleareyed way. I understand that white supremacy is maintained and reproduced through the criminal punishment apparatus. —Mariame Kaba, “Towards

In the space of less than twenty years, drones have become ubiquitous components of the security infrastructures that produce and police territories and borders of all kinds — from national dividing lines to the more scattered or almost imperceptible spatial relations that have come to characterize an era of globalized conflicts. Most often associated with the sensing and “signature strike” operations

The widespread adoption of bodyworn cameras by police departments across the country promises outcomes that appeal to a broad spectrum of stakeholders, ranging from Black Lives Matter and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Police Executive Research Forum. They hope that the presence of bodyworn cameras (“bodycams”) will improve the

“We have the honour to congratulate His Majesty’s Empire for the decisive victory which His Forces has recently achieved.” So opened a May 1945 petition to the High Commissioner for Palestine from three Palestinians requesting clemency. They had, they said, been banished from their village of Beit Daras to Khan Yunis “for political doubts.” These political doubts almost certainly meant presumed participation

In May 2014, lawyers from the Londonbased international nonpro t organization Reprieve led a motion on behalf of Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp prisoner Abu Wa’el (Jihad) Dhiab to produce thirtytwo videotapes of Dhiab being forcibly extracted from his cell and forcefed in a restraint chair. Dhiab’s lawyer described his forcefeedings as being administered so incorrectly that he vomited repeatedly and

“It was not a desire for vengeance, but a desire for justice,” the lawyer told the court at a trial I attended a few months before I started my ethnographic research on urban policing in the banlieues of Paris.1 The defendants were seven police officers indicted for acts of violence that had occurred a year earlier. The photographs of the plaintiff, a man from Turkey, whose swollen and bruised face

“Who do you protect? Who do you serve?” You could hear this chant frequently at protests in recent years, directed at lines of grimfaced cops across the United States. Modifying a common police tagline, the chant raised the possibility that the aggressive police management of Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter street protests was not simply about maintaining the peace but rather about a more

We walk through an arched pergola draped with passionfruit vines. “Everything happens for a reason,” says Luis,1 the military police officer walking with the two of us. In the distance, gunfire crackles in occasional bursts from a training ground behind a grove of citrus trees. “He killed eight people . . . all while off duty.” Luis is speaking of someone who has turned his life around. He’s been rehabilitated

On October 16 and 17, 2017, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, we brought together scholars from around the world to collectively investigate the concept, history, and administration of the global discourse and practice of “diversity.” In particular, we were interested in how the US Supreme Court decisions in Regents of University of California v. Bakke and Grutter v. Bollinger had ultimately

Today thousands of academics from Turkey, along with others from Syria, Iran, and Egypt are deserting their homeland in search of intellectual refuge in Western countries. These exiled academics have been attempting to practice diverse forms of teaching and researching, both in Turkey and in exile. We argue that the struggles of oppositional academics inside and outside Turkey today offer insight into

Author(s): Sonevytsky, M | Abstract: © 2018 by Duke University Press. This article investigates how sovereignty works in practice by attending to the aural public sphere of Crimea, as "Eastern music" is produced and circulated by the Crimean Tatar radio and as it penetrates the public spaces of microtransit. I argue that through the dissemination of "Eastern music" on the Crimean peninsula, Radio Meydan

Pero si en Tijuana ya no hay delitos de alto impacto!!!, como puede ser posible eso?, que des.madrito era la via rapida esta mañana, puedo apostar que muchos de los que estaban ahi varados en el tra co, son de los paleros que dicen “a mi no me afecta, se matan entre ellos” aha!! si y por culpa de alguien que decidio colgar a un malandro de un puente, pues muchos llegamos tarde a los trabajos . . .

The accusation that Black Pete—the blackface character at the center of the annual Sinterklaas festival—is a racist caricature has recently become a staple of the Dutch culture wars, leaving media and cultural producers in a quandary over the figure’s meaning and fate. This essay focuses on two recent seasons of the widely popular children’s television program Sinterklaasjournaal. The show deployed

In this article I explore what feature-length films of the kind that are shown in human rights film festivals contribute to human rights culture. Analysing films that feature victims (including, in some detail, Sonita) and perpetrators (notably The Act of Killing), I argue that a viewer is called on to identify with the protagonist who drives forward a narrative of self-responsibilisation – regardless

Carrie Tirado Bramen begins with a reference to Trump, who often describes himself as a “nice person”. Trump divides the world into nice and nasty, demonstrating how likeability and sociability are more powerful than politics. However, Trump is not the only public figure to emphasize niceness. Rather, niceness is a tool commonly utilized as a way to combat societal insecurity due to the neoliberal

Not long after the June 1967 war, at a meeting of the Labor Party, Golda Meir turned to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and asked: “What are we going to do with a million Arabs?” Eshkol paused for a moment and then answered: “I get it,” he said. “You want the dowry, but you don’t like the bride!” This anecdote underscores that, from the very beginning, Israel made a clear distinction between the land it

Author(s): Blankholm, Joseph | Abstract: This article bridges the gap between the study of religion-making secularism and the study of secular people with an empirical analysis of three recent lawsuits filed by secular activists in the United States. Each suit asks the courts to understand nonbelievers in a different way: one group refuses to identify as religious, another wants to be protected as

The recent “materialist turn” stresses the fundamental role of nonhumans in the constitution of humans’ social and political life and argues that the inability to grasp their importance dooms normative prognoses for ordering society to ethical, political, and practical failure. This article combines insights from recent affect theory and indigenous and non–North Atlantic societies in response to this

In the streets of Guatemala City, on the outer edges of today’s war on drugs, Christians hold a growing number of users captive inside Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers. Inside these makeshift asylums, pastors preach about the slavery of salvation — about how we are all either imprisoned by sin or held captive by Christ (see O’Neill 2017a). “Crack [cocaine] has a hold on me,” one user explained

A problem with constructing black aesthetics is whether aesthetics has been so colonized that its production would be a form of colonizing instead of decolonial practice. This article explores the problem through contextualizing and exploring recent theoretical responses to it. Since the publication of Addison Gayle Jr.’s classic anthology The Black Aes­ thetic (1972), the titular phrase has been a

This empirical-critical study looks at the Air Quality Egg project, a Euro-American effort focused on the collaborative creation of a “smart” air quality sensor network. While widely celebrated as a “best practice” example of bottom-up smart city making, the involvement of a US software company that turned the data platform into a full-blown for-profit service suggests a very different reading. Yet

A whole world exists around the ownership of a gun. There is, first, the world of consumption: from gun stores to gun shows, to magazines and web forums, and within these the enormous range of items to purchase — the holster, the ammo, the eye protection, the ear protection, the body armor, the safe, the bumper sticker, and, of course, the gun. The home defense gun, the carry gun, the 1911, the .38

Orcas are among the world’s most charismatic animals, combining grace and power, violent when they need to be, but rarely toward humans and never in the wild. Attacks on humans have been restricted to captive orcas, opening up widespread discussions on the ethics of marine-mammal captivity and prompting major changes to the North American orca-display industry, as represented by corporate giants such

In 2011, a year into my fieldwork on Islamic television in Egypt, a small crisis erupted in the audiovisual translation center of Iqraa, the world’s first selfdeclared Islamic satellite channel. The translation center subtitled and dubbed the channel’s Arabiclanguage programs into English. The main workflow at the center was divided between Egyptian translators, who were responsible for creating English

There is no shortage of known global “bad guys.” They are the racists, the sexists, and the otherwise intolerant. They are the ethnocentrists and the bullies, the fanatical and the profiteering, the closeminded and the cruel. They are easily recognized. Their exploitative, scaremongering, and willfully ignorant tactics can be contested and sometimes even contained by any number of compelling progressive

This essay explores how contemporary political life is framed through engagements with material forms. Extending work that has demonstrated that politics is best understood not as a discursive or institutional sphere but as the effect of material engagements, the essay asks, just how is it that materials become the grounds for politics? Focusing on the history of a road construction project in the

This article examines theories of human territoriality and their historical role in the demise of public housing in Western Europe and North America between the 1960s and the 1980s. The neglect and privatization of the public housing stock and the withdrawal of the state in direct provision in this period are often subsumed under the category of neoliberalism. This article unpacks this narrative by

In his socially engaged and intimate art, Carlos Motta attempts to document and redress the exclusions of history. Drawing on archival research and engagements with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities from Ukraine to Norway to South Korea to Colombia, he tracks the effects of colonial violence, the suppression of gender and sexual difference, and economic inequality. Working

“We are the only people in this world who are living under such total occupation. Israel sees us as being equal to our animals, and sometimes they even value us less than our animals.” This quote, from the founder of the Gaza Zoo, demonstrates both the significance and the complexities of human-animal relations in Gaza, especially at times of siege and war. My article draws on ethnographic encounters

The thing is, I’ve never been to Laarh. Till some months ago, I didn’t even know it existed. Then, one warm morning, a man turned up in Islamabad carrying his tale and his place, and I spent the next several weeks springing the name on people I met, friends, reporters, refugees, and acquaintances, in the hopes of scaring some information from them. Every outsider to this warbitten region knows this

textabstractMaps are considered to be an ultimate expression of modernity. Empirical cartography plays a central role in daily governance, and it also has a long history of furthering displacement and erasure. In this article I argue that the landscapes of historic British colonialism and the ongoing Israeli occupation influence the digital maps made by the Palestinian Authority. Through an investigation

Online poker gamblers employ software to track and algorithmically analyze play-by-play game information in real time, parsing opponents’ behavioral patterns and tendencies into color-coded numerical values that hover over their respective positions at the virtual table. These continuously updated statistical dashboards, along with retrospective game analysis and methodical routines of self-adjustment

This article explores the politics of permissible exposure for US nuclear workers. I argue that despite recent efforts to improve regulations for occupational radiation protection, the federal government has been unable to solve the fundamental paradox of nuclear safety: that some level of exposure is unavoidable when working with nuclear materials and that any level of exposure comes with an associated

This article focuses on the state confiscation of the Surp Hagop Armenian cemetery as more than just another fact about the famous 2013 protests in Gezi Park in Istanbul. In addition to coming to terms with the limits of the Gezi uprising in relation to its claims of inclusiveness, such a focus unravels the key tension between, on the one hand, progressive and left-wing calls to promote the allegedly

In “Embargoed Literature,” an essay written twenty-five years ago, Edward W. Said noted that “of all the major world literatures, Arabic remains relatively unknown and unread in the West.” How is it that one of the world’s great literary corpuses, as rich as those of classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Chinese, has so little echo in English? Is Arabic literature untranslatable? The obstacles in this case

Shamus Khan talks with Saskia Sassen about some of her most influential book projects, from The Mobility of Labor and Capital and The Global City to her recent publication, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Reading these texts together and in light of current issues, their conversation touches on topics such as how migration relates to political and economic processes, the

Extortion is the most common of crimes in Central America today and the most despised. As a growing criminal phenomenon, it exemplifies trends prevalent across post–Cold War Latin America as well as other parts of the world. In many societies, the “democratic wave” and the triumph of market fundamentalism has been accompanied by deepening uncertainty: the state has become criminal, criminals counterfeit

This article draws on research with and about refugees from across the Middle East and North Africa and examines the current Syrian refugee crisis through the tropes of visibility and invisibility. Adopting a deconstructive framework, it purposefully centralizes what has previously been assigned a peripheral position throughout the ever-expanding “archive of knowledge” (following Foucault) vis-a-vis

Does the spread of psychological counseling techniques in eastern Africa represent a “globalization” of the mind? This essay traces the genealogies of this phenomenon and points to the ways in which a set of imported techniques has been localized.

On October 22, 2012, an African easterly wave formed in the Caribbean Sea and quickly grew into a tropical storm with frightening potential. It was the hottest year in recorded human history (though that record has subsequently been shattered), and the seawater was unusually warm. Strong winds whipped the wet Caribbean air into a frenzy as the storm moved north and west, and by October 24 the system

The conditions of the Anthropocene, and the relative novelty of renewable energy forms, demonstrate the experimental plasticity of our era. Existing infrastructures of energy, political power, and capital can resist the more revolutionary ambitions of renewable energy to mitigate climate change and promote collaborative energy production, such as community-owned wind parks. Even when states adopt bold

This article discusses the unprecedented heat waves affecting the city of Buenos Aires—between December 2013 and January 2014—and the extended power outages that ensued. It focuses on this particular extreme case to examine a broader spectrum of shortcomings regarding energy in Argentina, such as an increasing demand that is not matched by investment in supply, aging infrastructure, and lack of coordination

In the fall of 2014, Rebuild by Design, an initiative of President Barack Obama’s Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, convened an international working group of experts to advance a global conversation on resiliency, design, and politics. As part of that process, the researcher Daniel Aldana Cohen interviewed several members of the working group on the challenges and opportunities that cities increasingly

Retreat, or relocating people and unbuilding land in places vulnerable to flooding and sea level rise, remains on the fringes of conversations about climate change adaptation. Yet already people throughout the world are moving away from the water en masse. Many more want to move but lack the resources to do so. Residents working to organize their own retreat are engaged in a struggle for recognition

Singapore climate change adaptation planning for water infrastructure is assessed against the concept of “vital security systems.” Cast against the historicity of water planning and postcolonial urbanism, water supply, coastal protection, and flood control are understood in terms of vigilance, emergency, prediction, and control. It is argued that climate adaptation planning relies on a naturalistic

This essay tracks the two-decade-long struggle to protect the delta smelt and other native fish populations in California. Through the case of the smelt, it asks how the goal of species preservation is integrated into contemporary governmental practice. What values are at play in efforts to sustain the existence of nonhuman life in a setting of intense competition over a diminishing and essential resource

This article examines the discourses and practices of climate change adaptation in the Arabian Peninsula. It suggests that climate change adaptation projects in the region are often attempts at reframing water-related challenges that are already present, regardless of the effects of climate change. For instance, the groundwater sources in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will be destroyed not necessarily

This essay foregrounds the political constituencies assembling around the problem of climate change in cities. Recent experiments in urban climate governance in Bogota, Colombia, are shown to challenge liberal democratic notions of the “public” by linking a redistributive economic agenda to the technical project of adaptation. An analysis of interventions aimed at building social infrastructure throughout

Specters of rationing haunt metro Sao Paulo. Water supplies have plunged to historic, dangerous lows. The idea of rationing has become a flash-point. The state’s center-right governor has insisted that rationing be avoided at all costs and the state’s profit-driven water utility has followed suit, even as dwindling water supplies are being opaquely and unequally distributed. To make sense of the situation