IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/ctwqxx/v30y2009i1p147-162.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Displacing Insecurity in a Divided World: global security, international development and the endless accumulation of capital

Author

Listed:
  • Marcus Taylor

Abstract

The current triple crisis of food, oil and credit has accentuated social instability across global capitalism, with the most severe effects displaced onto the urban and rural poor who, in the face of escalating prices for staple goods, face deepening immiseration. Mounting social unrest has led the international institutions of global governance to assess the crisis in terms of its security implications. This strategy has two related dimensions. On the one hand, it is part of a discourse that seeks to exceptionalise the current crisis and obscure its social foundations rooted in the evolution of global capitalism in its neoliberal form. On the other, it prepares the ground for interventions that attempt to uphold the status quo of a profoundly uneven global division of labour and consumption. The current crisis, however, reveals not an exceptional situation in need of securitisation, but the degree to which the current global capitalist order inherently displaces insecurity onto marginalised populations in order to reproduce the social conditions for accumulation at a global level. This process of displacement is examined on two levels. First, displacing insecurity is woven into an expanding international division of labour, in which ‘cheap labour’ is socially constructed and reproduced to toil within a global factory. Second, it is inherent to the consolidation of a global division of consumption in which Western mass consumption displaces ecological costs onto the global majority, creating grave insecurities over future life and livelihoods.

Suggested Citation

  • Marcus Taylor, 2009. "Displacing Insecurity in a Divided World: global security, international development and the endless accumulation of capital," Third World Quarterly, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 30(1), pages 147-162.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:30:y:2009:i:1:p:147-162
    DOI: 10.1080/01436590802622441
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01436590802622441
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/01436590802622441?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Romain Felli & Noel Castree, 2012. "Neoliberalising Adaptation to Environmental Change: Foresight or Foreclosure?," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 44(1), pages 1-4, January.
    2. Kimberley Anh Thomas, 2023. "Compelled to Compete: Rendering Climate Change Vulnerability Investable," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 54(2), pages 223-250, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:30:y:2009:i:1:p:147-162. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/ctwq .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.