Militarized Global Apartheid (Global Insecurities) by Catherine Besteman

Author:Catherine Besteman [Besteman, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2020-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

MILITARIZATION

We are bringing the battlefield to the border. —AN ENTHUSIASTIC SECURITY TECHNOLOGY PURVEYOR TO JOURNALIST TODD MILLER AT THE 2012 BORDER SECURITY EXPO IN PHOENIX, “FORTRESS USA: THE WILD WORLD OF BORDER SECURITY AND BOUNDARY BUILDING IN ARIZONA”

The previous chapters have charted the processes through which the global north has racialized the world; contributed to dispossession in the global south through plunder and military incursions; created mechanisms to contain the dispossessed, displaced, and undesirable mobile such as refugee camps, offshore holding facilities, detention centers, and prisons; criminalized mobility unauthorized by state permitting regimes; and developed programs and policies to manage the controlled mobility of people for the purpose of exploiting their labor. Here, we turn our attention to the final pillar of apartheid: the militarized security apparatus built to maintain racialized hierarchies of labor and mobility.

Cathy Lutz offers a particularly useful definition of militarization:

This process involves an intensification of the labor and resources allocated to military purposes, including the shaping of other institutions in synchrony with military goals. Militarization is simultaneously a discursive process, involving a shift in general societal beliefs and values in ways necessary to legitimate the use of force, the organization of large standing armies and their leaders, and the higher taxes or tribute used to pay for them. Militarization is intimately connected not only to the obvious increase in the size of armies and resurgence of militant nationalisms and militant fundamentalisms but also to the less visible deformation of human potentials into the hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and to the shaping of national histories in ways that glorify and legitimate military action.1

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