The Politics of Evasion

Policymakers and power-holders in leading states and corporations of the Global North are at a critical juncture: how are power, control and political rights to be pursued in a post-globalization era? This book is a sustained dialogue between political theorist, Robert Latham, and Mr V - a policy analyst from an unnamed state in the Global North. Mr. V is sympathetic to the pursuit of justice, rights and freedom by progressive activists and movements, but also mindful of the challenges of states in pursuing security and order in the current social and political moment. This book explores key ideas including sovereignty, activism, migration, intervention, citizenship, security and justice.

1. SECURITY, CIRCULATION, AND THE LIMITS OF LIBERAL ORDER "New forms of disruption" "We can label this logic, evasion" "Bringing risk into the picture" "Openness and closure produce one another" "Deepening security and the possibilities of protest" "The nature of the target matters" "The relationship between anonymity and liberalism" "Disorder as an evasive tactic" "No pure, angelic form of liberalism" 2. RESISTANCE, TIME, AND THE STATE IN QUESTION "Between permanence and temporariness" "Enduring and transient structures" "A standpoint from which to question the state" "The melting of all that is solid" "Alongside permanence is the possibility of non-permanence" "Creating new meanings and framings" 3. NEOLIBERALISM, HYPER-SECURITY, AND THE BOUNDING OF POLITICAL LIFE "The desirability of publicness" "The external versus internal divide" "A range of interventions and forms of presence" "Looking at the interspatial logics of deployment" "What sort of power comes along with evasion?" "The state is a deployment machine" 4. TOWARD A PROGRESSIVE POLITICS OF EVASION "Lapsing into a defeatism" "Evading deployments" A "progressive politics of evasion" "Entering a trajectory of transformation" "Leave it up to the people?" "What kind of new collectivities are in play here?" "Closure is needed to create passages" "The battle within societies over collectivity can't be avoided" "Making passage and re-collectivity constitutional logics of the state"