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

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.