Introduction: Wasted Lives

Zygmunt Bauman, the influential sociologist of liquid modernity, argues that at the start of the twenty-first century large numbers of people around the globe — hundreds of millions, in fact — are surplus to requirements, are, indeed, redundant. In Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts, Bauman (2004, pp. 5–6) argues that this redundancy is a consequence of the global spread and triumph of modernisation processes: ‘The production of “human waste” … (the “excessive” and “redundant”, that is the population of those who either could not or were not wished to be recognized or allowed to stay), is an inevitable outcome of modernization’. These modernization processes can, largely, be understood in terms of the colonization of all aspects of life, of all spaces and places by market forces, practices and processes under regimes of capital accumulation. As processes of modernization have become truly globalized, as the ‘totality of human production and consumption has become money and market mediated, and the processes of the commodification, commercialization and monetarization of human livelihoods have penetrated every nook and cranny of the globe’, then the ‘crisis of the human waste disposal industry’ (emphasis in original) has become more acute.