Books in the Global Insecurities series

In this ethnography of the Cancha mega-market in Cochabama, Bolivia, Daniel M. Goldstein examines what it means for the market's poorest vendors to maintain personal safety and economic stability by navigating systems of informality and illegality and how this dynamic is representative of the neoliberal modern city.

Margaret E. Dorsey and Miguel Diaz-Barriga argue that border wall construction along the U.S.-Mexico border manifests transformations in citizenship practices that are aimed not only at keeping migrants out but also enmeshing citizens into a wider politics of exclusion.

The contributors to Paper Trails examine migrants' relationship to the state through requirements to obtain identification documents in order to get legal status.

The contributors to Paper Trails examine migrants' relationship to the state through requirements to obtain identification documents in order to get legal status.

In Making Refuge Catherine Besteman follows the lives of a group of Somali Bantu refugees over the course of three decades, from their pre-civil war homes and terrible experiences in Kenyan refugee camps, to their recent resettlement in the struggling former mill town of Lewiston, Maine.

Tracing the college experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, Ellen Moore challenges the popular narratives that explain student veterans' academic difficulties while showing how these narratives and institutional support for the military lead to suppression of campus debate about the wars, discourage anti-war activism, and encourage a growing militarization.

Through global case studies that explore biometric identification, border control, forensics, militarized policing, and counterterrorism, the contributors show how bodies have become critical sources of evidence that is organized and deployed to classify, recognize, and manage human life.

Militarization: A Reader offers an anthropological perspective on militarization's origin and sustained presence as a cultural process in its full social, economic, political, cultural, environmental, and symbolic contexts throughout the world.

The contributors to Futureproof examine the affective and aesthetic dimensions of security infrastructures and technology with studies ranging from Jamaica and Jakarta to Colombia and the US-Mexico border.

Catherine Besteman offers a sweeping theorization of the ways in which countries from the global North are reproducing South Africa's apartheid system on a worldwide scale to control the mobility and labor of people from the global South.

Andrew Bickford analyzes the US military's attempts to design performance enhancement technologies and create pharmacological "supersoldiers" capable of becoming ever more lethal while withstanding various forms of extreme trauma.

Melinda Hinkson follows the experiences of Nungarrayi, a Warlpiri woman from the central Australian desert, as she struggles to establish a new life for herself in the city of Adelaide.