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THE VIOLENCE OF
NEOLIBERALISM
Simon Springer
The ascent of neoliberalism can be understood as a particular form of anxiety, a disquiet born in
the wake of the Second World War when the atrocities of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the
Soviet Union fostered a belief that government intervention trampled personal freedoms and
thereby unleashed indescribable slaughter (Mirowski and Plehwe 2009). There is some truth to
be found in this concern, but the response that followed has exhibited its own violent tenden-
cies. The Mont Pelerin Society, the originary neoliberal think tank, responded by resurrecting
classical liberalism’s three basic tenets. First, a concentrated focus on the individual, who was
viewed as the most qualified to communicate his or her desires, whereby society should be
reoriented towards removing obstacles that hinder this goal. Second, free markets were consid-
ered the most proficient means for advancing self-reliance, whereby individuals could pursue
their needs through the mechanism of price. Finally, a faith in a non-interventionist state that
would emphasize and maintain competitive markets and guarantee individual rights shaped
around a property regime (Hackworth 2007; Plehwe and Walpen 2006). From the geopolitical
context of the war’s aftermath, the origins of neoliberalism as a political ideology can be under-
stood as reactionary to violence. In short, neoliberals conceived that violence could be curbed
by a return to Enlightenment thinking and its explicit basis in advancing the merits of
individualism.
This historical context is ironic insofar as structural adjustment, fiscal austerity, and free trade,
the basic principles of neoliberalism, are now ‘augmented by the direct use of military force’
(Roberts et al. 2003), where the ‘invisible hand’ of the global free market is increasingly clenched
into the ‘visible fist’ of the US military. The relationship between capital accumulation and war
is of course longstanding (Harvey 1985), and the peaceful division that early neoliberals pursued
for their economic agenda demonstrated a certain naivety. While not all wars are decidedly
capitalist, it is difficult to envisage conditions wherein an economic ideology like neoliberalism
could not come attendant to violence insofar as it seeks a global domain, supports universal
assumptions, and suppresses heterogeneity as individuals are remade according to the normative
image of ‘neoliberal proper personhood’ (Kingfisher 2007). Either the lessons of colonialism
were entirely overlooked by the Mont Pelerin Society, or they uncritically embraced its narra-
tive appeal to the supposed higher purpose of the ‘white man’s burden’. Just as colonialism
paved a road to hell with ostensibly good intentions, the neoliberal imagination of an eventual
harmonious global village now demonstrates much the same. Embedded within such promises
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1of utopia are the dystopian realities that exist in a number of countries, where neoliberalization
has not produced greater peace, but a profound and often ruinous encounter with violence.
The historical record indicates that the years under neoliberalism have been characterized by
recurrent crises and deepening divisions between and within the world’s nations on ethno-
religious grounds. Although in some instances poverty has arguably been alleviated, or at least
not got any worse, under neoliberalism, in many more contexts poverty remains painfully acute,
while inequality has undeniably increased both within and between cities, states, and regions
(Wade 2003; Harvey 2005). There is nascent literature that is quickly gathering momentum,
which attempts to make these connections between neoliberalism and violence more explicit
(Auyero 2000; Borras and Ross 2007; Chatterjee 2009; Coleman 2007; Collier 2008; Goldstein
2005; Marchand 2004). From this growing concern comes increasing recognition for the idea
that the imposition of neoliberal austerity measures may actually promote conditions of increased
impoverishment that subsequently provide multiple opportunities for violent conflict (Bourdieu
1998; Bourgois 2001; Farmer 2004; Uvin 2003; Wacquant 2009). Within my own work I have
attempted to demonstrate an urgent need to build linkages between the violence occurring in
various sites undergoing neoliberalization, and to identify threads of commonality within these
diverse spaces so that an emancipatory agenda of transnational scope may potentially begin to
emerge (Springer 2015).
Although acknowledgement for the violence of neoliberalism continues to grow, it is impor-
tant to recognize how simplistic and problematic it is to assume uniformity across the various
constellations of violent geographies that are occurring in neoliberalizing contexts. Such an
approach serves to reinforce the authority of neoliberal discourse by continuing to circulate the
idea that neoliberalism as a particular model of statecraft is unavoidable, a criticism Gibson-
Graham (1996) make more generally with regard to capitalism. Likewise, to treat the material
expression of violence only through its directly observable manifestation is a reductionist
appraisal. This view disregards the complexity of the endless entanglements of social relations,
and further ignores the future possibilities of violence (Nordstrom 2004). When we bear witness
to violence, what we are seeing is not a ‘thing’, but a moment with a past, present, and future
that is determined by its elaborate relations with other moments of social process (Springer
2011). The material ‘act’ of violence itself is merely a confluence in the flows of oppressive social
relations, and one that is persistently marked with absolutist accounts of space and time, when
instead violence should be recognized as being temporally dispersed through a whole series of
‘troubling geographies’ (Gregory 2006). Nonetheless, understanding the resonances of violence
within the now orthodox political economic model of neoliberalism – however disparate, protean,
and variegated – is of critical importance to social justice. Only through a conceptualization of
fluidity and process can we begin to recognize how violence and neoliberalism might actually
converge.
I begin this chapter by identifying how processes of othering coincide and become a central
component of neoliberal logic by providing it with the discursive tools to realize its heteroge-
neous ideals. In the following section I describe how attention to the relationality of space and
time allow us to recognize neoliberalism and violence as mutually reinforcing moments of social
process where it becomes very difficult to disentangle these two phenomena. I then turn
my attention towards the exclusions of neoliberalism, where I consider how the exceptional
violence of this process comes to form the rule. Here I identify neoliberalism having produced
a state of exception through its particular version of sovereign authority and dire consequences
this results in for the downtrodden and dispossessed. I then conclude on a hopeful note by insist-
ing that collectively we are powerful actors who have the radical potential to resist, transform,
and ultimately undo neoliberalism.
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1Neoliberal othering
Although mainstream examinations of conflict theory have a tendency to focus on ‘local’ origins
by invoking the idea of ‘backward’ cultural practices as the most suitable explanations for vio-
lence (see Huntington 1996; Kaplan 2000), this reading problematically overlooks the influence
of ideology and economics. The geographical imagination of violence vis-à-vis neoliberalism
treats violence as an externality, a wrong-headed vision that engenders Orientalist ideas. Such
othering discourses insidiously posit ‘local’ cultures as being wholly responsible for any ensuing
bloodshed following neoliberalization, thus ignoring the mutability and relationality of the
‘global’ political economy of violence. Here we can look for guidance to the influence of Said
(2003), who has made significant contributions to a broader interest in how geographical repre-
sentations and practices produced notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’, or ‘Self’ and ‘Other’. In a contem-
porary sense, othering licenses further neoliberal reforms, as neoliberalization is positioned as a
‘civilizing’ enterprise in the face of any purported ‘savagery’ (Springer 2015). Neoliberalism is
rarely interrogated and is typically either openly endorsed (see Fukuyama 1992) or tacitly
accepted (see Sen 1999) as both the sine qua non of human development and the cure-all for
violence. Such othering places neoliberalism ‘under erasure’, where we are encouraged to
approach neoliberal ideas without a critical lens.
Popular geopolitics has repeatedly imagined ‘African’, ‘Asian’ and ‘Islamic’ cultures as being
somehow ingrained with a supposedly ‘natural’ inclination towards violence, a tendency that has
intensified in the context of the ongoing ‘war on terror’. The public performance of such ideas
feeds into particular geostrategic aims, thus allowing them to gather momentum and develop a
certain form of ‘commonsense’ validity. The imaginative geographies of such Orientalism are
creations that meld difference and distance through a sequence of spatializations that not only
assign particular people as ‘Other’, but also construct ‘our’ space of the familiar as distinct and
separate from ‘their’ unfamiliar space that lies beyond (Gregory 2004; Said 2003). This is the
exact discourse that colonialism rallied to erect its authority in the past, and in the current con-
juncture, Orientalism can be considered as neoliberalism’s latitude insofar as othering enables a
powerful discursive space for promoting the ideals of the free market. Such a connection
between neoliberalism and Orientalism may appear counter-intuitive when neoliberalism is
accepted at face value. After all, the neoliberal doctrine envisages itself as the champion of a
liberal internationalism centred around the vision of a single human race peacefully united by a
common code of conduct featuring deregulated markets, free trade, shared legal norms and states
that feature civic liberties, electoral processes, and representative institutions (Gowen 2001).
Nonetheless, an appreciation for neoliberalization’s capacity to promote inequality, exacerbate
poverty, license authoritarianism, and advance a litany of other social ills is growing (Bourdieu
1998; Duménil and Lévy 2011; Giroux 2004; Goldberg 2009; MacEwan 1999; Springer 2008).
Such recognition hints at the numerous ‘erasures’ neoliberal ideologues have attempted to
engage through neoliberalism’s discursive concealment.
Klein (2007) has persuasively argued that natural disasters have been used as opportunities to
push through unpopular neoliberal reforms on peoples and societies too disoriented to protect
their interests. In their absence, othering lays the necessary foundation for manufactured ‘shocks’
in procuring openings for neoliberalism. Similar to the originary state-level neoliberal trial run in
Chile (Challies and Murray 2008), the current sequence of imperialism-cum-neoliberalization
in the Middle East is exemplary of American geopolitical intervention and a variety of militarism
rooted in the Orientalist idea of folding distance into difference. Would the mere presence of ISIS,
as problematic as this organization is, have been enough to galvanize America’s authorization of
air strikes had their fragmented activities and threats occurred on Canadian soil rather than in
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1Iraq and Syria? We can only speculate, but, given the wholesale devastation that ensues, without
a significant dose of Orientalism the idea of launching missiles and dropping bombs on a country
in all probability would not get off the ground and a different strategy would be devised to
ensure minimal civilian casualties. Similarly, it was ‘unknown/faraway’ Santiago and not ‘familiar/
nearby’ Ottawa that played host to Washington’s subversions in the lead up to the ‘other 9/11’ in
1973, when the neoliberal experiment was first realized with the installation of Pinochet.
Attention to how particular geographies, including imaginative ones, are ‘produced by multiple,
often unnoticed, space-making and space-changing processes’ is of critical importance (Sparke
2007: 338, 2005). Sparke (2007) argues that such appreciation is itself an ethical commitment to
consider the exclusions – which can be read in the double sense of ‘under erasure’ and ‘othering’ –
in the production of any given geographical truth claims. The geography of neoliberalism
involves recognizing its variegated expressions (Peck and Tickell 2002), imperialist impulses
(Escobar 2004; Hart 2006), and authoritarian responses (Canterbury 2005; Springer 2009), all of
which dispel the theoretical tall-tales of a smooth-space, flat-earth where neoliberalism rolls-out
across the globe without friction or resistance. To deal with the inconsistencies between these
material interpretations and a doctrine allegedly premised on peace, othering practices are
employed to indemnify ‘aberrant’, ‘violent’, and ‘local’ cultures in explaining away any failings
of neoliberalism, thereby leaving its class project unscathed (Springer 2015). Orientalism is used
to legitimize the doublespeak neoliberal proponents invoke in the global distribution of violence
(Sparke 2007), to code the violence of anti-neoliberal resistance, and to geographically allocate
and place blame for violence by asserting that violence sits in particular, ‘Oriental’ places
(Springer 2011). The responsibility of critical theory under this ‘new imperialism’ (Harvey
2003) is thus to illuminate such erasures so that the othering of neoliberalism is laid bare and
therein may be refused.
Momentous violence
In my attempt to link neoliberalism to violence one might be inclined to ask if the former actually
causes the latter and how that could be proven. My response is that the question itself is largely
irrelevant. The empirical record reveals a noticeable upswing in inequality under neoliberalism
(Wade 2003), which Harvey (2005) regards as neoliberalism’s principal substantive achieve-
ment. Inequality alone is about measuring disparity, however qualified, while the link between
inequality and violence is typically considered as an appraisal of the ‘validity’ of a causal relation-
ship, where the link may or may not be understood to take on multiple dimensions including
temporally, spatiality, economics, politics, culture and so forth. The point is that violence and
inequality are mutually constitutive. Inequality precipitates violence, and violence gives rise to
further inequalities. Accordingly, if we wish to attenuate the devastating and disaffecting effects
of either, we need to rid ourselves of a calculative model and instead consider violence and
inequality as an integral system or particular moment. ‘Thinking in terms of moments’, Hartsock
(2006: 176) argues, can allow scholars ‘to take account of discontinuities and incommensurabili-
ties without losing sight of the presence of a social system within which these features are
embedded’. Although the enduring phenomenon of violence is fragmented by variations, strains
and aberrations as part of its processual nature, within the current moment of neoliberalism,
violence is all too often a reflection of the chaotic landscapes of globalized capitalism.
At different moments capitalism creates particular kinds of agents who become capable of
certain kinds of violence dependent upon both their distinctive geohistorical milieu and their
situation within its hierarchy. It is in this distinction of moments that we can come to understand
the correlations between violence and neoliberalism. By exploring the particular histories and
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1distinctive geographies that define individual neoliberalizations, scholars can begin to shed light
on the phantasmagoria of violence that is projected within neoliberalism’s wider rationality of
power. In other words, it is important to recognize and start working through how the moment
of neoliberalism and the moment of violence converge. The intention here is not to produce a
Cartesian map, wherein the same interpretation is replicated in each and every context of neo-
liberalization. Neoliberalism should not be read as an all-powerful and self-reproducing logic.
Lending such an infallible appearance serves to empower the idea that neoliberalism is beyond
reproach. It is imperative to contest the neoliberalism-as-monolithism argument for failing to
recognize space and time as open and always becoming (Springer 2014). In focusing solely on
an externally constructed neoliberalism we neglect the local geographies of existing political
economic circumstances and institutional frameworks, wherein the vagaries of societal influences
and individual agency play a key role in the circulation and (re)production of neoliberalism. In
short, to focus exclusively on external forces is to risk producing over-generalized accounts of a
singular and omnipresent neoliberalism.
While acknowledging the problematics of a monolithic reading of neoliberalism it is also
critically important to acknowledge that an intensive focus on internal phenomena is also limit-
ing. Without attention to the relational connections of neoliberalism across space we cannot
adequately addresses the essential features and important connections of neoliberalism as a global
project (Peck and Tickell 2002). This ‘larger conversation’ of neoliberalism is considered impor-
tant in relating similar constellations of experiences across various locations as a potential basis
for emancipation (Brand and Wissen 2005; Featherstone 2005; Routledge 2003; Springer 2008;
Willis et al. 2008). Retaining the abstraction of a ‘global’ neoliberalism allows phenomena like
inequality and poverty, which are experienced across multiple sites, to find a point of similarity,
a moment. In contrast, a refusal of the global scope of neoliberalism hinders attempts at developing
and maintaining solidarity beyond the micro-politics of the ‘local’. For that reason, conceptual-
izing neoliberalism requires awareness for the complex connections between local and extralocal
forces functioning within the global political economy (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Peck
2001). To understand the violence of neoliberalism then, we must be willing to sift through and
account for the traction of violence in the contexts of its particular hybridized and modified
instances of neoliberalization, while at the same time preserving the notion of neoliberalism as
a ‘radical theoretical slogan’ (Peck 2004: 403). The latter can be employed as a reference point
in opposing violence and bringing together distinct struggles against the controlling, abusive,
and punishing structures of capitalism.
It was only over the course of a succession of setbacks, interruptions, and false starts that
neoliberalism as a marginal utopian idea began to emerge as an established doctrine that has
congealed as a diverse yet related series of neoliberalizations (Peck 2010; England and Ward
2007). Part of the ‘success’ of neoliberalism as the common language of global discourse is that
it is based on a series of nostrums that, once employed, foretell that free market forces will lead
to a thriving future, where all of the world’s peoples will be unified in an equitable and harmo-
nious ‘global village’. Put differently, the neoliberal apostles are false prophets of emancipation,
proselytizing peace as they wage war. So while I want to argue that understanding neoliberal
violence requires attention to particular specificities that are conditional and context dependent,
the violence of neoliberalism also has a relational character that extends across multiple sites,
having been entwined within particular discourses and (re)productions of space (Lefebvre 1991).
Acknowledgement of this dialectic moment brings a broader significance to neoliberalism’s
encounter with violence, where contextually specific patterns of violence that are associated
with unique social events, political circumstances, cultural processes, and spatial transformations
can also be read more broadly across an array of sites undertaking neoliberalizing processes all
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1across the globe. While the inflections, cadences, and pulses of neoliberalism will always have
some measure of idiosyncrasy in different contexts, from moment to moment the funeral march
remains the same. Concealed beneath the allure of sirens, neoliberalism is actually a cacophony
of violence and conflict, where there is profound dissonance between what it promises and what
it ultimately delivers.
The neoliberal state of exception
The continuing exclusions of neoliberalism should motivate us to get involved and galvanize
our collective strength to stand in opposition. But beyond the desire for compassion, an affinity
that never takes for granted our shared humanity (Day 2005), lurks the threat of complacency,
the shadow of indifference, and the menace of detachment among those of us who have not yet
been subjected to our homes being forcibly taken by armed bandits known as police, to our
children’s curiosity languishing because a basic education is an expense we cannot shoulder, or
to our spouses dying in our arms having been denied adequate healthcare. The examples are not
mere abstractions. Each of these scenarios has been revealed to me with disturbing regularity
during the course of my ongoing research in Cambodia (Springer 2010, 2013, 2015). What
those of us still on the winning side of neoliberalism do not anticipate or account for – and let
there be no mistake that this is a system that unquestionably produces winners and losers – is that
in this abandonment of our ‘Others’, we produce a state of exception (Ong 2006). The relation
of the ban is nothing if not ambiguous, and to abandon someone is not simply to ignore or
forsake them. As Agamben (1998: 72) explains, ‘What has been banned is delivered over to its
own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons it – at
once excluded and included, removed and at the same time captured.’ In other words, to ban is
to create a state of exception, wherein the ‘exception does not subtract itself from the rule; rather,
the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the
exception, first constitutes itself as a rule’ (ibid.: 14). Consequently, it is through the construction
of a new neoliberal normative frame – wherein malice and malevolence become the rule – that
the exceptional violence of neoliberalism is transformed into exemplary violence.
Exceptional violence always runs the risk of becoming exemplary, or so routinized, quotidian,
ordinary, and banal that we no longer feel an emotional response to its appearance precisely
because it is the norm. We may recognize it as violence, but we remain indifferent. Exemplary
violence is most effective when it is no longer recognized as violence at all, a destructive form of
unconsciousness that Bourdieu (2001) referred to as ‘symbolic violence’. It is in this mundanity
of the everyday that we find meaning in Arendt’s (1963) ‘banality of evil’. History’s profoundest
moments of iniquity are not performed by extremists or psychopaths, but by ordinary people –
potentially you and me – as we come to accept the premises of the existing order. The banality
of evil is thus an erasure that deprives us of our ability to recognize violence as a moment that is at
once both exceptional and exemplary. As Agamben (1998, 14) explains, an exception,
does not limit itself to distinguishing what is inside from what is outside but instead
traces a threshold (the state of exception) between the two, on the basis of which out-
side and inside, the normal situation and chaos, enter into those complex topological
relations.
The exception and the example accordingly always exist in a dialectic relationship, and it is for
this reason that the ongoing abandonment of the ‘Other’ under neoliberalism comes to define the
sovereign authority of neoliberalism as a political economic order.
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1As our political capacities knowingly and unknowingly embrace the social disarticulation and
anomie of neoliberalism’s dystopia of individualism, the violence of this process deepens. Within
neoliberalism’s imaginative geographies of an affluent global village, what is not spoken is the
desire for a certain and particular homogeneity, an impulse to remake the ‘Other’ in ‘our’ image,
whereby the space of ‘the peculiar’, ‘the exotic’, ‘the bizarre’ is continually (re)produced through
the relation of the ban. But this is a relation that Agamben (ibid.: 21) knows well to be one
where ‘outside and inside, become indistinguishable’, and thus, as with all fantasies and desires,
at the heart of neoliberalism’s chimera of strength and confidence lurks a profound sense of anxi-
ety (Gregory 1995). This is not a disquiet without consequence, but one that licenses particular
violent geographies in ensuring that the ‘tableau of queerness’ (Said 2003) never disrupts the
neoliberal vision of global sovereignty. The ominous specter of the banality of evil is signalled by
the juxtaposition between a panacean fantasy of a ‘new world order’ and the sheer magnitude of
violence that permeates our contemporary world. This is a routinized, clichéd, hackneyed, and
mundane force, an evil whose potential resides within each and every one of us, and whose
hostility is nurtured, accumulated, and consumed through the othering of neoliberalism.
Fantasy and reality collide under neoliberalization, and our involvement in this process allows
for the normative entrenchment of violence against the marginalized, the dispossessed, the poor,
the downtrodden, the homeless, the unemployed, the disaffected, and the ‘Other’. Yet this
necropolitics of violence is not the conclusion of neoliberalism’s violent fantasy; rather, it is its
genesis. The violence of neoliberalism is continuing to unravel the world. In this grave
realization, and in echoing Marx, critical scholarship must not merely seek to interpret the world;
it must seek to change it by aligning its theory and practice on all occasions and in all instances
to the service of social justice. By seeking to shine a light on the variety of ways in which the
processes of neoliberalization are saturated with both exceptional and exemplary violence,
we open our geographical imaginations to the possibility of (re)producing space in ways that
make possible a transformative and emancipatory politics. This moment of ‘Empire’ (Hardt and
Negri 2000) demands such courage of our scholarship. As members of the assemblage we call
humanity, we each have a moral obligation to stand up and speak out as an act of solidarity with
those whom the violence of neoliberalism has targeted, and those who have been silenced
by the complacency of a stifled collective imagination wherein neoliberalism is considered an
inexorable force.
Conclusion
The rolling-back of the state is a rationale of neoliberal governance, not an informed choice
of the autonomous agents that comprise the nation. Thus, resistance to neoliberalism often
provokes a more despotic outlook as states move to ensure that reforms are pushed through,
particularly if the changes are rapid and a legitimizing discourse for neoliberalization has not
already become widely circulated. This is why effective subjectification to neoliberal ideals and
the production of ‘othering’ discourses become a hallmark of neoliberalization. Yet complete
acquiescence to neoliberalism is improbable for two reasons. First, every single member of a
given society is never going to completely accept of agree with the dominant discourses. Thus,
we so often find that those marginalized by neoliberal reforms are actively engaged in continuous
struggles to have their voices heard, which is unfortunately just as frequently met with state
violence in response. Second, social processes have an essential temporality, meaning that they
continue to unfold. While notions of temporal stasis and spatial uniformity pervade popular
accounts of a fully integrated ‘global village’ (see Friedman 1999), these ideas are fundamentally
reliant upon a problematic assignment of monolithism and inevitability to neoliberalism, as
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1though space–time has only one possible trajectory (Massey 2005). In the popular imagination,
there is little acknowledgement of the discursive work that goes into the (re)production and
distribution of neoliberal ideas in a diverse range of contexts (Plehwe and Walpen 2006). As the
utopian discourse of neoliberalism rubs up against empirical realities – such as heightened
inequality and ongoing poverty – citizens are more likely to express discontent with particular
characteristics of neoliberalization, most obviously the reduction of essential social provisions
such as healthcare and education. Resorting to violence accordingly becomes one of the few
disciplinary options available to governments transformed by neoliberalization as they attempt
to retain legitimacy, where ‘othering’ becomes a primary mechanism in the articulation of
power. In short, those who don’t fit the mould of a proper neoliberal subject are treated as
enemies.
The rising tide against neoliberalism and the geographically dispersed protests that signify
and support such a movement necessarily occur in terrains that always exceed neoliberalism
(Hart 2008; Leitner et al. 2007). Consequently, we can never attribute neoliberalism to a direct
calculable expression. Although the idea of a distinct singular form of neoliberalism is promi-
nent in the popular imagination, such a formulaic interpretation of a pure neoliberalism is an
untenable idea that has been altogether dismissed by geographers (Peck and Tickell 2002).
Neoliberalism is a theoretical abstraction that rubs up against geographical limits, and conse-
quently its ‘actually existing’ circumstances are never paradigmatic. Yet it is nonetheless enor-
mously important to recognize how the evolving geographies of protest, resistance, and
contestation can be interpreted as a shared sense of betrayal with what can be broadly defined
as ‘neoliberal policy goals’. The implication of this reading is a growing recognition for trans-
national solidarity as being inseparable from ‘local’ movements, which prompts a relational
understanding of both resistance to, and the violence of neoliberalism (Featherstone 2005;
Wainwright and Kim 2008). Some of the most noticeable outcomes of neoliberalization are
increased class tensions, intensified policing, increased surveillance, and heightened security
measures, which inevitably arise from strained relations. So while there are variegations and
mutations to account for in neoliberalism’s travels, there is also a need to appreciate the similar
deleterious outcomes that all too frequently arise.
The relationship between neoliberalism and violence is directly related to the system of rule
that neoliberalism constructs, justifies, and defends in advancing its hegemonies of ideology, of
policy and programme, of state form, of governmentality, and, ultimately, of discourse (Springer
2012). Neoliberalism is a context in which the establishment, maintenance, and extension of
hierarchical orderings of social relations are re-created, sustained, and intensified, where pro-
cesses of ‘othering’ loom large. Accordingly, neoliberalization should be regarded as integral to
violence inasmuch as it generates social divisions within and across space. Yet the world as we
see it today where the violence of neoliberalism proceeds with a careless lack of restraint is nei-
ther necessary nor inevitable. By increasing our shared understanding for the cruelty that neo-
liberalism engenders we set in motion a process of awakening from the allure of market logic, a
process that shatters the influence of anomie and sounds a death knell for neoliberal ideas. As
exceptional violence comes to form the rule, people around the world are becoming more
acutely aware that something is not right, and consequently we are becoming more willing to
stand up for our communities, for ourselves, and for ‘Others’. Every time we refuse to sit idle
before would be evictors speculating on land, have the courage to protest exclusion from demo-
cratic process, strike against an exploitative employer who denies a fair wage, or resist being
framed as violent savages incapable of agency, the rhizomes of emancipation grow stronger.
There is a world to be won, and, as long as we can come to recognize the reflection of ‘Others’
within ourselves, we will prevail.
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