Capital & Class

‘The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.’ (Samuel P. Huntington)

The editorial committee of Capital & Class are implacably opposed to the invasion of Iraq. Rather than being a humanitarian intervention, the invasion is a brutal act of imperialist aggression. The huge anti-war protests that have gripped the world are testimony to this basic understanding. The reasons for the war are spurious and the only proven link between Al-Qaeda and Iraq is US Foreign Policy. What has prompted the attack on Iraq is that Saddam Hussein's vile Ba'athist regime has suddenly become expendable in the judgement of the leadership of the USA.

These are truly fearful times that we are living through. In the United Nations, attempts to arrive at a diplomatic resolution of the crisis continue apace. The choreography of process serves little though to conceal the absolute certainty of outcome. The script of this war was crafted in Washington many months ago. In the next few days, the full military might of the world's sole remaining superpower will be unleashed on the beleaguered peoples of Iraq. As the regime of the erstwhile western client Saddam Hussein falls, the dawning of a new era of democracy will be hailed. With a compliant regime headed by the US military safely installed the cavalcade of American state terror will move on to bring untold horror on the benighted residents of some other misbegotten state. New world order, same old slaughter.

The aim of this paper is to understand the motives and effects of landscape adjustment during a period of heightened security consciousness. In this paper, the authors review aspects of the fear-landscape nexus in relation to the environments of everyday life, past and present, with particular reference to three important themes—marginality, spectacle and surveillance. In so doing this paper charts these three themes and clarifies the terminology of fear in order to identify some of the complementary ground between this term and landscape construction and reproduction.

The adoption of risk as a common part of contemporary societal construction has been tied to an environment of proliferation, multiplication, specialism, counterfactual guess-work, and, above all, anxiety. Deliberations on the growth of anxiety and fear have concentrated largely upon the impact of globalisation and the advent of new technological regimes. However, as discussed here ‘ambient fears' and anxieties can saturate the social spaces of everyday life. Hence, this paper examines a mundane and routine social activity—cinema-going—to demonstrate that fear, risk and anxiety are deeply embedded in the fabric of contemporary capitalist cities, shaping all manner of social practices. A central argument within this paper is that fear is inescapably caught up in the fabrication of social difference, with the strategies of risk avoidance that people practice in their everyday lives reinforcing boundaries between Self and Other.

Within Belfast most violent arenas the designing of place-centred communities, which actively resist an ethno-sectarian ‘other’, has been achieved via symbolic practice and the perpetuation and reproduction of religious segregation. This paper explores how political and religious segregation has within Belfast has been accomplished through regulating social contact between communities so as to direct the political ‘logic’ of spatial enclosure. Segregation has thus aided the reproduction of inter-linked spatial devices, which have enacted both violence and conflict. These devices include the reproduction of fear, the sociology of deviance and the articulation of discourses of defence. Without doubt the disquisition which constitutes ethno-sectarianism and fear in Belfast is reproduced through what are essentially ‘lived experiences’.

This paper describes and analyses the wider mechanisms, processes and contexts of the riots that took place in Northern UK cities and towns in the Summer of 2001. It examines these events and the imagined fears that aided the hardening of boundaries between violently opposed groups. It is noted that a long-term entrenchment of various forms of racial discrimination and racist violence in Oldham, Bradford and Burnley areas was connected to the long-term economic decline of the textile industry. Localised deindustrialisation, it is argued, generated a community discourse of nostalgia and cultural decline that was articulated via twin motors of race and ethnicity. As a result geographical concentrations of fear, risk and insecurity aided the likelihood and intensity of racist violence and disorder.

Media driven interpretations of fear and risk have failed to notify the general public that the most likely victims of violence are females who are attacked by a male partner. Domestic violence is pervasive throughout virtually all cultures, occurring across all social classes, all ethnic groups, and all age groups. Yet the true extent of domestic violence is generally agreed to be unknown. Domestic violence is a private fear and as is shown within this paper the search for sanctuary spaces that are offered by refuges is an important component in the acquisition of safe places. However, this paper examines how the ‘professionalisation’ of some refuges as well as other processes of institutionalisation may have had a negative impact upon the victims of abuse and violence.

In working against media representations of the young as a mindless and violent cabal this paper focuses on young people as victims of harassment and fear. While this reality has been recognised for some time it is clear that the victimhood of young people remains largely absent from public debates. As such it is argued that a process of felon setting against youth reflects the more common positioning of youth by society and the state as feared, out of control, and in need of regulation. The aim of this paper is to illustrate how the production and regulation of young people's space is central to the persistence of this paradox, and reinforced by the continued emphasis on young people as offenders in the policy arena. The paper also draws out the geographies of risk for young people, arguing that dualisms and distinctions between victim/offender, feared/fearful, public/private, and safe/dangerous spaces need to be dismantled, if the complex and multiple position of young people in relation to fear of crime is to be acknowledged and addressed.

It is well-known that lesbians and gay men have long been produced and examined as objects of fear. However, this article analyses lesbians and gay men as subjects of fear. This paper offers an exploration of the formation and uses of fear in the context of lesbian and gay experiences of danger and safety associated with violence. In so doing it explores the politics and geography of fear that inform lesbian and gay perceptions of danger and safety. The evidence provided is based upon an analysis of an established and a non-established arena of lesbian and gay performance and visibility/invisibility.

A moving commemoration at the University of Essex on 7th March of Ian Craib, Professor of Sociology, began with an affectionate address by his son, Ben. Ian Craib died at the age of 57 years on 22nd December, 2002 from a massive heart-attack, induced by an inoperable cancer in his lungs. ‘Remembering Ian Craib’ lasted nearly three hours. This was not because of the string quartet playing favourite pieces of Ian's nor because of the past and present colleagues, both academic and administrative, who also paid him generous tribute. It was principally because of the students who queued up to praise and appreciate what one of them described as ‘the most inspiring teacher that I have ever known.’