Over the past three decades, the industrialized world has witnessed four resilient social trends: (1) the consistent erosion of union-membership; (2) an increase in income polarization and inequality; (3) a dramatic resurgence in popular protest; and (4) a steady rise in public and private policing employment. In this paper, we examine the relationship between these trends by theorizing and operationalizing the notion of the "industrial reserve army" and a series of related tenets in order to conduct an international (N=45), empirical test of a nascent Marxian model of policing. By treating total policing employment as an empirical barometer of bourgeois insecurity we find that this insecurity is conditioned by two elements of Marxian political economy: (1) relative deprivation (income inequality) and (2) the rise of an industrial reserve army (manufacturing employment and unemployment). Second, while surplus value and labour militancy (strikes and lockouts per 100,000 population) rise along with union membership, the presence of higher rates of unionization appears to ameliorate the need for more policing in all but post-USSR countries. While unions assist in checking the immiseration of workers through labour actions, union membership is nonetheless inversely correlated to policing employment, giving credence to the Marxian idea that while unions help mitigate against the exploitation workers, they also act as "lieutenants of capital," performing an essential policing function under capitalism.Trade-unions have always been the most effective representatives of the organized labour movement to protect workers from the erosion of their wages and to control changes made in working conditions and hours worked. For Marxist political economists, the function of trade-unions was never limited to the immediate Crime Law Soc Change (2011) 56:329-371

In this paper we operationalize and empirically test six core tenets of pacification theory derived from Marxian political economy using time series data for the USA from 1972-2009. Our analysis confirms that rising inequality is statistically significantly correlated to increased public and private policing over time and that increased public and private policing is also statistically significantly correlated to increased industrial exploitation as measured through "surplus-value". While unionization correlates to strikes and lock-outs which suggests that unions have an important mobilizing role for the industrial reserve army, unionization also inversely correlates to total policing employment. As union membership decreases, policing employment increases, which gives credence to the notion that unions may also act as policing agents for capital. We conclude that when these findings are coupled with our previous international research of 45 countries for the snapshot year of 2004 (Rigakos and Ergul 2011) that produced almost identical results, there appears to be significant empirical support for pacification theory. The relationships we have discovered recur both across time and international contexts despite the fact that variations in legal norms and institutional histories of policing are varied and complex.

In this dissertation I explore the relationship between politics, aesthetics, culture and technology by (re)thinking and (re)conceptualizing the concept of kitsch as a theoretical construct in order to investigate the dream-worlds of Europe which sprang at the intersection of liberalism, social democracy and capitalism. I argue that the unexplored potentialities of kitsch, as a concept, reside in the analysis of the dream-worlds, which have been occupying the social and political imaginaries of Western individuals, communities and institutions since the disenchantment of the world. My methodological approach is built on Benjamin's notion of historical materialism. Thus, I engage with the historical object(s) (e.g., arcades, fashion, technological reproductions etc.) not as "object(s) of experience" but as a "participant(s) in historical experience" (Caygill 2004, 90). Challenging the progressive notion of history, I argue that within the objective impenetrability of commodity fetishism a "sur-real" world of fetishized images -that is, kitsch -emerges, alienated from the individual and the collective, yet constituting and shaping them. By mapping out the implications of this "sur-real" world on "the political," the collective (un)conscious and action, I conclude that alternative politics could arise from the unsettling interpretations of the reified and symbolic expressions of this same "sur-real" world, paving a path for new political imaginaries.iii Dedicated to my dearest friend Hilal Özçetin iv Acknowledgments Firstly, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Dr. Tom Darby. His agreement to take me on after the unexpected retirement of my previous supervisor was one of the greatest things that happened to me. His guidance made me find my way out of the dark and deep hole I had fallen into for a very long time. His unwavering support and belief in my intellectual abilities helped me to rediscover myself. I could not have imagined the completion of this dissertation without his supervision and mentorship. I also would like to thank Professor Peter Swan for his unending support and confidence in me, and Dr. Hans-Martin Jaeger for his insightful comments and questions on my chapters and sincere interest in my thesis.

Vida Bajc and Williem de Lint, eds., Security and Everyday Life. New York: Routledge, 2011, 312 pp. $ US 44.95 paper (978-0-415-85344-6) $133.00 hardcover (978-0-415-99768-3).F or centuries the issue of security has been one of the central concerns of governing. However, the Foucauldian approach suggests that the role security plays in governing is reformulated with the rise of the liberal art of government, a government whose existence is dependent on the production of freedoms as well as the controlling, constraining, and coercing of such freedoms. Then, what is the cost of manufacturing freedom? What are the implications of the interplay between freedom and security for social control? What are the roles of new surveillance mechanisms in ordering, framing, and constructing appropriate social behavior? Security and Everyday Life presents a perspective through which these questions could be answered.This volume addresses the complexities of the relationship between security and everyday life by formulating a meta-theoretical framework through which the operations of the security dynamics embedded in everyday life can be made visible, and by means of which the rationale behind approaching various "social situations and cultural phenomena" as "a potential threat to security" (p. 1) can be uncovered. In other words, by illustrating the scope of "bureaucratic surveillance" woven into the fabric of everyday practices, this volume seeks to demonstrate how security has become an ordering principle of cultural and social life.The information gathered by the extensive security apparatus serves to generate exclusionary categories where the world is classified on the basis of a binary opposition between "orderly" and "disorderly" by means of which the sovereign power's legitimacy for preemptive action or reaction is guaranteed. However, in order for the activities of the security apparatus to receive acceptance from the public it is necessary to form a specific perception of reality within which the public is made to feel "protected from or -alternatively -of being exposed to, potential harmful irregularities in public life" (p. 3). This becomes possible by communicating to the public the fear of disruptive forces. Only then the conditions are completed for the creation of a context in which the concerns of security can trump all else.

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