Militarized global apartheid

Abstract

New regimes of labor and mobility control are taking shape across the global north in a militarized form that mimics South Africa’s history of apartheid. Apartheid was a South African system of influx and labor control that attempted to manage the “threat” posed by black people by incarcerating them in zones of containment while also enabling the control and policed exploitation of black people as workers, on which the country was dependent. The paper argues, first, that the rise of a system of global apartheid has created a racialized world order and a hierarchical labor market dependent on differential access to mobility; second, that the expansion of systems of resource plunder primarily by agents of the global north into the global south renders localities in the global south unsustainable for ordinary life; and, third, that in response, the global north is massively investing in militarized border regimes to manage the northern movement of people from the global south. The paper argues that “global apartheid” might replace terms such as “transnationalism,”“multiculturalism,” and “cosmopolitanism” in order to name the structures of control that se-curitize the north and foster violence in the south, that gate the north and imprison the south, and that create a new militarized form of apartheid on a global level.