A Response to Sassen – Expulsion, Extraction and the Silent Enabler

Abstract

Expulsion, extraction Sassen is one of our most influential analysts of globalisation. Her efforts to locate actors, such as nations or cities, within and against the various dynamics of globalisation have had a deep impact on how we conceptualise contemporary globalising forces. Her notion of assemblages of Territory, Authority and Rights (TAR) have given us a vocabulary for discussing how globalisation is constructed, undone and reformed; and her broad historical approach has given us greater insight into contemporary changes by allowing us to understand them as part of a longer trajectory, detailing how key concepts and notions have flowed and mutated from the Middle Ages onwards. In the context of her present lecture, two themes stand out in Sassen’s work. The first is an interest in electronic, capital markets as an elemental marker of twenty-first century globalisation. This is evidenced, for example, in her most well-known work (at least among lawyers), Territory, Authority, Rights,3 and has become the focus of her later work on high finance. The second theme is her interest in the dark side of globalisation, in its ‘discontents’4 and in those subject to ‘expulsions’5 – an interest that is represented here as the victims of the brutality of globalisation’s extractive logics. As with the idea of TAR assemblages, the characterisation of globalisation as extractive provides us with a powerful vocabulary for identifying and expressing the huge negative costs of economic globalisation to humans and the environment. It gives us a vivid way of understanding the harms done, not as a side-effect to be mitigated, but as the core logic of global capital. The language of extraction represents a shift from Sassen’s earlier vocabulary of expulsion and is a welcome one. ‘Expulsion’ as a term spoke to the brutalities of the global economy, and Sassen used it to refer to both the physical and social expulsion of individuals and communities from place and liveable space. Yet the term was less evocative than that of extraction: while it is easy to grasp how the global market in land leads to the expulsion of local people from the space that was once theirs, it is less easy to visualise how global capital leads to social inequalities and exclusion through the language of expulsion. It is certainly the case, as Sassen argues in this lecture, that city-dwellers are being pushed out as global capital seeks safe havens for their investments. Yet, on the whole, poorer citizens are not expelled from society; they are instead slowly but inexorably pushed out to the margins of social life and then out of sight. Expulsion is a dramatic often highly visible action and, as such, arguably fails to capture the processes of marginalisation that are precisely non-dramatic in their method, yet dramatic