Spaces of enclosure

Building on recent critical scholarship by authors including Retort [Retort, 2005. Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. Verso, London] and Ferguson [Ferguson, J., 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Duke University Press, Durham, NC], this critical review will explore the inter-articulation of neoliberal norms and a resurgent and violent form of geo-politics through the rubric of 'enclosure'. We believe that 'enclosure' serves as an appropriately flexible concept that speaks not only to the vagaries of primitive accumulation but also to the recent recrudescence of an aggrandized mode of statist violence. We argue that enclosure operates contingently, provisionally, and violently across a range of scales, sites, and networks and sketch four preliminary axes of investigation: subjectification, legal violence, the colonial present, and the politics of representation. The review goes on to suggest a set of markers through which to widen the conceptual and political purchase of enclosure through the geoeconomic, geopolitical and biopolitical, and highlights distinct spatial formations, modes of subjectification, and technologies of power through which enclosure variously operates. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.