Homeland Security: Myths and Monsters
Homeland Security: Myths and Monsters
Arun Kundnani and Mizue Aizeki
Illustrations by Anuj Shrestha
Capitalism / Fiction & Literary Nonfiction / Art & Culture
Copublished with Surveillance Resistance Lab
This is the century of homeland security.
The federal government created a monster. They said it would keep us safe. The monster hatched in November 2002. It was named the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). An appetite for control and conquest was in its DNA. Its early influences, in the years after 9/11, were paranoia and vengeance.
The DHS is the only new department the United States has spawned in this century. With its birth, issues that were previously seen as separate—immigration control, policing, and counter-terrorism—were brought into a single, sprawling entity. Twenty-two preexisting agencies were absorbed into what became the nation’s third largest government department. Today it has a budget of over $100 billion and employs a quarter of a million people. Every danger is now conceived of as a threat to “homeland security,” and as the 9/11 Commission said in 2003, “the American homeland is the planet.”
Product Details
ISBN: 9781945335266
Published: October 15, 2024
Format: 5.5 x 7.5 in
Page count: 38, full color
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Arun Kundnani is a writer based in Philadelphia. Born in London, he moved to the US in 2010. His books include What is Antiracism? And Why it Means Anticapitalism (Verso, 2023), The Muslims are Coming (Verso, 2014), and The End of Tolerance (Pluto, 2007). He is currently working on a biography of Jamil Al-Amin. A former editor of the journal Race & Class, Arun has been described by the Guardian as “one of Britain’s best political writers.”
Mizue Aizeki is the founder and Executive Director of the Surveillance Resistance Lab. For nearly twenty years, Mizue has been organizing to end the injustices at the intersections of the criminal and migration control systems—including criminalization, imprisonment, and exile. While at the Immigrant Defense Project, Mizue led multiple policy and individual case campaigns at the to end the entanglement of local law enforcement and ICE policing, and also built community defense programs to combat ICE raids.
Mizue is a coeditor of Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence (Haymarket Books, 2024). Mizue’s photographic work appears in Dying to Live, A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid (City Lights Books, 2008) and Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016).
Anuj Shrestha is an illustrator and cartoonist currently residing in Philadelphia after having lived in nearly all four corners of the United States. His illustration work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, ProPublica, Wired and Playboy, among others; and has been featured in the Society of Illustrators and American Illustration annuals. He has won two gold medals for his comics from the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art Festival Awards of Excellence and a gold medal from The Society of Illustrators. His most recent zine is Both/And (Issue Press, 2022).
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Surveillance Resistance Lab investigates and makes visible the often obfuscated ways in which tech-fueled governance increases state and corporate power over our lives. It undermines our right to dissent and organize, and intensifies the policing of migrants, workers, communities of color, and more.
By translating research into action, we work with movement partners to nurture and accumulate the power of organizing and resistance—locally and transnationally. We challenge how dominant notions of “security” fuel criminalization, exclusion, and dispossession, and protect our ability to build a world where we can all thrive.
Risograph printed poster featuring the cover art for Homeland Security: Myths and Monsters.
Neil Gray
Urban Studies / Capitalism / Philosophy
Take Over the City provides the first comprehensive spatial analysis of Italian operaismo and the extraordinary urban struggles of 1970s Italy.
Take Over the City is the first systemic spatial account of Italian operaismo. Drawing on the Marxist urban theory of Henri Lefebvre and others, the book situates the struggles of operaismo, especially in the 1970s, within an incipient-yet-tendential phase of global urbanization. In doing so, the book draws attention to previously neglected urban struggles in the wider social factory, recognizing these as immanent to the new spatial composition of capital in Italy.
The book argues that these innovative urban struggles carry important lessons for contemporary forms of organization and social conflict in the sphere of social reproduction. They drew attention to, and acted within, a tendency that has only become more entrenched since the 1970s: the centrality of urbanization and real estate to national political economies. If urbanization has become increasingly central for capital accumulation processes, it follows that urban struggle must become increasingly central to anti capitalist struggle. The struggles to ‘Take Over the City’ in 1970s Italy provide an important marker of how this might be done in the current era.
By excavating the urban struggles of 1970s Italy with a spatialized understanding of operaismo’s signature theoretical contribution—class composition—the book provides both an important contribution to radical urban history and a window into how current urban struggles might be theorized. It seeks to both spatialize readings of operaismo through the concept of spatial composition and to radicalize urban theory with Italian autonomist Marxist thought and practice. This should be of interest to those interested in autonomist praxis more generally, and those interested in radical urban history, contemporary urban struggles and social reproduction.