A radical social theory of the security-industrial complex, showing how pacification underpins the global economic system.

What is security, and what is its relationship to capitalism? George S. Rigakos' explosive sociological treatise charts the rise of the security-industrial complex. Starting from a critical appraisal of "productive labour" in the works of Karl Marx and Adam Smith, Rigakos builds a conceptual model of pacification based on practices of dispossession, exploitation and the fetish of security commodities.

Rigakos argues that a defining characteristic of the global economic system is its ability to productively sell (in)security to those it makes insecure. Materially and ideologically, the security-industrial complex is the blast furnace of global capitalism, fuelling the perpetuation of the system while feeding relentlessly on the surpluses it has exacted.

George S. Rigakos is associate professor of law, criminology, and political economy at Carleton University, and the author of The New Parapolice: Risk Markets and Commodified Social Control, 2002.

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