While managing the working class has been a central concern of capitalist ruling classes throughout history, contemporary restructuring in the face of slowed growth, declining profit rates, climate change and environmental degradation makes the question of maintaining social order, and hence of policing, more important than ever before. We decided to focus this special issue on the various modalities of policing to secure, maintain, and reproduce existing racialized class structures at this moment of world-systemic crisis. In this introduction, we try to situate the urgency of understanding the relationship between policing, pacification, and legitimacy in the larger context of the capitalist world-economy in crisis. We then turn to a summary of the contributions to highlight the main themes that emerge in this Special Issue. Just two months into a global health pandemic, the world watched as a white police officer slowly choked to death a working class Black man over an alleged $20 counterfeit bill outside of a Minneapolis corner store. George Floyd's death sparked militant protests throughout the United States not seen since the urban rebellions of the 1960s. Taking direction action, the Black-led and
Meltem tries to understand what "Mediterranean" is, and how this geography is changing and is being shaped. It seems that one of the central issues shaping the Mediterranean today is about migration and security, about movements of people, and expansion of borders. In your work, you explore these issues especially with respect to the border practices and their meaning. First of all, can you explain the actual dynamics and history of migration and borders in the Mediterranean? This is a question that cannot possibly be answered in a short way. In terms of the history of
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.