Expulsions

By Saskia Sassen. 2014

1,131 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Soaring income inequality and unemployment, expanding populations of the displaced and imprisoned, accelerating destruction of land and water bodies: today's socioeconomic and environmental dislocations cannot be fully understood in the usual terms of poverty and injustice, according to Saskia Sassen. They are more accurately understood as a type of expulsion--from professional livelihood, from living space, even from the very biosphere that makes life possible.This hard-headed critique updates our understanding of economics for the twenty-first century, exposing a system with devastating consequences even for those who think they are not vulnerable. From finance to mining, the complex types of knowledge and technology we have come to admire are used too often in ways that produce elementary brutalities. These have evolved into predatory formations--assemblages of knowledge, interests, and outcomes that go beyond a firm's or an individual's or a government's project.Sassen draws surprising connections to illuminate the systemic logic of these expulsions. The sophisticated knowledge that created today's financial "instruments" is paralleled by the engineering expertise that enables exploitation of the environment, and by the legal expertise that allows the world's have-nations to acquire vast stretches of territory from the have-nots. Expulsions "lays bare the extent to which the sheer complexity of the global economy makes it hard to trace lines of responsibility for the displacements, evictions, and eradications it produces--and equally hard for those who benefit from the system to feel responsible for its depredations.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/17939c7cb85386e0351328962322f8d56ecfab0a

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Citations in the corpus

Global urbanization and food production in direct competition for land: Leverage places to mitigate impacts on SDG2 and on the Earth System (2019, background): “…that favors the growth of smaller parcels of private land ownership, where each is used by the purchaser to maximize profit (Barzel, 1997; Lee and Webster, 2006), and where each parcel is subjected to global financial speculative investment (Batty, 2008; Fazel, 2000; Harvey, 2012; Sassen, 2014).”
A Critique of the Extractive Operations of Capital: Toward an Expanded Concept of Extractivism1 (2017, background): “Emphasizing the wave of foreclosures and evictions that followed the 2007–8 crisis, Sassen (2014) highlights the moment of expulsion as a distinctive feature of contemporary capitalism.”
Sharing versus collaborative economy: how to align ICT developments and the SDGs in tourism? (2019, background): “Global environmental and social challenges prove that contemporary economic systems need to change (Piketty & Zucman, 2014; Sassen, 2014; Steffen et al., 2015).”
Consumers and Artificial Intelligence: An Experiential Perspective (2020, background): “Critics of this transhumanist perspective (Sassen 2014, p. 23) have linked AI to “new logics of expulsion” and economic redundancy that arise as AI approaches aging, health, productivity, and other domains through the transhumanist lens of limitless performance rather than standard levels of…”
The de-financialization of housing: towards a research agenda (2020, background): “In more progressive cities, the production of affordable homes tends to be legitimated as a democratic right (Wijburg, 2020), whereas in more liberal cities affordable housing is considered an economic necessity to provide sufficient living forms for workers (Sassen, 2014).”
London and New York as a safe deposit box for the transnational wealth elite (2016, background): “In 2012, 85% of all high-end residential real estate in London and 50% in New York were bought by foreign buyers (Sassen, 2014).”