The Political Currency of Hostility

THE SUSPECT: COUNTERTERRORISM, ISLAM AND THE SECURITY STATE. By Rizwaan Sabir (forward by Hicham Yezza and Afterword by Aamer Anwar). London: Pluto Press, 2022, 238pp. ISBN: 9780745338484.

TANGLED IN TERROR: UPROOTING ISLAMOPHOBIA. By Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan. London: Pluto Press, 2022, 169pp. ISBN: 9780745345413.

WORK AND THE CARCERAL STATE. By John Burnett. London: Pluto Press, 2022, 214pp. ISBN: 9780745340166.

NOTHING HAS TO MAKE SENSE: UPHOLDING WHITE SUPREMACY THROUGH ANTI-MUSLIM RACISM. By Sherene H. Razack. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022, 266pp. ISBN: 9781517912352.

THE STRANGER AS MY GUEST: A CRITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF HOSPITALITY, by Michel Agier (originally published in French in 2018 and translated into English by Helen Morrison). Cambridge/Medford: Polity Press, 2021, 144pp. ISBN: 9781509539895.

The social fabric of an increasingly disunited and divided Britain appears to be unravelling – driven by corporate greed, elite corruption, social and economic mismanagement and environmental degradation amongst other factors – which are strung along by the targeted manufacture of xenophobia, racism, hostility and fear set within an invasive securitised and militarised environment that continues to erode civil liberties and human rights. Fear becomes the default response to uncertainty in what Zygmunt Bauman termed a ‘liquid society,’ wherein there is an absence of frameworks of support to help individuals face anxiety. Freedom is evaporating in Britain under the direction of an authoritarian and morally bankrupt government, whose extreme policies now emasculate the far-right ideologists whose ideas they sequester and emulate without any moral imagination. Trampling on the dreams, hopes and expectations of millions in one of the world’s richest countries – where the rich and privileged 1% appropriate a quarter of the nation’s wealth – workplace slavery/savagery is re-emerging by deliberate design entrenched within an uncompromising neoliberal project, that ‘rolls back social policy’ and ‘rolls out’ injustice through pernicious dismantling of the social contract.