The global web and its digital ecosystem can be seen as tools of emancipation, communication, and spreading knowledge or as means of control, fueled by capitalism, surveillance, and geopolitics. The Digital Frontier interrogates the world wide web and the digital ecosystem it has spawned to reveal how their conventions, protocols, standards, and algorithmic regulations represent a novel form of global power. Sangeet Kumar shows the operation of this power through the web's "infrastructures of control" visible at sites where the universalizing imperatives of the web run up against local values, norms, and cultures. These include how the idea of the "global common good" is used as a ruse by digital oligopolies to expand their private enclosures, how seemingly collaborative spaces can simultaneously be exclusionary as they regulate legitimate knowledge, how selfhood is being redefined online along Eurocentric ideals, and how the web's political challenge is felt differentially by sovereign nation states. In analyzing this new modality of cultural power in the global digital ecosystem, The Digital Frontier is an important read for scholars, activists, academics and students inspired by the utopian dream of a truly representative global digital network.

Focusing in particular on the European borders, this volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of academics to consider questions of immigration and the free movement of people, linking control within the state to the role of the police and internal security. The contributors all take as the point of departure the significance of European governmentality within the Foucauldian meaning as opposed to the European governance perspective which is already well represented in the literature. They discuss the relation between control of borders, introduction of biometrics and freedom. The book makes available in English an analysis of an important and politically highly charged field from a major French critical perspective. It draws on different disciplines including law, politics, international relations and philosophy.

Questions about land control have invigorated thinkers in agrarian studies and economic history since the nineteenth century. ‘Exclusion’, ‘alienation’, ‘expropriation’, ‘dispossession’, and ‘violence’ animate histories of land use, property rights, and territories. More recently, agrarian environments have been transformed by processes of de-agrarianization, urbanization, migration, and new forms of primitive accumulation. Even the classic agrarian question of how the social relations of agriculture will be influenced by capitalism has been reformulated at critical historical moments, reviving or producing new debates around the importance of land control. The authors in this volume focus on new frontiers of land control and their active creation. These frontiers are sites where established power relationships are challenged by new enclosures and property regimes, producing new social and environmental dynamics in their stead. Contributors examine labor and production processes engaged by new configurations of actors, new agrarian and environmental subjects and the networks connecting them, and new legal and violent means of challenging established or imminent land controls. Overall we find that land control still matters, though in changed degrees and manners. Land control will continue to inspire struggles for a long time. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Focusing in particular on the European borders, this volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of academics to consider questions of immigration and the free movement of people, linking control within the state to the role of the police and internal security. The contributors all take as the point of departure the significance of European governmentality within the Foucauldian meaning as opposed to the European governance perspective which is already well represented in the literature. They discuss the relation between control of borders, introduction of biometrics and freedom. The book makes available in English an analysis of an important and politically highly charged field from a major French critical perspective. It draws on different disciplines including law, politics, international relations and philosophy.

Despotism on Demand draws attention to the impact of flexible scheduling on managerial power and workplace control. When we understand paid work as a power relationship, argues Alex J. Wood, we see how the spread of precarious scheduling constitutes flexible despotism; a novel regime of control within the workplace. Wood believes that flexible despotism represents a new domain of inequality, in which the postindustrial working class increasingly suffers a scheduling nightmare. By investigating two of the largest retailers in the world he uncovers how control in the contemporary "flexible firm" is achieved through the insidious combination of "flexible discipline" and "schedule gifts." Flexible discipline provides managers with an arbitrary means by which to punish workers, but flexible scheduling also requires workers to actively win favor with managers in order to receive "schedule gifts": more or better hours. Wood concludes that the centrality of precarious scheduling to control means that for those at the bottom of the postindustrial labor market the future of work will increasingly be one of flexible despotism.

An innovative account of how distinctive forms of colonial power and knowledge developed at the territorial fringes of British India. Thomas Simpson considers the role of frontier officials as surveyors, cartographers and ethnographers, military violence in frontier regions and the impact of the frontier experience on colonial administration.