Expulsions: When Complexity Produces Elementary Brutalities

The past two decades have seen a sharp growth in the number of people, enterprises, and places expelled from the core social and economic orders of our time. This tipping into radical expulsion was enabled by elementary decisions in some cases, but in others by some of our most advanced economic and technical achievements. I use the notion of expulsions to go beyond the more familiar notion of growing inequality, and get at some of the more complex pathologies of today’s global capitalism. It brings to the fore the fact that forms of knowledge and intelligence we respect and admire are often at the origin of long transaction chains that can end in simple expulsions.

The talk is based on Saskia Sassen’s forthcoming book Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard University Press 2014)