Tuesday, March 10 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
Lone Mountain Main — 270 - Del Santo Reading Room
The global war on terror waged after 9/11 precipitated an emergent world order of militarized apartheid - a loosely integrated effort by countries in the global north to protect themselves against the mobility of people from the global south while consolidating racialized labor hierarchies. Militarized security empires are emerging from and shoring up global apartheid, based in the identification and containment of “risky” bodies throughout the globe in concert with the expansion of securitized spaces produced through material, affective, and ontological expressions of militarism by the global north. These emergent imperial formations are spatial and technological rather than territorial, and they are taking shape through imperial projects that racialize and incarcerate people while securing cosmopolitan class privilege and capitalist extraction across borders.
Catherine Besteman is an abolitionist educator at Colby College. Her research focuses on carcerality, decarceration and abolition; security; militarism; displacement; and community-based activism with a focus on South Africa, Somalia, and the US. In addition to coordinating the abolitionist initiative Freedom & Captivity, she has published nine books, and received recent fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations.
Tuesday March 10th, 2026
11:45 am, Zief Law Library