Keele Research Repository

This article explores the 'normalized' forms of violence (Objective and Symbolic) which lurk beneath the 'subjective' form of violence- which Zizek (2011) has defined as violence with an identifiable agent (from terrorism to street demonstrations to so-called ethnic conflicts). Combining recent arguments- from the works of green/cultural criminologists (for example, Ruggiero, 2013; Ruggierro and South, 2013), and political economists (Zizek, 2009; 2011; 2014; Harvey, 2011; Varoufakis, 2013; Lazzarato, 2011)- we explore the violence inherent in late modernity's 'governance through debt and fear', showing how post-political bio-politics (Zizek, 2014) constructs the 'other' as a site of administration (through debt, incarceration, sanctions etc.) such that emergent 'insider' and 'outsiders' positionalities determine whom justice is owed, and whom 'harm' is 'externalized'- that is discounted as a necessary condition of international order maintenance.