ABSTRACT
Domestic terrorism has come home and it increasingly targets the young. Acting as a paramilitary force, the police have become a new symbol of domestic terrorism, harassing racialized youth by criminalizing a multitude of behaviors. Politics has become an extension of war, just as economic insecurity and state-sponsored violence increasingly find legitimation in the discourses of privatization and demonization which promote anxiety, moral panics, fear, and undermine any sense of communal responsibility for the well-being of others. The idea of the soft war considers the changing conditions of youth within the relentless expansion of a global market society. The hard war refers to the harshest elements of a growing youth crime-control complex that operates through logic of punishment, surveillance, and control. Neoliberal capital is based on a Hobbesian mantra of war against all and a survival of the fittest ethic and one consequence is an aggressive politics of disposability and disappearance.
