Globalization and Surveillance

This book offers a lively, accessible, and informative introduction to surveillance through the lens of globalization, and globalization through the lens of surveillance.Ström traces the state’s increasing control over its citizens and critically examines the social meaning and consequences of surveillance and globalization.

This book offers a lively, accessible and informative introduction to surveillance through the lens of globalization, and globalization through the lens of surveillance. The story that unfolds is wide-ranging, taking a thoroughly multidimensional and transdisciplinary approach that brings clarity to a complex subject. Drawing a long historical arc, and freely crisscrossing the Global North/South divide, Timothy Erik Ström traces a narrative beginning with colonial land surveys. He convincingly shows how surveillance and capitalism are inextricably linked, illustrated through in-depth studies on Google and China’s Social Credit System and the broader reconfiguration of everyday life. Drawing on a wealth of empirical examples and historical context, his book is a theoretically informed but accessible example of engaged scholarship that provides a provocative and critical examination of the uneven and contradictory subjective and material social meanings and consequences of surveillance and globalization.