Brett Story’s Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America is a brilliant and timely study on prison geographies. Story, who is from Canada, arrives to the U.S. prison through her personal experiences of eviction, first as a child and then as a young student fighting against gentrification and documenting it as an amateur filmmaker.

Spaces of Security is a richly detailed volume examining the multiple dimensions, practices, and formulations of security that increasingly shape the conditions for modern life, as well as the discourses that have shaped how security is understood. According to editors Setha Low and Mark Maguire, attempts to study “security” have largely failed to attend to the conceptual and logistical complexities of addressing a subject with such varied meanings and foci—for example, when international relations scholars invoke “security,” they do not necessarily refer to the same conversations sociologists do when invoking the term.

A succession; compounding successions; a storied stack; the superposition of time; the folds of the longue durée; materialized temporality. We see it in our mind’s eye: a peeling back that reveals the inner complexity of multi-generational dwelling and deep time. We might even imagine standing next to a cut-away, holding something for scale.

As the grandchild of two people relocated to work on sugar beet farms during WWII, my family’s silence around their experiences of internment, and the postwar conditions of their lives produced a stubborn, yet shapeless form of that history in my mind.

In Europe, as in other parts of the world, private security officers have become regular actors in order maintenance in public spaces since the 1990s, next to the police. In some countries, such as Belgium and The Netherlands, this development is accompanied by an increased legal mandate for private security officers.

One way to conceptualize the lived dynamics of modern militarism is through engaging the trope of attachments. How do people become attached to war and to the procedures of security that now render militarized societies as spaces of perpetual fortified conflict, even when these spaces (like the United States) are represented in International Relations discourse as being far from the actual sites of conventional combat?