“Who owns the cities? Who owns the territory?” is the title of the lecture that caught my eye on Facebook the first time I found out about Saskia Sassen. At first, it made me curious about the question “who actually owns the cities and territory of the countries, if not the people?” It seems to me that there is something abnormal because the right to own territory is known as one of the most important concepts for nations and its peoples. The answers are given in the book Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, with four chapters:
- Shrinking economy, growing Expulsion
- The new Global Market for Land
- Finance and Its Capabilities: Crisis as System Logic
- Dead Land, Dead Water.
Sassen points out the status quo of the acquisition of local land by foreign governments and firms (Sassen, 2014a, p.80). She indicates that there are six main countries as destinations for investors to acquire land. Most of these countries belong to the group of the poorest countries in the world: Ethiopia, Madagascar, Sudan, Tanzania, Mali and Mozambique (p.108). Therefore, numerous people in such countries have been expelled from their own land. However, the list of Foreign Buyers in the Superprime Housing market in 2007-2012 named Tanzania, Kenya and Somalia as the greatest buyers of the real estate in Dubai (p.134). This shows that the land of many poor people in the poorest countries is sold, while real estate from one of the highest price markets in the world is being acquired by some of the richest people in the poorest countries. These extremes condition, according to Sassen, is “far beyond inequality” (2014b).
The phenomenon of expulsion in the current stage of global financial industry vertically ranges from global to regional, national and local levels. Besides, it also horizontally varies in various economic dimensions. For instance, the cases of Greece, Spain, and Portugal show “the shrinking of economic spaces and its consequences” (p.36). Under the reconstruction of these three economies, numerous people have been fallen to the adverse conditions of economic prosperity, such as unemployment, foreclosures from the houses purchased with debts, suicide and out- migration (from Europe), especially to South America. These conditions mark “the mass displacement of refugees and million displaced people” (pp.56-60). Another example is imprisonment as expulsion. Sassen analyzes incarceration in the United States. There are now 2.29 million prisoners in the US, almost half of those in the world (p.67). Besides, the proliferation of “for-profit prisons and for-profit prison services” leads to involvement of this industry in expelling people from their place of origin. The phenomena of shrinking economies, the re-construction of economies and the imprisonment share a common consequence: the expulsion of the people from their original living environment.
On the other hand, Sassen presents a new analysis with regards to the expulsion of creatures from the marine environment, which is called “dead water”. This is caused by the ≈fertilizer run-off water from commercial agriculture to the ocean. This upper water layer is warmer and lighter than cold water in the deeper layers of the ocean. This layer with chemicals spoils the ocean creatures. As a consequence, the decomposition of these creatures consumes oxygen. “When the level of oxygen below the top eutrophic layer is depleted to the point that they can no longer sustain life, they become what are known as dead zone” in the ocean (pp.187-188). There are 400 dead zones in the world ocean, comprising almost 250 thousand square kilometers (p.187).
In Expulsions, Sassen investigates the extreme conditions, which are over the edge of the system of all things on Earth. The author assumes that “the systemic edge is the site where general conditions take extreme forms precisely because it is the site for expulsion or incorporation” (p.211). Humankind is now somewhere beyond these edges, regarding almost all angles of life. Sassen explains situations created by the policy under theories of Keynesianism. Such policy invites investment in people and infrastructure, whereby more people have been involved the economy. However, under the victory of neo-liberalism, over the globe, behind all statistics, more people nowadays are expelled or excluded from their traditional livelihoods and are fled to other living condition to survive.
Furthermore, the analysis in Expulsion recalls the concept of denationalization in her previous publication Territory, Authority, and Rights. Traditionally, land is considered as one of the essential elements of the territory. Moreover, being added with cultural values, land is thus a fundamental material for the formation of nations. However, in Expulsion, land is simply analyzed as an economic asset, which can be sold. A country thus might own land or territory of other countries. This will undermine the concept of nationalism, leading to denationalization, hence resulting in the expulsions of people out of their original land.
Most of the facts by Sassen are common information. However, this is a fresh and strong analysis. These systemic ideas challenge readers by conceptualizing shrinking economy, indebted countries and individuals, financial crisis, and environmental depletion and degradation. As a consequence, there are new phenomena of the expulsions of the human being from their own social, economic and environmental space. Moreover, those complex expulsions, according to Sassen, are happening systematically everywhere on the global-scale (pp.1-2 and 129-132). The author generates a new point of view, which is beyond non-systemic thinking and beyond the traditional ways of explaining the current situation of the world.
The book, furthermore, shows how systemic, complex and brutal capitalism operates in the global modern economy. The finance system puts billions of people in “the flow of capital”, encircles them in debts, and then expels them out of their own culture, society and ecology of origin. Even though Expulsions indicates what really happening is, those who read it should avoid being despaired. On the contrary, this book needs to be interpreted as an encouragement to explore, to think more about the way out.
References
Sassen, S. (2014a). Expulsion: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Sassen, S. (2014b, May 13). The lecture in London School of Economic and Political Sciences (LSE). Retrieved October 30, 2015, from http://thecrankysociologists.com/2014/06/02/book-review-expulsions/
Sassen, S. (2008). Territory, Authority and Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press.
Nhung Nguyen 
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