| Summary/Abstract |
Starting in the 1970s neoliberalism began to undermine and chisel away at liberalism, taking aim at the social wage. By the twenty-first century this had resulted in a structural crisis of overaccumulation and a political crisis of legitimacy as social dislocation and precarity became prevalent. The war in Iraq created through war and reconstruction new spaces for accumulation. The invasion and occupation were premised on and worked to maintain anti-Muslim racism in order to scaffold legitimacy for a neoliberal state that is hollowed out of its previous liberal promises. No longer offering a social wage, this becomes the affective wages of neoliberalism, premised on the reification of ontological difference between a civilized, humane and rational West, and a fundamentally illiberal Muslim other. At the same time that liberalism is eroded by neoliberalism, the latter draws from and reinforces the liberal logic of deflection manifest in frontier logics.
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