Elite authority can be produced through the monopolisation of the means of security and world-reproduction: protection from enemies and disaster; access to food, water and fertility; communication with divine or nonhuman powers; prediction and orientation; and the ritual recovery of presence in moments of uncertainty. Architecture, infrastructure, narrative and ritual materialise this monopoly, transforming dependence into legitimate authority and legitimate authority into the capacity to organise labour and accumulate surplus.
ABSTRACT SECURITY
Security becomes abstract when protection is detached from the situated practices through which people directly negotiate their dependencies on one another, land, water, nonhumans, and other forces, and is instead delegated to distant institutions, infrastructures, experts, technologies, property regimes, and systems of calculation. Security comes to promise freedom from care, obligation, uncertainty, vulnerability, and continuous negotiation. Yet this apparent liberation depends on an expanding apparatus that must continually accumulate power, resources, labour, knowledge, and wealth in order to reproduce itself.
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DISPOSSESSION OF SITUATED DEPENDENCIES
The expansion of abstract security therefore tends to displace plural, place-based ways of seeing, knowing, relating, building, governing, and living. These are not simply irrational traditions superseded by superior systems, but situated experiments through which communities have negotiated material and existential dependence directly. Their displacement can occur through coercion and enclosure, but also through charisma, spectacle, convenience, and desire: the promise that individuals can be liberated from inherited duties, hierarchies, disciplines, reciprocal obligations, and local dependencies. Infrastructure increasingly presents this liberation as access to mobility, health, convenience, empowerment, consumption, communication, and security.
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LIBERATION THROUGH DEPENDENCY
What appears as individual autonomy is therefore accompanied by a reorganisation of dependency. Dependence does not disappear; it is displaced across greater distances and embedded within increasingly specialised technical, administrative, economic, and spatial systems. Direct dependencies become less perceptible and less negotiable, while individuals become users of systems whose conditions of production, maintenance, ownership, and governance are increasingly remote. Infrastructure thus simultaneously liberates individuals from certain immediate obligations and renders them dependent upon systems they have progressively less capacity to understand, alter, or reproduce themselves.
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RETERRITORIALISATION AND SPECIALISATION
Dispossessed relations are subsequently reterritorialised within specialised divisions of labour and increasingly exclusive institutions. Knowledge that was once distributed through households, communities, ritual practices, ecological experience, and everyday reproduction becomes differentiated into expert domains: politics, religion, engineering, science, administration, architecture, medicine, finance. This separation makes possible monopolies over the practices through which a society understands, governs, protects, and reproduces itself.
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MONOPOLY OF WORLD-MAKING
The crucial transformation is therefore not simply the concentration of wealth, but the monopolisation of the means through which a world can be interpreted, secured, destroyed, repaired, and reproduced.
MONOPOLY OF DIVINE COMMUNICATION / KNOWLEDGE
A specialised class claims privileged access to the forces, knowledge, signs, calculations, gods, laws, models, or data through which uncertainty can be interpreted and collective life oriented. In the Divine Economy argument, priest-bureaucrats appropriate and centralise the ritual knowledge through which architecture, order, and the world are reproduced, thereby removing the recovery of presence and divine communication from households and settlements.
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MONOPOLY OF LEGITIMATE DESTRUCTION AND CREATION
Control over knowledge becomes entangled with control over the legitimate capacity to intervene: to prohibit, punish, sacrifice, demolish, enclose, redistribute, construct, repair, protect, and determine what forms of life may continue. Graeber and Wengrow’s three elementary forms of domination converge here: control of violence, control of knowledge, and charisma can become institutionalised as sovereignty, administration, and political authority.
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MONOPOLY OF PRODUCTION AND REPRODUCTION
Once an elite or institution can convincingly present itself as necessary to maintaining order against chaos—to securing food, water, fertility, protection, health, prosperity, political order, or existential orientation—it can organise the labour through which society reproduces itself. Godelier’s formulation is especially important here: dominant groups must provide “proof” that the lives of the dominated depend upon them; religious authority can therefore become inseparable from the extraction of supplementary labour. Architecture, ritual, narrative, spectacle, infrastructure, and administration materialise this dependence, making the governing order appear not simply coercive but necessary.
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SURPLUS ACCUMULATION
The organisation of reproduction becomes a means of organising surplus. Labour, resources, food, land, knowledge, and time can now be channelled toward centralised accumulation under the auspices of maintaining security, prosperity, order, and the reproduction of the world. The Chaco argument describes precisely this conjunction: an exclusive ritual machinery for protecting and restoring the world is braided to wealth accumulation, while architecture, infrastructure, spectacle, long-distance networks, and divisions of labour organise populations for surplus production. Graeber and Wengrow similarly define ruling classes as those who organise society so as to appropriate a disproportionate share of its surplus.
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SECURITY BECOMES SECURITY FOR THE SYSTEM
A fundamental inversion follows. Institutions ostensibly created to secure life increasingly operate to secure the continuation and expansion of the system itself. Because accumulation depends upon continually extending extraction, the apparatus must draw ever more labour, energy, land, water, attention, information, and ecological capacity into itself. Security logics therefore spread into ever broader domains—not necessarily because life becomes more secure, but because the reproduction of the system requires increasingly comprehensive management of the conditions on which accumulation depends.
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THE SYSTEM DESTROYS THE CONDITIONS OF ITS OWN SECURITY
Because this security is organised around expansion rather than reciprocal limits, it progressively undermines the conditions of its own possibility. Human beings, communities, soils, forests, watersheds, species, and resources are extracted faster than they can reproduce themselves. The system produces the ecological, economic, political, psychological, and existential crises from which it then promises protection. Security consequently becomes an escalating cycle: extraction produces insecurity; insecurity legitimates further securitisation; further securitisation enables further extraction.
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CRISIS DE-ABSTRACTS DEPENDENCY
When these systems fail—when the tap stops producing clean water, the grid fails, a landscape collapses, food becomes scarce, or institutions cease to guarantee protection—the supposedly neutral technical background becomes visible again as a particular material and political architecture. Distant dependencies suddenly re-enter everyday space. What appeared universal is revealed to have been historically constructed, contingent, and dependent on specific relations between bodies, labour, land, water, institutions, technologies, and ecologies.
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RECLAIMING THE CAPACITY TO BUILD WORLDS
Within these crises, people are rejecting—or simply bypassing—the monopolisation of world-building, knowledge, security, governance, and reproduction. This should not be understood as a return to an autonomous, local, premodern past. Rather, the emerging practices are simultaneously more emplaced and more plural: they reclaim direct, perceptible dependencies while moving between scientific and experiential knowledge, technical and ritual practices, modern and nonmodern institutions, local specificity and translocal alliances, individual autonomy and collective obligation.
The alternative to abstract security is therefore not insecurity, but shared vulnerability: making dependencies sufficiently visible, proximate, and negotiable that those who depend upon a system can participate in its knowledge, governance, care, reproduction, and transformation. Rather than monopolising the capacity to secure and reproduce a world, these practices reopen it to continuous collective experimentation.
