The obscene underside of the war on terror is the refugee who sutures his lips and eyelids to mark his abjection, the child in the Woomera detention center whose response to the trauma of her incarceration is to repeat, “Don’t touch me I’m dead,” the Mexican migrant whose death in the desert constitutes a strategy of “deterrence” that is necessary to prevent others from attempting the crossing, the SUV driver whose realization of “the American dream” is fueled by the persistence of war and its pervasive economy of death.

– Elizabeth Dauphinee and Cristina Masters ‘Introduction: Living, Dying, Surviving I’, from The Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror.