Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
The authoritarian–financial complex is a system of concentrated power linking corporations, financial institutions, and centralized state authority. It normalizes psycho-social fantasies that sustain its dominance by shaping popular desires and limiting possibilities. However, grassroots movements and radical theories challenge this hegemony through initiatives like worker-owned cooperatives, platform co-ops, and community economies, which promote economic democracy and decommodification. Political innovations include direct democracy practices and municipalist projects building horizontal self-rule from the ground up. These efforts reimagine governance, prioritising collective autonomy and shared stewardship of resources. Despite significant obstacles, a transformative future requires repurposing digital technologies and data-driven methods from tools of control into instruments of collective empowerment. By integrating emerging technical capabilities with radical political-economic reorganization, these movements present a credible pathway to societal transformation, breaking the grip of the authoritarian–financial complex and fostering a more equitable and liberated world.
This chapter introduces the rise of an interconnected ‘authoritarian–financial complex’ reshaping capitalism. It argues that repression and control are no longer mere tools of power but have become profitable industries, driving capital accumulation. Financial interests increasingly rely on conflict, instability, and the expanding carceral and surveillance systems as lucrative markets. The chapter examines how public fears are manufactured to justify the securitization of infrastructure and spaces, creating a ‘repressive cycle of finance’ where austerity breeds inequality, fuelling coercive solutions and growth in private prisons, defence, and data analytics. This complex manipulates collective desires for authoritarian control and invasive technologies, conditioning individuals to embrace surveillance and behavioural modification as empowerment. Paradoxically, this deepens subjugation to systems of domination. The result is a convergence of political and economic forces driving the total financialization and securitization of human life.
Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND license. In Capitalism Reloaded, Peter Bloom charts a pivotal shift from the well-known military-industrial complex to a new ‘Authoritarian-Financial Complex.’ Unlike its predecessor, which centred on armaments and defence, this emerging power structure fuses financial interests with advanced surveillance and digital control, turning social repression into a lucrative industry. Bloom introduces a ground breaking theory of ‘complex power,’ where control itself becomes a central driver of capitalism, shaping economies and societies. Bloom explores how this insatiable demand for security and profit extends beyond traditional authoritarian regimes, permeating everyday life and eroding democratic freedoms. This book challenges readers to confront the deep entanglements of modern capitalism before they solidify into a techno-authoritarian order.
This chapter introduces the concept of ‘complexifying power’ to analyse the interplay of political, economic, and cultural elites. Complexes are seen as dynamic formations where elite interests converge to wield significant coercive and ideological influence. They secure consent by manufacturing cultural fantasies and harnessing aspirations, even as their policies deepen inequality and alienation. This paradox highlights their ability to manipulate desires, leading people to invest in their own subjugation. In capitalism, complexes integrate social control with profit, reshaping investment, production, and technology to serve accumulative and coercive goals. Bridging structural power analysis with psychoanalytic insights, the chapter shows how unconscious ‘complexes’ shape ideological identifications. By perpetuating crises, complexes justify expanded control operating across subjective and systemic levels. This dual dynamic internalizes dominance, framing human existence within systems of control while using crises as pretexts for further consolidation.
This chapter explores how the ‘authoritarian–financial complex’ has created a global market for social and political control. Mechanisms like mass incarceration, surveillance, policing, and welfare provision have been commodified into profitable industries. It highlights the prison–industrial complex, where incarcerated individuals and marginalized communities are exploited for economic gain, and examines the racialized criminal justice system and private prison labour’s impact on workers’ rights.
The financialization of welfare services is also analysed, showing how social support systems have become profit-driven under market discipline. Security campaigns like the ‘war on drugs’ and ‘war on terror’ are examined for their role in militarizing law enforcement, enabling invasive surveillance, and outsourcing state violence to private contractors. Popular culture’s role in manufacturing consent for these measures is explored, alongside the rise of private security firms thriving on instability. The chapter reveals the complex as a force reshaping governance around profit and control imperatives.
The authoritarian–financial complex has driven a psycho-social shift linking personal empowerment to digital control technologies. The rise of the quantified-self movement promotes self-tracking through apps and devices, presenting datafication and self-optimisation as paths to greater agency. However, this masks how self-tracking enforces narrow norms of productivity, health, and behaviour, making individuals complicit in their own disciplining by internalising societal expectations as personal goals. The data generated becomes a profitable commodity, enabling corporate profits, predictive analytics, and behaviour modification. Framed as empowerment, digital self-tracking exploits the desire for control in an uncertain world, fostering technological addiction through immersive app design. At its core, this psycho-social complex commodifies personal data and experience, concentrating wealth and power in platform monopolies. These systems reshape individual identities around a consumeristic ideal of self-actualisation through quantification, reinforcing control under the guise of personal growth and empowerment.
This chapter examines how the authoritarian–financial complex perpetuates itself by manufacturing crises and presenting oppressive interventions as rational solutions. Exploiting societal anxieties about security and control, it amplifies instability to justify expanding surveillance, data-driven control, and privatised security systems, framed as impartial and scientific. These measures erode civil liberties and exacerbate marginalisation while enriching stakeholders. The complex thrives on public–private partnerships, diverting dissent into iterative technological ‘fixes’ rather than substantive reforms. It exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to reframe centralized monitoring as empowerment while undermining democratic oversight. Authoritarian regimes fuelled misinformation to erode scientific rationality, consolidating power under security pretexts, while corporate giants prioritized profit-driven digital governance over public welfare. Far-right populism, despite opposing globalization rhetorically, aligns with neoliberal market dominance and elite control, embedding itself within the very techno-economic systems it critiques. The complex commodifies solutions to its manufactured crises, perpetuating a repressive cycle marketed as empowerment.
This chapter explores how precarity has become a hallmark of contemporary capitalism, driven by the rise of the authoritarian–financial complex. Insecurity and uncertainty are deliberately cultivated and commodified by a transnational elite of corporate executives, technocrats, and oligarchs to consolidate power and wealth. Precarious labour arrangements, fuelled by the gig economy and algorithmic management, have undermined worker protections. Meanwhile, social necessities like housing, healthcare, and education are financialized, making access dependent on debt and credit markets. The detention industry illustrates how vulnerability is monetized, with private prisons profiting from migrant incarceration. Precarity has created a global ‘precariat’ class, defined by shared insecurity, though even elites face cycles of fortification against instability they perpetuate. Sophisticated surveillance and data systems monitor and control precarious populations, reinforcing inequalities. The authoritarian–financial complex thrives on producing precarity, leveraging insecurity to entrench hierarchies and profit from widespread vulnerability.
This chapter examines how personal fantasies of control, central to the authoritarian–financial complex, have been reimagined as attractive discourses of collective progress. It explores how the rhetoric of ‘smart progress’ rationalizes authoritarian governance by framing digital surveillance and control as essential for efficiency, security, and societal advancement. The chapter reveals how this ideology aligns state power, digital platforms, and financial flows into a self-perpetuating system of datafication. It highlights the adoption of ‘smart city’ discourses, linking repressive technologies to narratives of development, obscuring their role in normalizing invasive data extraction and surveillance. It also investigates ‘data-driven extractivism’, which commodifies human populations, perpetuates global inequities, and marginalizes indigenous knowledge. The analysis shows how aspirations for techno-development are co-opted, creating insatiable demands for technologies that reinforce control under the guise of empowerment. Repressive state apparatuses have transformed into ideological tools, manufacturing consent through narratives of mastery and progress.
This chapter explores the rise of the authoritarian–financial complex, contrasting it with the military–industrial paradigm. It highlights the privatization of security, financial market dominance over defence sectors, and the proliferation of surveillance and artificial intelligence technologies. Central to this complex is securitization – transforming entities into tradable assets for capitalist valorization, opening new realms for capital accumulation through population control. The chapter examines ideological narratives that blend technological empowerment with accumulation rationalities, masking how securitization perpetuates precarity. It introduces the ‘repressive cycle of finance’, a self-sustaining dynamic where financial instability drives demands for profitable securitizing interventions. By commodifying dominance and linking it to fantasies of empowerment, the authoritarian–financial complex legitimizes its expansion. Ultimately, this system reconfigures power as a marketable product, embedding social control within capitalist accumulation and reshaping dominance as a tradable asset tied to individual and collective desires.
