War has become a mode of sovereignty and rule, eroding the distinction between war and peace.

America is at war with itself because it's basically declared war not only on any sense of democratic idealism, but it's declared war on all the institutions that make democracy possible. And we see it with the war on public schools. We see it with the war on education. We see it with the war on the healthcare system.

The challenges that young people are mobilizing against oppressive societies all over the globe are being met with a state-sponsored violence that is about more than police brutality. This is especially clear in the United States, given its transformation from a social state to a warfare state, from a state that once embraced a semblance of the social contract to one that no longer has a language for justice, community and solidarity - a state in which the bonds of fear and commodification have replaced the bonds of civic responsibility and democratic vision.

The generation of youth in the early 21st century has no way of grasping if they will ever be free from the gnawing sense of the transience, indefiniteness, and provisional nature of any settlement.

Within neoliberal narratives, youth are mostly defined as a consumer market, a drain on the economy, or stand for trouble.

I think the other side of this is in this balance between the social state and the punishing state, remember, the social state has been decimated. And the question becomes, how is finance capital, how does the 1 percent now resort to governing? And they govern basically through a form of lawlessness and what I call the punishing state, in which we've had a punishment creep, and now it moves from the prison to almost every institution in society, from airports to schools to social services.

With no adequate role to play as consumers, many youth are now considered disposable, forced to inhabit "zones of social abandonment" extending from homeless shelters and bad schools to bulging detention centers and prisons.