Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2021 3(2) current mode of being. These practices are essential to counter hegemonic types of power and thus can truly democratise politics. Chapter four considers the widespread production of lucrative vulnerability. The term, unsurprisingly, refers to how ‘vulnerability generated by contemporary political economic conditions [can be turned] into opportunities for highly lucrative profit-making’. 25 In laying out this chapter, Gordon first maps out the key counterarguments against the use of the term slavery in modern-day settings. The four main counterarguments are based on legal positivism, racial–ethnic exceptionalism, technical idealism and an anti-statist critique. In elaborating these countervailing points, Gordon shows that slavery and capitalism are not contradictory, and that slavery and democracy are not contradictory. Rather: political progress that translated into expanded, if still highly imperfect, substantive enfranchisement was linked to competing conceptions of the nature of the polity in ways that must force us to consider the challenges of securing such progressive developments in the absence of a countervailing hegemonic foe. 26 In her view, there is always an offsetting or counteracting force. To have means that there are necessarily have nots. To be free means that unfreedoms exist. She writes, ‘[i]n a world like our own, is anything that is made available to everyone something that offers much?’. 27 Gordon argues that we must not look at states and institutions of government as only violent and oppressive. Instead, we must look at them as instruments that can be exercised and wielded by the people. The conclusion, chapter five, is a call to action. In this chapter, Gordon compels us to return to the state. Freedom and enslavement are two faces of the current global political economic system. As noted above, Gordon finds that freedom is not a natural condition interrupted by political institutions. So, political measures inform and infuse economic ones. Envisioning these measures requires fresh political mechanisms rather than their abandonment. We cannot be anti-statist; otherwise, inequality, unfreedom and enslavement will continue to grow. Ultimately, Gordon believes that we need renewed forms of political identity, both smaller and larger than the state, that can mobilise shared resources. For her, these new forms would include processes of becoming that deepen relationships among people and territory. As she points out with numerous examples, there are already communities around the world that are mobilising the conditions conducive to consent and self-determination, and we must look to them for guidance. 28 She rallies against antipathy and challenges us to remain steadfastly political, rather than tossing them out wholesale, in order to transform our states for the better. To finish, Gordon teaches us that the study of statelessness and the study of slavery as two conditions of extreme vulnerability inform each other in critical ways. Gordon’s book thereby creates room for collaboration in research across disciplines as well as for solidarity on the ground. This book inspires us to seek out these connections and to continue to build new ones in order to make our societies and institutions fairer. 25 26 27 28 Gordon (n 2) 103. ibid 30. ibid 34. ibid 132. 358