In the wake of the failed coup in January 2019, the US has targeted Venezuela through a combination of non-traditional means. Rather than deploying military force, it has engaged in a 'hybrid war', using state and non-state actors to exert political, economic and social pressure across various spheres of everyday life. This has deliberately impacted the poorest and most vulnerable citizens. Futures Held Hostage explores the features of this hybrid war, showing that the victims are being 'held hostage' with no foreseeable resolution. With essays from historian Vijay Prashad, journalists Belen Fernandez and Anya Parampil, economist Prabhat Patnaik, and political theorist George Ciccariello-Maher, as well as interviews with figures such as UN diplomat Samuel Moncada, and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, this book exposes the ways that the Venezuelan people have experienced the effects of sanctions, rising mortality and decreasing life expectancy due to impaired distribution of food, medicine, housing and healthcare. Futures Held Hostage demonstrates that this punishment is a response to Venezuela's attempts to assert its independence from international finance capital and construct a future at odds with global neoliberal regimes. A mass, popular movement against US policy will be a vital component of a more just and equitable future in Venezuela, the United States, and the world at large.

Author Biography

Jordan T. Camp is Visiting Scholar in the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and Co-Director of the Racial Capitalism Working Group in the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University. He is the author of Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (University of California Press, 2016); co-editor (with Christina Heatherton) of Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016), co-editor (with Laura Pulido) of Clyde Woods' posthumously published, Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans (University of Georgia Press, 2017). He is currently editing and writing, As Goes the South: The Life and Lessons of Roz Pelles, co-editing (with Chris Caruso) David Harvey's The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles (Pluto, 2020), and writing The Long Vendetta: Twentieth Counterinsurgency and the Survival of Capitalism.