What is global surveillance? Towards a relational political economy of the global surveillant assemblage

•Considers the global and surveillance as assemblages.•The global and surveillance together constitute a global surveillant assemblage.•Global surveillance functions to support neoliberal goals.•Global surveillance helps define the global as the natural scale of neoliberalism.•The global surveillant assemblage is necessarily incomplete.

This paper provides interrogates the relationship of the global and surveillance. It makes a broad theoretical argument for a relational political economy of global surveillance by bringing surveillance studies, assemblage theory and political economic work on neoliberalism in geography into a closer conversation. It argues that in the contemporary control society, surveillance is employed to facilitate the functioning of neoliberalism and the naturalization of the global as its proper scale of operation. It draws on multiple examples which demonstrate both the scalar politics of the global surveillant assemblage and its materialization in particular instances of actual global surveillance. The conclusion addresses emergent possibilities of transformation.