Between January 2025 and January 2026, 63 femicides were officially recorded în Romania. This figure doubles if we take into account also the number of reported attempted femicides. Moreover, a considerable number of these type of violences against women have occurred outside the confines of private homes and played out in public (urban) spaces, sparking outrage and exposing structural dysfunctionalities of legal, political and administrative frameworks for dealing with such issues. The legitimation logic of capitalist deployment of security and surveillance nexus crumbles once confronted with the structural opportunities it creates and reproduces for gender (and class) based violence. This reveals, from an oblique perspective, at the same time the capital-driven engineered militarisation of cities, but also the systemic failure to deliver any kind of safety to vulnerable, marginalised and subordinated social categories. Our intervention aims to offer a critical reading of (urban) space, surveillance and security, discussing the issue of urban inequalities by using gender (and class) based violence and power deployment in the urban context as focus points from which the capitalist militarised logic of securitisation can be exposed as yet another project of class repression, sociopolitical exclusion of various social categories and reinforced patriarchy.
Dana Domșodi is lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, University of Babeș-Bolyai, Romania. Her research focuses on social theory, history of social sciences, critical theory, labour studies and critique of capitalism.
Oana Mateescu is in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, University of Babeș-Bolyai, Romania. Her focus is in anthropology, focusing specifically on the triad capitalism, labour and digital technology.