Pacification Social War and the Power of Police

by Neocleous, Mark

• ISBN13: 9781804294017
• ISBN10: 1804294012
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2025-02-18
• Publisher: Verso

Summary

This provocative book offers the first sustained critique of the theory and practice of pacification

In his new book, critical theorist Mark Neocleous engages in a sustained critique of the theory and practice of pacification. Combining philosophical analysis with historical detail, Neocleous analyses the development of pacification as a key concept through which capitalist modernity has been organized, offering readers the first book that treats pacification as an important concept in the history of state power and capitalism.

Neocleous’s approach is fourfold, examining pacification as social warfare carried out through the ideology of peace; as a form of social police carried out through mechanisms of security; as law and order exercised through the permanent wars of class society; and as the myriad practices of power designed to counter insurgency.

Making use of official documents of state, the writings of counterinsurgency thinkers and the ideas perpetuated by practitioners of counterrevolution, the book unravels the complex ways through which pacification generates new forms of social war and new modes of policing that reproduce capitalist order and fabricate obedient subjects.

Through expansive accounts of war and police, and engaging with a range of topics from debt to death, from stasis to civil war, and from the police kettle to the politics of fear, the book offers a provocative analysis of the ways in which state and capital combine to build a pacified social order.

Author Biography

Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University London. He is the author of many books, including The Politics of Immunity: Security and the Policing of Bodies, A Critical Theory of Police Power, and War Power, Police Power.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
1. From Stasis to Sovereignty to Social War 
Insurgent citizens: stasis becomes us 
Seditious blockheads and the giddy people; or,
Did somebody say ‘civil war’? 
Social war 
2. Securitati Perpetuae: Death, Fear, and the Cunning of Security 
‘Security some men call the suburbs of hell’ 
‘Let every man go about without fear’ 
Acknowledge your darkness’ 
‘Death has us by the scruff of the neck’ I: security 
3. Th e Art of Well Building 
Clear-Hold-Build 
‘A brighter and nicer new life’ 
Social police 
4. Kettle Logic and the Fantasy of Containment 
Protest contained 
Movement restrained 
Rage pacified 
. . . and hope disappointed 
vi Pacification
5. Debt as Pacification 
Capital (it fails us now) 
Law (it fails us now) 
‘Death has us by the scruff of the neck’ II: debt 

Index