Pacification: Social War and the Power of Police

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 organised, 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.

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

About the Author :
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.

Review :
By tracing the roots of key concepts of today's security regimes back through European history to the Romans and Greeks, Neocleous's fascinating and erudite analysis recasts our understanding of the contemporary logics that animate policing and counterinsurgency. This interesting book uses a wide range of historical writings to show how closely pacification and counterinsurgency are intertwined in bourgeois-capitalist societies and the state formation that goes with them, and what a crucial role the logic of debt plays in this. Mark Neocleous's book is a formidable diagnosis of the present. It teaches us a terrible lesson: today, the real opposite of peace is not war, but pacification. The concept of pacification reveals the secret mechanisms of contemporary machines for producing obedience in the service of the state and capitalism. An essential book for understanding contemporary violence and struggles.