The logic of pacification: war-police-accumulation

Abstract

This article argues that the concept of pacification allows us to understand the productive role that state violence plays in securing capital and fabricating bourgeois order. Using the long history of ruling class thinking on the theory and practice of pacification, the article claims that for tactical purposes critical theory really needs to re-appropriate the term ‘pacification’ to help grasp the nature of the violence at the heart of systematic colonization. This is a violence that is sold to us as ‘peace and security’.