War Police And Assemblages Of Intervention

This book reflects on the way in which war and police/policing intersect in contemporary Western-led interventions in the global South. The volume combines empirically oriented work with ground-breaking theoretical insights and aims to collect, for the first time, thoughts on how war and policing converge, amalgamate, diffuse and dissolve in the context both of actual international intervention and in understandings thereof. The book uses the caption WAR:POLICE to highlight the distinctiveness of this volume in presenting a variety of approaches that share a concern for the assemblage of war-police as a whole. The volume thus serves to bring together critical perspectives on liberal interventionism where the logics of war and police/policing blur and bleed into a complex assemblage of WAR:POLICE. Contributions to this volume offer an understanding of police as a technique of ordering and collectively take issue with accounts of the character of contemporary war that argue that war is simply reduced to policing. In contrast, the contributions show how – both historically and conceptually – the two are ‘always already’ connected. Contributions to this volume come from a variety of disciplines including international relations, war studies, geography, anthropology, and law but share a critical/poststructuralist approach to the study of international intervention, war and policing. This volume will be useful to students and scholars who have an interest in social theories on intervention, war, security, and the making of international order.

This book reflects on the way in which war and police/policing intersect in contemporary Western-led interventions in the global South. The volume combines empirically oriented work with ground-breaking theoretical insights and aims to collect, for the first time, thoughts on how war and policing converge, amalgamate, diffuse and dissolve in the context both of actual international intervention and in understandings thereof. The book uses the caption WAR:POLICE to highlight the distinctiveness of this volume in presenting a variety of approaches that share a concern for the assemblage of war-police as a whole. The volume thus serves to bring together critical perspectives on liberal interventionism where the logics of war and police/policing blur and bleed into a complex assemblage of WAR:POLICE. Contributions to this volume offer an understanding of police as a technique of ordering and collectively take issue with accounts of the character of contemporary war that argue that war is simply reduced to policing. In contrast, the contributions show how – both historically and conceptually – the two are ‘always already’ connected. Contributions to this volume come from a variety of disciplines including international relations, war studies, geography, anthropology, and law but share a critical/poststructuralist approach to the study of international intervention, war and policing. This volume will be useful to students and scholars who have an interest in social theories on intervention, war, security, and the making of international order.

Holmqvist presents an original account of the relationship between war and policing in the twenty first century. This interdisciplinary study of contemporary Western strategic thinking reveals how, why, and with what consequences, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq became seen as policing wars.

This book examines military and civilian actors in international interventions and offers a new analytical framework to apply on such interventions. While it is frequently claimed that success in international interventions hinges largely on military–civilian coherence, cooperation has proven challenging to achieve in practice. This book examines why this is the case, by analysing various approaches employed by military and civilian actors and discussing the different relationships between the intervening actors and those upon whom they have intervened. The work analyses different military concepts, such as peacekeeping and counterinsurgency, and the often-troubled relationship between the humanitarian and military intervening actors. It presents a new analytical framework to examine these relationships based on identification theory, which illuminates how the interveners represent those they have been deployed to engage, as well as their own identity and role. As such the book offers an enhanced understanding of the challenges related to civil-military cooperation in international interventions, as well as a theoretical contribution to the study of interventions, more generally. This book will be of much interest to students of international interventions, military studies, peacekeeping, security studies and International Relations.

This interdisciplinary Handbook brings together into one coherent volume a range of international authors, who firmly establish the relevance of war within the discipline of criminology. The chapters address emerging and prevailing issues in the criminological study of war, including state crime, corporate crime, victimology, genocide, policing, security and various forms of violence. Taking a critical standpoint including feminist, cultural, and radical approaches amongst others, the Handbook is split into five clear sections: (1) The Criminogenic Contexts of War; (2) Violence and Victimization at War; (3) Violence, War and Security; (4) Perpetrators of Violence and the Aftermath of War; and (5) Cultural and Methodological Developments for a Criminology of War. Edited by two leading experts in the field, this Handbook provides an original point of reference on the contemporary debates and applications of criminology and war and will be a key resource for academics and students across criminology, international relations, critical military studies, military sociology, peace studies and law.

A collective ethnography of grassroots mobilizations for community safety across the Silicon Valley This is a narrative of struggle and solidarity and a collective toolkit for grassroots opposition to militarization, policing, and ongoing conditions of war in the current conjuncture of racial patriarchal capitalism. Grassroots researcher Annie Paradise presents here a collective ethnography of the mothers and community matriarchs whose children have been murdered by police across the San Francisco Bay Area as they develop and practice autonomous, creative forms of resistance. The War on the Social Factory: The Struggle for Community Safety in the Silicon Valley maps local families’ struggles to reclaim their households and their communities—to create a social infrastructure of care, justice, and safety outside state- and market-determined modes of “security.” Practices such as sustained vigil, testimony, and the production and circulation of insurgent knowledges are shown here to be part of interconnected justice efforts to demilitarize and decarcerate communities in the face of the multiple forms of violence enacted under late racial patriarchal capitalism. Paradise examines the expanding carceral processes of enclosure, criminalization, dispossession, expropriation, and disposability that mark the neoliberal "security” regime across the Silicon Valley and offers counter-counterinsurgent strategies and practices of co-generative, dynamic resistance.

This edited volume analyses the global making of security institutions and practices in our postcolonial world. The volume will offer readers the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the global making of how security is thought of and practiced, from US urban policing, diaspora politics and transnational security professionals to policing encounters in Afghanistan, Palestine, Colombia or Haiti. It critically examines and decentres conventional perspectives on security governance and policing. In doing so, the book offers a fresh analytical approach, moving beyond dominant, one-sided perspectives on the transnational character of security governance, which suggest a diffusion of models and practices from a ‘Western’ centre to the rest of the globe. Such perspectives omit much of the experimenting and learning going on in the (post)colony as well as the active agency and participation of seemingly subaltern actors in producing and co-constituting what is conventionally thought of as ‘Western’ policing practice, knowledge and institutions. This is the first book that studies the truly global making of security institutions and practices from a postcolonial perspective, by bringing together highly innovative, in-depth empirical cases studies from across the globe. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars interested in International Relations and Global Studies, (critical) Security Studies, Criminology and Postcolonial Studies.

In Violence Work Micol Seigel offers a new theorization of the quintessential incarnation of state power: the police. Foregrounding the interdependence of policing, the state, and global capital, Seigel redefines policing as “violence work,” showing how it is shaped by its role of channeling state violence. She traces this dynamic by examining the formation, demise, and aftermath of the U.S. State Department's Office of Public Safety (OPS), which between 1962 and 1974 specialized in training police forces internationally. Officially a civilian agency, the OPS grew and operated in military and counterinsurgency realms in ways that transgressed the borders that are meant to contain the police within civilian, public, and local spheres. Tracing the career paths of OPS agents after their agency closed, Seigel shows how police practices writ large are rooted in violence—especially against people of color, the poor, and working people—and how understanding police as a civilian, public, and local institution legitimizes state violence while preserving the myth of state benevolence.