Mark Neocleous, "Pacification: Social War and the Power of Police" (Verso, 2025)
01:25:00 Share

Work management platforms. Ugh. Endless onboarding, IT bottlenecks, admin requests. But what if things were different? Monday.com is different.

No lengthy onboarding. Beautiful reports in minutes. Custom workflows you can build on your own. Easy to use, prompt-free AI. Huh. Turns out you can love a work management platform. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.

Flex your business with an American Express Business Gold card. You'll earn four times membership rewards points on your top two eligible spending categories, like transit and electronics, each month on up to $150K in combined purchases per year. Plus, you can now earn three times membership rewards points on flights and prepaid hotels booked on AmexTravel.com. Terms and points cap apply. Learn more at AmericanExpress.com slash business dash gold. Amex Business Gold, built for business,

Welcome to the New Books Network.

For more than two decades, Mark Neoclius has been a pioneer in the radical critique of policing, security, and warfare. Today, we'll discuss his newest work on the theory and practice of pacification, which he argues is social warfare carried out through the ideology of peace.

Pacification not only aims to counter resistance to capitalist exploitation, dispossession, and displacement, but it aims to prevent such resistance from emerging in the first place by constructing social institutions in the built environment.

Pacification is a totalizing process by which states deploy social policies, symbolic practices, and coercive operations in order to produce cooperative or at least acquiescent subjects. However, pacification never succeeds in obscuring the antagonistic nature of capitalist social relations and never entirely succeeds in countering or preventing resistance from emerging. Consequently, pacification becomes an endless social war of peace.

Mark Neoclius is professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University in London. His previous books include A Critical Theory of Police Power, which was reissued by Verso in 2021, The Politics of Immunity, which came out from Verso in 2022, and War Power, Police Power, which came out from the university press in 2014. He's also a member of the Anti-Security Collective,

And he co-authored the Security Appalachian Manifesto, which is available at anti-security.org. Hello, Mark. How are you today? Hello, Jeff. I'm fine, thanks. How are you?

Good, good. So to start off, as is customary on the New Books Network, I want to ask you about the origins of this book. What led you to write this book in particular, and how does it build on and depart from your earlier work on policing, the critique of security, and the fabrication of social order? Sure. Yeah. Well, as with most of my books, it has a...

It had a long gestation. I started thinking about pacification some 15 or more years ago when I was developing the critique of security that you mentioned. And I tried to work with the idea of security as pacification. I latched on to the richness of the idea and some of its origins and the way it was used, the way that

the security intellectuals like to talk about pacification and the way that pacification theorists like to talk about security. And I developed, I started working with it or on it through a series of articles. One was called Security as Pacification. And as I was working on my book that you mentioned a little while ago called War Power, Police Power,

I had an argument in there about war as peace, peace as pacification, and the idea of pacification as uniting the ideas of war and peace and war and police. But there was something that I felt was unfinished about it that I hadn't properly grappled with. So I...

I decided to really just embark on a more lengthy engagement with the idea and to bury myself in some of the literature. And as I think you've alluded to, I...

I mean, one of the reasons I like the idea is that it enables us to work with the ideas of war and police without distinguishing between war and police. And that was something I tried to do. I wrestled with historically in a series of arguments. And I think that connection between the idea of war as a form of police and police as a form of war

And both of them as forms of fabrication of the social order and articulations of ideas about security really get captured with this idea of pacification. So that's what I was trying to work with. As you know, I essentially try and argue that critical theory needs the idea of pacification to try and make sense of

of our contemporary capitalist world, of the origins of capitalism, and also...

I think what I liked about writing the book was it enabled me to engage in a lot of the official literature, a lot of the counterinsurgency literature, a lot of police literature, army literature, a lot of the literature produced by what I call the Quintinistas, the counterinsurgency theorists. And there's a nice kind of rich history there, which was

Well, I guess the word enjoyable isn't the right word, but it was an interesting engagement with that history. And it was an attempt to try and, if you like, recuperate the idea of pacification or take the idea of pacification and turn it into an idea for critical theory. Yeah, I think that that is so immensely valuable because I have a PhD in political science and

I worked on military regimes and military governments, and I found it really frustrating in the way that political scientists talk about military rule and the role of militaries and politics in a lot of societies, because they take this sort of ontological distinction between

War being something that militaries do that takes place against external, usually militaries of other nation states, and policing as something internal against crime, which isn't treated as a given category that's not really examined.

They take that distinction as foundational and as given. And in many cases, the kind of key political scientists who have been involved in developing theories of civil-military relations, namely Samuel Huntington, was one of the security intellectuals that...

no doubt you've engaged with in Comercast a lot and he did a lot of work particularly in the soldier in the state and in cementing this distinction between well militaries are professionals in the deployment of organized violence against militaries of other nation states and anything else is just well rent seeking or crime they don't

think about, well, maybe there's something deeper going on in the fabrication of capitalist societies that might draw militaries into politics or that might totally erode the boundary between so-called police and so-called military. I like Stuart Schrader's idea of the police-military continuum. I think you would ask a continuum rather than a hard and fast boundary, I think.

That's so much more helpful for understanding what militaries and police do politically and sociologically in the world today. Yeah, I mean, I think on that, it would be, again, going into that literature, the literature that was directly using the idea of pacification from the state officials and the counterinsurgency theorists and the like,

And the literature on counterinsurgency, you know, people like David Goluda, for example, or Kilcullen, or recently...

or even the counterinsurgency manual. I mean, one of the things I find that's interesting about it is that that literature often very, very comfortably moves between the ideas of police and the ideas of war of some sort. We make it all, you know, war, small war or something, but they're,

And more often than not, they're just perfectly happy thinking about these things, one and the same thought, so to speak, because for them it is a unity. There's a sense in which academic scholarship is to blame for this trenched dichotomy that gets put in our minds and we find it very difficult to shake off. And of course, those of us who have been trying to do some of the critical work

around this distinction to break it down end up conjuring up um conjuring up other ways of thinking about it as a way of trying to let's let's stop let's stop doing that um so in a sense that's what i'm doing with pacification and i guess that's what it does with the idea of continuum you know yeah and um i think that uh

Yeah, these counterinsurgent intellectuals are telling us something important about the nature of social order when they're talking about warfare being something that takes place in all sorts of places, not just against the nation states of other militaries. They're telling us something important sociologically that

mainstream social scientists tend to ignore or set aside. Sure. But also even just, you know, regular police officers, but in particular senior officers, you know, they use the language of war so comfortably, so clearly, you know, for them, they really are engaged in the war. It's not an issue for them to try it that way. They really think of a war on crime as well as a war on all the other things that they're fighting.

And that was one of the things I'm trying to capture in the book with this idea of social war. Try and, you know, grapple properly with what they actually tell us time and again, which is, yeah, no, this is a war, right? So then the question is, well, let's think about what they mean when we're talking about it as a war.

And they don't mean it metaphorically, which is what a lot of the liberal academic scholarship says as well. Yeah, they don't really mean it. It's a metaphor. But actually, I think they really mean it. We should take them seriously. So you opened the introduction by arguing that the concept of pacification is necessary for understanding how capitalist society, with all of its attendant inequality, exploitation, dispossession, environmental destruction, is maintained and reproduced.

Um, what let's crack open this concept of pacification. Um, how do you, uh, think about it or define it? How does it relate to terms like civil war and counterinsurgency that may be more common in scholarly or popular political discourse? Sure. Yeah. So, uh,

I think one of the things that I take from the literature that I engage with is the constant theme of, which isn't, you know, is this police? Is this war? Is this counterinsurgency? It's the common theme of order, that classification is the bringing into order order.

something now the something might be a social whole but it might also be disorderly subjects or inconstant subjects or revolting classes um but it's about the constitution of order and of course this goes back for me to to one of my first books which i called the fabrication of social order which which was uh republished more recently in the title that you've

that you said in your introduction, which is a critical theory of police power. So I'm interested in, you know, I have historically been interested in the fabrication of social order and in particular the fabrication of habsonist order. You know, how is order constituted in a society which is, we are told time and again, is a society that is

simultaneously one of peace, because that's what capitalism supposedly brings us, but which nonetheless is constantly engaged in a discussion about one kind of war after another. And that's what I try and capture with this idea of social war, which we can maybe say a little bit more about later, perhaps. So that's what I'm interested in. I'm interested in a sense, how does a society that is

So, you know, profoundly exploitative, alienating and irrational. How did that get, A, created and, B, maintained? How is it produced and reproduced? And that's how I've come to this idea of pacification, through the work of some of those thinkers who were engaged in the processes of pacification.

which of course isn't meant simply in terms of how some people perceive it in terms of, let's say, a colonial context, but is also meant to apply in terms of what I call from Marx, the systematic colonization of the world. It's not about what takes place in the colonies, it's about what takes place in the systematic colonization of the world by people.

in the name of capital. Right, and the recent literature on the transnational circulation of counterinsurgent or pacification knowledge, personnel, and resources speaks to the

the connection that you're making there, the systematic colonization of the world by capital, regardless of whether it's within or across geopolitical boundaries. These are similar processes that work in a lot of cases. Yeah, I would go further. I would say they're not similar processes, but they're the one and the same process.

I mean, you know, it's one of the ways in which we fall into these dichotomies, right? That we start thinking,

we start thinking of it over there and over here. And then you start, this is the grounds of a lot of that literature that goes, okay, so there's a colonial laboratory and things are tested there and then they're brought back over here. Or people like to refer to in that way of the rumouring. And I think there's ideas, I mean, in one sense, they get onto something important, but they also confuse the issue by thinking of

and over there and over here. And in a sense, for the people who are seeking the pacification of the world,

you know, there is no over there and over here. There's a process called capitalism. There's a process of exploitation. There's a process of countering infurgency that needs to be understood as one process, that needs to be understood as a unity. You know, I think it's interesting that critical thinkers have

In a sense, they have less of a conflict of the unity of the process of capital exploitation and a lot of the people engaged in the practice of capitalist exploitation. And so they're constantly reimagining the world as one kind of dichotomy or dualism after another. And then a lot of times research projects in working out how the two things connect. And I think it's better if you don't start with the two things, that you start with the unity of the process.

yeah um so in that sense you know pacification is a unified process of order construction uh that's how i try and develop the argument in the book um i mean in relation to you you're about counterinsurgency yeah um i mean one of the things i try and do in the book is to to engage a kind of

a double historical genealogy of the concept of pacification and counterinsurgency. And it's quite interesting that, you know, pacification has this long history

going back to the Romans. And then it's picked up by various thinkers and it has a real flurry of interest with the birth of capitalism, where clearly the ruling elites and their thinkers were thinking, well, what do we do to pacify these masterless creatures, these insurgents, these rowdy, disorderly people?

and how do we, if you like, constitute the commercial order that we want to constitute. So there's a real flurry of interest in the idea of pacification in early modernity and the development of capitalism. Whereas it has this history. In contrast, counterinsurgency is an incredibly recent term. I mean, its earliest is kind of 1960, the early 1960s.

And as you know, one of the things I mean, I do in the in the book in the introduction in particular is to is to explore some of the literature, some of the early literature on counterinsurgency, which is interesting because of how much it relies on the on the concept of pacification.

that it the the counterinsurgency thinkers of the time you know were tasked with this idea of countering insurgency and they immediately fell back on the idea of pacification and then they start bouncing back and forth between between the two ideas uh so

In one sense, the book is a book on counterinsurgency, but essentially I fold the idea of counterinsurgency into the idea of pacification. And a lot of the time, as you may have noticed, I engage a kind of

the separation of the counter and the insurgency. In other words, I use two words rather than one. In other words, the process of pacification, or central to the process of pacification, is the process of countering insurgency. In other words, I was conscious of trying to not write a book that simply fell into the insurgency literature, but which nonetheless spoke to a lot of that literature.

But in a sense, you know, the counterinsurgency literature is pacification literature. And so in one sense, all of the counterinsurgency literature that's emerged since roughly 1960 is a kind of contribution to the history of pacification. Hmm.

I think that this book is also a contribution to Marxism and Marxist state theory in particular, because at least for me, one frustration that I've had with trying to employ Marxist state theory in my own research has been that

There seems to be this reification of the labor market and the Pacific process of workers going to market and selling their labor power to capitalists and workers.

thinking of Marxism as kind of an imminent critique of these liberal institutions that, uh, you know, and that's incredibly valuable and important, but at the same time, it almost, um,

reproduces the liberal historiography's suppression or marginalization of processes of violence at the point of production to say nothing of the violence of primitive accumulation that has been central to what states have done historically in the U.S. and other advanced capitalist countries no less than

And in the developing world, you know, labor historians have written lots of great books about these, you know, militarized clashes between unions and strikers on the one hand and capitalists and the state on the other. And yet,

Marxist state theory, in my view, has not really taken on board the role of the coercive apparatus in the accumulation of capital as being central to what Marxist states do, or capitalist states do. So I'm interested in thinking about how your work

on pacification and on the fabrication of sub forwarder contributes to Marxist scholarship and, and how it might speak to kind of silences because Western Marxism has historically focused a lot on ideology and how states and, and capitalists acquire the consent of the governed to their own domination and,

almost at the expense of losing sight of actual coercion, at least in my mind. Would you agree with that reading? And what do you think that the history or work on pacification might contribute to rethinking the capitalist state? Yeah, okay, nice, good question. So I think in terms of a contribution to Marxist theory, I'd like to think that the book

puts pacification into our language. In other words, my intention is that pacification becomes a central category through which we can understand the constitution of capitalism, countering of insurgency, the nature of the myriad social wars of modernity. So that's one side of it. The other side is, as you know, one of the things I try and

and do in the book is to develop this idea of social war. Touch on the fact that it has a kind of very, very small history within Marxism. Engels played around with the idea for a while, and then a few others kind of pick up on it.

And I think we need to work with it more. It should and can be an important category within Marxist thought in a way that sets it at a kind of critical distance from the concept of civil war.

which Marx was much more fond of for various historical reasons at the time. He was trying to connect kind of the actual civil wars that were taking place in particular in America with what he thought of as the civil war, which was class war. So I think social war is kind of broader than that and more useful than that because...

Civil war has been really captured by the legal and military thinkers, and they've imposed a certain kind of reading on civil war. But the other thing about social war is that I think for Marxism, it's been very easy to use the phrase class war and sometimes use the phrase civil war, but to not really...

engage with the ways in which the class war connects with and intersects with a whole range of other wars that cannot easily fit into the the notion of of civil war uh so you know we've got a range of obvious ones you know the war on poverty the war on drugs the war on crime for example and

And then, of course, a whole range of less obvious ones, some that just come and go. The war on scroungers, for example, the war on benefits cheats, the war on homelessness, the war on begging and the war on vagrancy and so forth. And then, you know, some that I mentioned that, you know, I'd like I put in as hopefully a surprise to everyone.

to readers, but you know, the war on sodomy, for example, or the, or the, the war on moralism, you know, these kinds of wars that come and go. And they, they, they can't be understood through the lens of civil war. They can't be understood. Like they can be understood through the, the, the, the, the extent of police powers, because obviously all under the whole range of the whole gamut of police powers and,

But they also kind of need to be understood in relation to the class war. It's the kind of war that cannot be declared because a lot of the time the ruling class wouldn't want to declare a class war. They're more than happy to declare one social war after another, right? It's quite interesting. It's especially interesting, I think,

given the ideology of peace with which we're bombarded, right? So...

we end up living in a world where capitalism is peace, that liberalism is peace, bourgeois order is peace, we live in a peaceful social order, that liberal democracies don't go to war against one another. And yet this peace is saturated with one war after another. So you literally cannot go about in the bourgeois world without being part of one social war after another, right? You pass a

a beggar being questioned by the police about why they're begging. You're part of a homeless person that's being questioned by the police about why they're sleeping under the shelter. These are moments in the social world of modernity. And I think we need, I think modernism needs to think

One of the things I'm trying to do in the book with this idea of social war is to think, well, okay, if pacification is about kind of social war, then maybe we need to engage more with this idea of social war, connect the gamut of social wars, which amounts, you know, week after week, year after year, with what we understand as the class war.

And I think we also need to think about it as, again, war is not a metaphor here, you know? Uh, and I think that sometimes, uh, um, uh, you know, academics in particular can, can kind of feel cloistered from, uh, the hard edge of this, but, um,

you know, in the U S, uh, so many people have guns and they're cosplaying as soldiers out there. Uh, I live in Virginia and I see this all the time. Uh, people wearing camo and, uh, bragging about how many guns they have. And it's all, it's all linked to, well, I need to defend my property against the scroungers who are coming to, and the government that works for them. Uh,

And it's all linked to the social war. And I, yeah, I, I think that for a certain kind of Marxist research, once a society reaches a stage where the commodity form subsumes all of their social relations, then capitalism kind of reproduces itself through its own structures of exploitation and

this kind of overt violence is seen as almost like an atavistic holdover or characteristic of societies that are not quite totally capitalist. And I think that that's really wrong-headed. And I think that an important starting point, which I think you adopt, is the point that even with real subsumption, subsumption is not total. And I think that

there's always going to be resistance to the kind of internal workings of the market that are sometimes lost touch with in some forms of Marxism. But that's kind of getting on my hobby horse. But also in terms of that resistance, once that resistance is understood as insurgency,

then part of the project of state power is to counter that insurgency. Of course, at one of the time,

On some occasions and in some cases, it really is conscious resistance. In other cases, it may be unconscious resistance. In some cases, it's not resistance at all. But nonetheless, it still amounts to be an insurgency of some sort that therefore needs to be, right? So there you get the interlocking of kind of the counseling of insurgency and

Forms of social warfare and the range of powers that are used against these things. Crimes against property as warfare against humanity. Or even if you think about something that I haven't heard a lot of recently, I guess this is one of the wars that's disappeared, but I certainly remember it.

from whatever, maybe 15, 20 years ago, which was the war on squeegee merchants. Do you remember? Yeah, yeah, I remember hearing about that, yeah. You know, so there's a moment where people were trying to earn a pound or a dollar or a dime or whatever you say, you know, just by, you know, washing a windscreen at a traffic light, right? So the standard traffic with a bucket and a squeegee.

and offer to wash your windscreen whilst the lights were red. And the idea was you would give them whatever it was at the time, 50 pence or something.

And this was supposedly a major problem. Of course, if it's a major problem, once the bourgeoisie starts declaring something to be a social problem, then the state has to declare a war against it, right? So you get a war on squeegee merchants. And of course, the squeegee merchants aren't actually fighting any kind of war, right? It's trying to make a living. And it turns out that the problem seems to be

that they're trying to make a living without engaging in wage law. Yeah. And also, you could think about, I could see an argument where people worry about property values or they worry about, yeah, some of these costs of having people being out of place and engaging in activities to make money that,

uh, other people might view as damaging their own economic interests in somewhere. Um, okay. So, um, the first chapter of the book argues that the modern state arose to tame and contain class conflict from whence arose the, this is knowledges and discourses of pacification. You talk a lot about the, the Greek idea of, of stasis, um,

What does stasis mean and what does its disappearance from modern political theory tell us about the relationship between pacification, the birth of the modern state, and the rise of capitalism? I've been intrigued by this ancient Greek concept of stasis for a long time, not least because for many, many years over the decades on and off I've taught stasis.

uh courses on ancient greek political thought and in particular plato and aristotle and uh this word stasis comes up and i i've always struggled to get students to understand it because it's one of the most complicated and complex and bewildering concepts you can ever encounter um

And one of the things I tried to always get students to think about was the way in which this word was translated in the English text, because obviously we were using the English text, not the ancient Greek text.

So it's been a bewildering term for some time and I was intrigued by how it was translated and I was partly intrigued by kind of what happens to it. So it's a wonderful term because it's a kind of perfect kind of

dialectical unity of opposites if you like which is which is root of a lot of our our words which contain that same kind of unity of opposites so i think it's the root of the word something of something like static if you think static then on the one hand in english we use static to describe something that is is immobile is immobile is staying in the same position is fixed

And yet we use the word static to describe movement, right? Movement on the radio, interference with the radio wave is static. They're static on the line, right? So we still have that kind of complicated opposition in some of our modern terminology. I was also intrigued by the history of the word because it is a root word.

of a lot of our uh stat words you know not least uh example state um but i was particularly intrigued by it because um it's it's the root of our word of of taking a stand of the idea of taking a political stand and and for the greek stasis was was was was the idea that

It was the duty of a citizen, the expectation of a citizen to take a stand in conflict, that there are some fundamental conflicts that take place and that the citizen was expected to be taking a stand in them. That this wasn't a problem. In fact, it was an expectation. So there's the constitution of Athens that is said to be written by Aristotle, which

you know, has this idea that those, the person who does not take a stand, the person who is not engaged in stasis, um, should be banished, should be cast out, right? Because they're not a good citizen. Uh, and, and one of the things for the Greeks was this was, this was different to the idea of polymos, which gets very much more easily translated war, uh,

Whereas stasis is much more problematic for translators. And it's much more, I think, problematic and interesting for us in terms of its conceptual history. So in the translations, you get the idea that a lot of the time in Plato and Aristotle, for example, stasis is translated as faction.

And so, you know, it's people taking part in factions, forming a political faction. Sometimes it's translated as civil war, even though it is clearly distinct from the Greek idea of polymos. Sometimes it's translated as similar things such as civil strife or something like that. So...

What's interesting about the idea is that a lot of the historians who've worked with this concept say that essentially what this idea of stasis does in terms of taking a stand is that it interpolates the citizen as a kind of insurgent. The inherent in this idea of citizenship is the idea that one is expected to take a stand in social conflict of some whatever sort, whatever you want to call it.

And I was intrigued by this idea and I wanted to explore a little bit of its history, given that

you know, the roots of a lot of our ideas about politics come from ancient Greece, but that this has somehow not quite stuck in the same way, right? We can talk about the demos and the kratos as democracy and so forth, but this idea of stasis has just lost its political resonance. I kind of explored some of its history and I discovered that, you know, actually,

It gets translated in various ways through the Romans. So it gets re-articulated as the idea of constitution, which was, I think, the Romans' way of trying to get us to understand that whatever social conflict there is has to be managed somehow politically. But then I got hooked on Hobbes' translation of Thucydides.

And Hobbes does something incredibly clever there, which he is. He translates stasis in various ways. Faction, for example. But most importantly, it's translated as sedition. So it becomes a problem, right? It becomes something that needs to be eradicated.

So from the ancient Greeks' idea that this is an expected part of being a citizen, it now becomes something that is a threat, a threat to the social order, a threat to the state. It needs to be eradicated, and it needs to be eradicated through what Hobbes will later describe as civil war. And it's a war fought by the ruling class with the powers of the state.

So I got interested in the idea of how it was that we lost the idea that it could perhaps be an expected part of being a citizen to take a stand in conflict and to therefore assume the position of an insurgent to a world in which we are all expected to be countering insurgency over and over again.

And out of a whole heap of things come, one is, I guess, the most important in terms of the conversation we're having is the idea that with the development of capitalism and the state and early modern state theory, what you get is a kind of very, very categorical no to civil war, which is a no to status, right? In other words...

You take problems, you know, the purpose of the state is to stamp out, eradicate civil war. At the same time, and that kind of eradication of civil war is embedded in the idea that the state exists for peace, right? Okay, so the state exists for peace and therefore the state must stamp out civil war. And yet at the same time,

the state is constantly announcing one war after another, right? It's announced war against the masterless reign of early modernity, a war against the Hobbes, Anabaptists, Papists, and all the others that he didn't like, a war against other forms of insurgents, a war against anything forming into any kind of faction or in particular, any kind of potentially revolutionary class formation. So...

I think it takes us to a central tension within early modern political thought, which is kind of still with us, which is this kind of categorical no to civil war, but a categorical yes to, this is what I call the social wars, right? So no, no to civil war, yes to peace. Oh, by the way, we're announcing yet another social war, right? This time war against beggars, the homeless, the squeegee merchants and so forth.

And I try and, in that chapter, I try and kind of ask, you know, what happened to the idea of stasis and explore some of that history. And then out of that, try and develop a history of the concept of social war up against the idea of civil war.

Yeah, and I found this history of stasis really interesting, and I could see how it would be difficult to teach this concept in the university where I did my PhD, which is a very middle-class university. A lot of students who come in

think of citizenship as being about solutionism, about the highest form of citizenship is to be a policy wonk, finding solutions to all of these problems like poverty, like drug abuse, criminality, whatever.

you know, and some may find solutions that are more liberal and try to, uh, intervene to, uh, um, deal with the so-called, uh, social roots or foundations of these problems. Others may be more conservative and, uh, have more, um, punitive or carceral, carceral solutions to some of these problems or quote unquote tough love, uh, uh, which is what they named cruelty. Um, but,

But, you know, this idea that citizenship entails taking a stand in a social conflict

is something that would be utterly foreign to them, I think. And I think that they would have a lot of trouble wrapping their heads around how that could be valuable. It's interesting that you used the terms you used when you talked about your students and talking about what they might understand as good citizenship is that actually you referred to being either a policy monk

or engage in some kind of social policy. The point about policy is that it's a form of police, right? So, as you know, in the book, I connect what I'm calling social war with what I call this expanded idea of social police, you know?

what you're saying in effect, what you're, what you're getting at, I think is, is it is embedded in, embedded in us from an early age that to be a good citizen is to be part of the police apparatus, to be part of the, part of the apparatus to, to, to pursue good police in order to be in good social order as a good social. Yeah.

Yeah, and more liberal students want to go into social entrepreneurship or NGOs or these private, non-governmental aspects of the police apparatus that have their charter schools and whatnot. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

And I think that that's part of what makes this book and pacification such a rich concept for me is that it does bring together the more the coercive side, but also the more hegemonic consent oriented side and also

you know, Foucaultian governmental conduct of conduct kind of interventions as well that are not quite as obviously coercive. We can see all of these as dialectically intertwined aspects of

of one social process that aims to counter insurgencies, whether by eliminating them or preventing them from arising in the first place. I think that that's something that's really valuable because it helps me kind of make sense of, well, why do militaries and so many societies also have

engage in things like cartography and civil engineering and why why are there these militarized

police units who are involved in all sorts of things that you wouldn't typically associate with fighting interstate wars, the things that we traditionally think of as militaries. And yet all militaries do so much more than just killing people, to put it bluntly.

And I think that pacification as this capacious concept that brings together these different aspects of fabricating social order helps make sense of what militaries actually do instead of what liberal political theory tells us they should do in the benchmark that creates for so much empirical scholarship of militaries and political science.

Um, so chapter two focuses on how the security industry mobilizes our fear of death to justify practices of pacification, uh, that render resistance to the status quo and thankable. Um, how does the security industry mobilize our fear of death and how it's learning to, as you put it, genuinely practice death, save us from being slaves to security. Yeah. Okay. Um,

Yeah. Well, as you know, you've obviously read other books of mine as well. I do have this pull towards death. So death always is somewhere in the book. Yeah. So I was, I was, I was in, I'm, I'm intrigued by the history of, of security and the,

that long history of security compared to the relatively short history of insecurity as an idea. And the invention of insecurity as a very modern idea and how that came about. And, you know, what were people using as the opposite of security prior to the invention of the concept of insecurity?

And the answer to that is really is fear. And in particular, it's fear of death. And that opens up for me an interesting avenue, which is to do with the strange history of security in that, you know, through a lot of its time,

Security was a sin, right? In Christianity, security is a sin. If anyone talking about themselves as a secure person or as having security is engaged in a dreadful crime against God because one can't be secure other than in the hands of God. And obviously that just strikes us as weird, right? I mean, it's just because we're so obsessed with

with this idea of security, that our society is so saturated with it that our whole being is supposed to be putting it at the forefront of our minds and bodies day after day, minute after minute. So the idea that security was a sin is quite unnerving until you realize that actually the whole debate about security is a debate about death,

And so the question then is, well, if security is pacification, then what is the connection between pacification and death? And so what I do in that chapter, or I try and do in that chapter, is to explore the ways in which the fear of death, and I guess fear generally, but in particular the fear of death, and then even more in particular the fear of violent death,

plays a role in attaching us to the state. It plays a role in making us think that we do need to look to the state for our security, and that in exchange for that, we do need to offer the state our obedience. And so that chapter kind of becomes a way of trying to say, well, what might happen in our political imaginations today

about security if we were to kind of free ourselves from the fear of death. And so suddenly the question of death is no longer simply whatever you want to call it, philosophical, religious, or whatever. It's actually deeply...

deeply political because it becomes a way of managing political fears. It becomes a way of, of interpolating subjects as fundamentally insecure and fundamentally fearful and therefore of encouraging subjects to be, to be pacified, you know, in other words, to kind of accept the pacification of,

that's imposed on them through the security apparatus, but to also go further than that and in a sense internalize it to make it their own practice, to make it part of their own being as political subjects. So it's a strange chapter, I know, because I know it's not the sort of chapter that most people picking up a book called Pacification might expect. But I do think that it's one way of thinking about

the centrality of death to our political imaginations. Yeah, and I think it's important to think about for understanding why pacification works and how success...

The security industry and the security sector is so good at enrolling people in these social projects of pacification. I think the fear of death is absolutely central to that, to the hegemonic aspect of security, right? Right.

Well, you can also think of it in terms of the kind of enemies, the social enemies that we're expected to accept that there should be social wars fought against, you know, the obvious example.

you know, the starkest one is obviously the war on terror, but then all the other wars are always connected with the idea that there is going to be this, this creature coming out of the darkness to threaten your life. Right. So the war is obvious and then, you know, war on drugs, the war on crime, but then also the war on. Yeah. And the, you know, the fear, the fear of a home invasion that structures, uh,

so much and then even the squeegee merchant becomes you know some kind of problematic figure you think oh no he's not going to just wash the man's not going to wash my windscreen he's going to actually whatever extort you or something make your make your windshield dirtier and then try to get you to pay him to make it clean again uh

Yeah, for sure. So in that sense, the question of death and the fear of death also then opens up the space with just thinking about fear more generally. So moving on to chapter three, a major point in this book is that pacification is productive. It's not just about destroying everything.

enemy groups or even enemy populations. It's about creating a new social environment that structures social interactions and controls circulations and mobilities and channels them in certain ways so as to make capitalist production less frictional

less subject to friction or less vulnerable to disruption. And so I would like to talk a little bit about how has pacification as a productive process been manifested in doctrines and practices of counterinsurgency and policing that you've done research on?

Yeah, so, well, that chapter is specifically focused on the kind of productive side of pacification. And this is one of the ideas or principles that counterinsurgency inherits from pacification and runs with, reiterates, repeats, develops, and so forth. And the point of that is to

Well, partly just to stress the idea that for pacification theorists, the process is meant to be productive. Now, that's not to say it's not destructive, but meant to highlight the way in which these people see themselves as actually producing something new.

and producing something that can be sustained, even if that means a permanent countering of the insurgency that the production of the newness creates, because it

And clear hold and build is one of the slogans that you analyze, right? Yeah. Clear hold build is a really interesting slogan because it's latched onto by the counterinsurgency thinkers that you're alluding to. But what's interesting about clear hold build is one of the things I do in the chapter is to show

The extent to which it's become integral to British policing of the moment. It's interesting that police forces will simply look at this idea and go, yeah, that's a nice idea. That's good. We can go with that.

in a way that to them doesn't need explaining because they understand themselves as being involved in countering insurgency. So they don't feel like it needs explaining. The point is that it's the central issue that I wanted to focus on in that chapter was this idea of building because the point is not just simply to clear an area of insurgents or criminals or gangs or drug dealers or whatever,

The point is to build something in which those social enemies do not reappear. Yeah? So it's the build that I'm interested in there. And I'm partly interested in that. I partly wanted to stress it because, well, obviously it alludes to this idea of the fabrication of a social order, the constitution of a reform of society and so forth. But I was also...

I wanted to push against the interpretation of pacification as a purely kind of reactive destructive process. Actually, it's more than that. It's about creating something new. The destruction is intended to lay the grounds for a new foundation.

And that in the literature, you get time. And again, the pacification theorists and practitioners going, yeah, we built this, we built this, we built all these hospitals, we built all these markets, we built all these roads, we built all these schools, we build, build, build, we keep building, we keep building. Of course, they then go in the bastards are still unhappy with us. What's the matter with these people? We built them some, some hospitals, but now they're, they're still fighting against us. And they don't quite understand the issue, the central issue, but you know,

And of course, what that means is they don't understand how the building of a new order can end up creating the insurgency that they then need to counter because we built the order above the heads of the people that they think they're building the order for, or they say they're building the order for. And so they, and this is as if it's like another way in which pacification is productive, they end up producing the insurgency that they then need to counter. Yeah.

I've seen this so many times in reading about colonial pacification campaigns in particular where the imperial militaries will displace people from their homes and create these new model villages that are totally alien to the people they're supposed to help and totally dismantle their

livelihood strategies that they had been accustomed to and that had succeeded for them and at the same time don't create any resources that allow them to help them to make any kind of transition to reform. It's just that and then they're just shocked when people incite these villages or fall.

Yeah, that's right. But then you see, again, if we think of it as one process of systematic colonization, then

then it is exactly the same. Well, not exactly. You get a similar process taking place in British cities, right? So police force go, okay, we'll do clear, we'll build. Okay, we need to clear the area of whatever it is, criminals or drug dealers, and hold the area. And we can do that as police. Then how do we build a new area? Well, they clearly can't go in and build new hospitals and schools and so forth. What they do is they build...

new relations with other parts of the police machine. In other words, we build relations with schools or universities or social workers and so forth, right? And that extends the arm of the police into those other areas of what I call in the book, you know, social police, right?

So that notion of build, I mean, sometimes it's meant literally, yeah, we build a hospital. Sometimes it's meant, you know, we need to rebuild local communities. And the only way that...

through police forces is by kind of reengaging the other arms of the social police machine. Yeah. And then when people don't like being surveilled and having all their choices made for them, then, you know, it's just said, oh, well, it's their culture or, you know, some other racist frivol to explain it away. Yeah. Yeah.

So what happens is they engage, you know, so in the UK we have police, you know, so uniformed police officers being called

to a school and engaging in the strip searching of young people with the oversight of the teachers of the school, because supposedly the person has melted of marijuana or something, right? Or you get this engagement of various parts of the police machine

into the lives of young people, literally, not just the lives, but the bodies as well. And then they get surprised when they've created an insert, what they would call an insert, they get surprised. Local communities get rather pissed off about the fact that this body of this young person has been

literally penetrated by the state machine right so you know and they say well we need to do this because we're fighting the war on drugs so these things come together right or at least they come together through this lens of this notion of pacific right absolutely

And then, so chapter three focuses on the fantasy of building pacified societies. Chapter four focuses on the containment of demonstrations and, and,

We could almost think of it sequentially as containing the demonstrations that are created by the effort to build a pacified society. So you talk about the evolution of this tactic called kettling that police use to contain demonstrations. What is kettling and what does it reveal about the pacification of social conflict in capitalist societies?

Yeah, sure. So kettling, as I'm sure you know, is the process by which, well, when we're talking about policing, the process by which a crowd is held in place by a police cordon of some sort, whether it's police officers themselves or vans or fencing that the police have brought in.

usually in order to police a demonstration of some sort. But it also has another history of policing, for example, crowds at football matches. So they're held in place often for many, many hours until...

People are finally allowed to leave the kettle, often after being photographed and having their details taken down. In other words, being surveyed. And I kind of use... Well, I guess I use the kettle in two ways, or I develop it in two ways. One is...

One is to think about the kettle itself as an act of violence, an act of police power, police violence, to essentially teach people a lesson, right? To teach a lesson that this is...

what will happen to you if you protest, right? In other words, this is the thin end of the countering of insurgency, right? This is the beginnings of the countering, of our countering of your insurgency. So if you decide to protest against whatever it might be, student fees, for example, or any austerity measures,

and a whole range of other things. This is what can happen to you, right? We can hold you. We can... We want to show you that we have the right to hold you in place for as long as we want without providing you food or water or a toilet, right? And you are only permitted to leave when we say you can leave and after we've taken down all your details and taken proper surveillance of you, right? So...

you want to do this on a regular basis, this is what you're going to be faced with. So I was intrigued by the kettle as a particular technology of police power. But of course, as with all things police, it turns out to also be a technology of war power, both in terms of what the police think that they are fighting, a war against crime, a war against dissidents, a war against terror, and so forth.

But it also has a history within the military itself that military forces have long used the kettle as a military tactic. So surprise, surprise, we have a technology that is both war and police. In other words, it's this unity once more. Okay, fine. So we've got that idea, which is interesting in itself. We've also got the idea that...

I mean, I give some of the documentation in the chapter, as you know, which is that basically the official line from police forces is that we don't kettle, right? In other words, we don't engage in something called kettling. Kettling is something that the media have constructed or that liberal lefties have talked about. We don't engage in kettling. What we do instead is we engage in containment, right?

Now, that's an interesting kind of denial of something that we all know exists and that in itself is quite telling. But to open it up, well, to call it containment,

interestingly opens it up into broader debates about what is being contained. And of course, containment has a history in terms of counterinsurgency, the idea of containing the communist menace abroad and in other places, but also the communist menace at home. And therefore, the containment of all sorts of dissidents, insurgents, rebels, disorderly elements, and so forth.

And so I kind of also use the kettle in a second way, which is to think about pacification as containment in general. The containment of social movements, but also the containment of social movement, as in literal movement in public spaces.

and the idea that you know pacification can be thought through thought of through the lens of of containment to the and so that in that sense the two to suit the two sides of my argument come together in the sense that the kettle becomes a kind of microcosm of our social containment or political containment um and then uh

the final chapter focuses on, um, how debt contributes to pacification of social conflict in capitalist societies. Um, how is that related to pacification? Yeah. Okay. So I tried to, yeah. And that, I tried to bring the question back to, to capital and, and money, um, and the ubiquity of debt in our world. Um,

which is, of course, partly connected to the...

sort of relative, it's difficult to put this, I guess relative decline of the wage form as a form of submission. But, you know, the kind of debt form as one part of the money form alongside the wage form as a way of policing our lives, as a way of constituting us as obedient subjects of capital, which is, of course, a product of, you know, what goes by the name of neoliberalism in the last period of

30, 40 years. But the way I got into that was through the pacification literature and the counterinsurgency literature that constantly talked about money. The use of money as a mechanism of pacification. And so we get slogans such as money as a weapon system.

you know, M-A-A-W-S, right? Money as a weapon system. And you think this is interesting, right? You know, like you said earlier, military machines aren't just about shooting people. In fact, a lot of the time they're not shooting people. What they're doing is they're using money as a weapon system, right? Well, what's going on there when forces of the state are using money as a weapon system? What do they mean by using it as a weapon and how are they using it? A lot of the time they're using it

to get people into debt and to facilitate the rise of wage labor in certain contexts where wage labor hasn't been fully established. This is interesting and important, I think, right? This is central to pacification, and it seems miles away from guns and bombs and napalm and so forth. But for the pacification theorists,

It's key, right? Because how do you manage people? Well, you manage them by saturating their lives with the idea of money and getting them into debt to the point where they need money. And so how are they going to get money? Well, they're going to have to keep selling their labor for a wage.

And of course, that is why it's one process, right? That's why our lives are exactly the same as the lives of people who exist in those places known as colonies, right? They've been interpreted as indebted subjects and therefore as subjects who need to engage in wage labour in order to pay off their debts. And of course, this comes back to the whole notion of death because, you know,

there is an integral connection with between debt and, and death. Um, so the book ends up finishing back on the question of, of death, um, and death as the possible only escape from our debt. It sure feels like that. Sometimes I have so much, uh, student, I saw have a lot of student debt. That's probably never going to get repaid. Um, um,

So to wrap up our interview, what are you working on now? What's next on the docket for you? Well, would it surprise you to discover I'm working on a book of this? No. I'm working on a book that is tentatively titled The Most Beautiful Suicide. So I'm working on the question of suicide, but in particular suicide

The idea of the suicidal leap or jump. In other words, suicide from heights. I'm interested in that because I have a fear of heights, which is, of course, a way of saying that I probably have a desire to jump when I get to those heights, which is a fear that many, many people share.

I certainly do. Yeah. Right. So there's something interesting there. But there's also a very interesting history of the suicidal leap, whether that's, you know, cultural figures and the way that jumpers appear in, for example, I don't know the word, Andy Warhol or other artists or the ways in which various interesting figures have led to their deaths. I mean, freelancers, for example.

Deleuze, for example, and many others. So I'm kind of connecting that to associated ideas about falling, leaping, possibly even flying, flying.

And so that's taking me in interesting directions. You know, what goes on in the American disavowal of the jumpers from the World Trade Center? I know that part of that disavowal is that America is

doesn't want to accept that some people chose suicide over burning, right? And therefore, you know, they were not, they were the victims of murder as much as anyone else and not suicidal agents. But I think there's also something significant about the fact that they were jumpers.

And the extent to which America has kind of buried, to use that phrase, has buried that question of the jumpers is, for example, culturally and politically interesting, I think. Yeah, maybe has something to do with the fear of giving up or being seen as a quitter in some way or not being a fighter or something like that, not being resilient. Yes.

Exactly. And so the whole, the wider discussion of suicide then needs to be situated in our wider culture of success, of the life force, of the will to pass, giving up, be a loser, you know, and so on. So there is a wider discussion about suicide that will take place in the book, which is nonetheless focused on this idea of jumping. Sounds interesting. Cool.

All right. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Mark. The book, once again, is Pacification, Social War and the Power of Police, out February 2025 from Verso. Thank you so much and have a nice day. Thank you very much, Jeff. I really appreciate your interest.