1st Edition
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.
Assemblages of War:Police – An Introduction, Jan Bachmann, University of Gothenburg, Colleen Bell, University of Saskatchewan, Caroline Holmqvist, Swedish National Defence College Part I: Ordering 1. The Police Power in Counterinsurgencies: Discretion, Patrolling, and Evidence, Colleen Bell, University of Saskatchewan 2. Policing Africa – The US Military and Visions of Crafting ‘Good Order’, Jan Bachmann, University of Gothenburg 3. Security Sector Reform (SSR) and the War:Police Assemblages of International Interventions, Marc Doucet, St. Mary's University and Miguel de Larrinaga, University of Ottawa Part II: Othering 4. The Enemy Live: A Genealogy, Laurence McFalls, University of Montreal and Mariella Pandolfi, University of Montreal 5. The Utility of Proxy Detentions in Counterinsurgencies, Laleh Khalili, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 6. Tribal Militias, Neo-Orientalism and the US Military’s Art of Coercion, Oliver Belcher, University of Oulu, Finland 7. Checkpoints and the Gendered Policing of ‘Civilized’ Nation-State Boundaries in Southern Thailand, Ruth Streicher, Free University of Berlin PART III: Spatializing 8. A Mediterranean Police Assemblage, Barry J Ryan, Keele University 9. Air Power as Police Power, Mark Neocleous, Brunel University 10. Intervention and Ontological Politics: Security, Pathologization, and the Failed State Effect in Goma, Peer Schouten, University of Gothenburg and Kai Koddenbrock, University of Duisburg-Essen Afterword: War and Crime, Military and Police: The Assemblage of Violence by Security? Didier Bigo, King's College, University of London and Sciences Po
Biography
Jan Bachmann, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Colleen Bell, University of Saskatchewan, Canada
Caroline Holmqvist, Senior Lecturer at the Swedish National Defence College and Researcher at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs.
This is a vital and timely collection. These essays work superbly well together to unpack one of the deadliest terms of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries -- "security forces" -- and they do so with that rarest of combinations, intellectual creativity and substantive depth.
Derek Gregory, Peter Wall Distinguished Professor, Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies and Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Canada.
The militarization of police has been discussed a great deal lately, but the use of police personnel and policing logics in wars and post-war situations has received far less attention. This volume contains great empirical research, but it is also important for theorists of domestic law and of transnational governance; in addition it will be of interest to criminologists as well as international law scholars. It reveals that international coercive action, far from being straightforwardly military, now combines the logic of domestic policing with those of institutional reform, humanitarian aid, and military victory. An extremely timely volume with an appropriately multinational set of authors.
Mariana Valverde, Professor of Criminology, University of Toronto, Canada.
Apparently, we live in a world that has never been more peaceable. As this excellent volume explains, however, this appearance is deceptive. While the term war is now seldom used, the meting out of international violence hasn't gone away. As the contributors explain, war has been replaced by an apparatus of international policing operations linked to restorative programmes variously labelled 'stabilisation', 'counterinsurgency' or 'the responsibility of protect'. In forcibly bringing order to an uncertain world, such interventions typically disavow all political resistance as the work of throwbacks, criminals or terrorists. For the populations living under these corrective measures, the surveillance regimes, selective detentions and drone strikes are far from peaceable. War, Police and Assemblages of Intervention is one of the best single collections of cutting-edge critical thinking on our current international predicament that you can find. It's an invaluable guide for those who want to know what the price of freedom actually is.
Mark Duffield, Emeritus Professor, Global Insecurities Centre, University of Bristol, UK.
