‘A Brighter and Nicer New Life’: Security as Pacification
| Author | Mark Neocleous |
| Published date | 01 June 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663910395816 |
| Date | 01 June 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
‘A Brighter and Nicer
New Life’: Security
as Pacification
Mark Neocleous
Brunel University, UK
Abstract
The article argues that the process of securing the insecurity of capitalist accumulation
might best be understood as a process of pacification. Pacification is closely connected to
the Vietnam War, but the article suggests that pacification has a much longer history,
linking the original accumulation in the colonies with the movement towards
capitalism in the West. Read in this way, pacification is a form of police power,
securing the insecurity of capitalist order. This helps us make sense of the permanent
‘wars on ... ’ being declared by capitalist states, from the war on drugs to the war
on terror, and suggests that ‘pacification’ is a crucial concept for understanding security.
Keywords
pacification, police power, securing accumulation, security, security as pacification
Early in The Manifesto of the Communist Party Marx and Engels make the following
claim:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of
production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations
of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the
contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revo-
lutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed,
fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are
Corresponding author:
Mark Neocleous, Dept of Politics and History, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH, UK
Email: mark.neocleous@brunel.ac.uk
Social & Legal Studies
20(2) 191–208
ªThe Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663910395816
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swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is
solid melts into air. ([1848]1984: 487)
Understood in terms of what has become the most important political trope of contem-
porary politics, the suggestion seems to be that at some fundamental level the order of
capital is an order of social insecurity. Yet Marx also notes that this permanent insecurity
gives rise to a politics of security, turning security into the fundamental concept of
bourgeois society (Marx, [1844]1975: 163). It is through this politics of security that the
constant revolutionizing of production and uninterrupted disturbance of capitalist order
are fabricated, structured and administered (Neocleous, 2000, 2008).
This need to ‘secure insecurity’ is fundamental to every aspect of capitalism, from
the everyday life of the citizen-subjects of capitalist polities through to the global reach
of capitalist corporations. On the one hand, it reaches into the minutia of our personal,
social, economic and cultural acts, and the security practices through which ‘everyday
insecurities’ are policed: neighbourhood watch schemes, gated communities, CCTV;
security guards, doormen, bouncers; stop and search, passport control, identity cards; the
securitization of workplaces, public spaces and private spheres. On the other hand, it also
points to the security practices through which international insecurity is managed: power
balances and international treaties, diplomacy and world order, the clash of civilizations
and the nomos of the earth.
This has posed a serious problem for those working on questions of security. The
existence of such vastly different ‘worlds’ of security – and worlds of insecurity – has
been the basis of various and enormous disciplinary splits surrounding the concept over
the years, splits which have made it rather difficult to connect the work of criminologists
with those in strategic studies, or the sociology of policing with international studies.
Such splits have come to the fore with the ‘war on terror’, which if nothing else has been
a salutary reminder of the extent to which the international and the domestic are always
already entwined. Yet despite this entwinement, and despite the concepts shared across
the disciplinary fields, such as deterrence, risk, intelligence, information, surveillance,
resilience (Aradau and Munster, 2009), the connections between security as understood
by criminologists, sociologists, international relations, strategic studies and political
theory are still rather loose and undeveloped. As loose and undeveloped, it might be
said, as the connections between ‘everyday life’ and its insecurities as a core category
of socio-cultural theory and ‘strategic power’ for governing global insecurity as a core
category of international studies. This is perhaps only to be expected given the dreary
world of ‘models’ within the intellectual universe, a world which often generates
equally dreary attempts to bring the ‘models’ together and then leaves little more than
confused smiles when it turns out that they probably can’t be brought together and that
the reason for this might lie in the ‘models’ themselves. Hence, for example, the range
of work which starts with crime-fighting and war-fighting as distinct processes – that
is, the ‘criminological model’ and the ‘military model’– and then struggles to work out
how they might be connected (e.g. Andreas and Price, 2001; Chesney and Goldsmith,
2008; Simon, 2001, 2007: 280). Or, as a further example, witness the recent attempts to
bring together the criminological and sociological issues concerning ‘pre-crime’ and
the IR/strategic issues concerning ‘pre-emption’ (McCulloch and Pickering, 2009;
192 Social & Legal Studies 20(2)
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