Martial politics, MOVE and the racial violence of policing
| Published date | 01 November 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211042732 |
| Author | Katharine Hall |
| Date | 01 November 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: Race and Security in World Politics |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211042732
Politics
2024, Vol. 44(4) 621 –633
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/02633957211042732
journals.sagepub.com/home/pol
Martial politics, MOVE and
the racial violence of policing
Katharine Hall
Queen Mary University of London, UK
Abstract
Recent scholarship on war and policing has begun to theorize the two in more intimate relation
with each other, especially through connections to racialized violence and governance. Drawing
on this body of work, and the concept of martial politics specifically, I examine how logics of war
operate within domestic spaces and reproduce racialized conceptualizations of threat. I focus
on a confrontation between the MOVE organization and the city of Philadelphia in 1985, which
led to police firing 10,000 rounds of ammunition into a house where MOVE members and their
children were living, and to the extensive use of military-grade explosives, culminating in the police
dropping a bomb from a helicopter onto the house. The bomb ignited a fire that killed six adult
MOVE members and five children, and destroyed 61 houses. I examine the decision of the city to
bomb MOVE and consider the role that conceptions of war and threat played in shaping the event.
This case shows not just the migration of military techniques into domestic spheres (and a long
history of this in the United States), but more significantly, it reveals how violence and war-making
have always been a foundation of liberal governance.
Keywords
liberal violence, martial politics, policing, race, war
Received: 10th August 2020; Revised version received: 14th June 2021; Accepted: 25th June 2021
Attention MOVE, this is America.
– Philadelphia Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor (13 May 1985)
This is America
Don’t catch you slippin’ up.
– Childish Gambino
If we do not arrest you, we will fire at you, as many bullets as necessary.
– Denise Ferreira da Silva (2007: xii)
Corresponding author:
Katharine Hall, Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS, UK.
Email: k.hall@qmul.ac.uk
1042732POL0010.1177/02633957211042732PoliticsHall
research-article2021
Special Issue: Race and Security in World Politics
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