Author Description

Pacification is often thought of as a military strategy or a metaphor for social control. Destroy, Build, Secure goes beyond this common usage of the word and instead focuses on pacification as a category of analysis. The contributors demonstrate how pacification is simultaneously a repressive and productive strategy, mobilizing the concept to problematize the liberal boundaries of war and peace, military and civil spheres, as well as police and military operations across time and geography. From the nineteenth century to our current conjuncture, from North America to Europe, North Africa and on to Turkey, the contributors show how through mobilizing violence pacification is fundamental to strategies of securing relations of accumulation and domination both at home and abroad. Destroy, Build, Secure argues that pacification has been essential to the survival of imperialist capitalism and that critical theory needs to take the concept seriously.