ABSTRACT

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. 

chapter |14 pages

Assemblages of war:police

An introduction

part I|58 pages

Ordering

chapter 1|19 pages

The police power in counterinsurgencies

Discretion, patrolling and evidence 1

chapter 2|20 pages

Policing Africa

The US military and visions of crafting ‘good order'

part III|69 pages

Spatialising

chapter 8|17 pages

A Mediterranean police assemblage

chapter 9|19 pages

Air power as police power

chapter 10|21 pages

Intervention as ontological politics

Security, pathologisation and the failed state effect in Goma 1

chapter 11|10 pages

Afterword

War and crime, military and police: the assemblage of violence by security?