ABSTRACT
The concept of police militarization has gained traction through spectacular acts of violence, such as in the draconian police responses to protests associated with the Occupy movement in 2011 and the 2014 urban revolt sparked by the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Pacification is best thought of as a central strategy of the colonialist, capitalist state as it works to secure the insecurities of accumulation both domestically and internationally, and this lines up with the police mandate. As a way of thinking through the police and war assemblage as always about the fabrication of order and productive labour, the notion of pacification better highlights the ways that coercion and consent are always the flip sides to the security coin. By contrast, thinking on police violence and state repression through the concept of pacification highlights that this is potentially already existent and apparent within liberalism itself.
