Pacification is also a project with a world-historical resonance, something that is not lost on managers of state violence. In 2012, when Camden’s sixty-seven homicides gave it a murder rate 560 times higher than the national average, Police Chief Scott Thomson was sardonic, telling a reporter that the city’s violence fell “somewhere between Honduras and Somalia.” Reflecting on the situation, Chuck Wexler of the Police Executive Research Forum, a police professional association, evoked similar imagery: “If Camden was overseas, we’d have sent troops and foreign aid.”35 Implicitly, these police officials describe Camden as a pocket of state failure enmeshed within the wealthiest and most advanced society in human history, a little piece of Mogadishu tucked away in a neglected corner of the Northeast Megalopolis that stretches from Boston to Washington, D.C. These comparisons are points of entry into what I call the prose of pacification: the shared discourses, forms of expertise, and practices that tie together the indeterminable wars on drugs (Honduras), crime/poverty (Camden), and terror (Somalia), boundless wars on vaguely defined social problems that do much to define contemporary political life the world over. The language used to define problems is also a productive force shaping social reality. The varied security discourses understood as examples of pacification—policing, military strategy, and social policy in general—share common historical origins in the creation of the capitalist world-economy and the consolidation of a social order organized around individualism, market relations, and the commodity form. When police executives evoke the language of the war on crime, they are unconsciously drawing upon deep histories of capitalist order making that color their perception of what the problems are and orient their action within a likely range of responses.
The deep roots of the pacification reveal the immense historical force evoked by security discourses and their formative power to shape present realities. Neocleous, for example, traces the genealogy of “pacification” far beyond its strong associations with counterinsurgency campaigns of the Vietnam War to the formative moments of the modern world. The term was first used in the sixteenth century to describe the necessity of governing “in peace.” It was used in two contexts: (1) the Edicts of Pacification, which brought an end to the French Wars of Religion; and (2) the “pacification” of Spain’s colonial possessions in the Americas. These events “are important because they are deep into the period of early global accumulation and the history of capital. . . . [T]hey are the point of departure for the period in which the insecurity of bourgeois order had to be secured.” Hence, the “peace” created by these pacifications was a particular type of peace. The Edicts of Pacification, in part, put an end to the decentralized violence that characterized medieval sovereignty and began the slow centralization of power and violence that defines the modern state. The pacification of New Spain, similarly, was a formative moment in the emergence of the capitalist world-economy. It marks a shift from naked plunder to a different practice of rule centered on “gathering information about the population, the teaching of trades, education, welfare provision, ideological indoctrination, and most importantly, the construction of a market.”36
The pacification of the nascent capitalist world-economy was a continuous process. As Europe, the Americas, and West Africa became linked in a global division of labor, it created new commercial cities—new problems of urban insecurity: vice, crime, blasphemy, and the general disorder associated with the itinerant poor. These problems of poverty led the centralizing states of early modern Europe to undertake massive pacification projects, understood and organized in terms of the largely forgotten “police science” or polizeiwissenschaft of the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. This pre-disciplinary discourse united English liberals and Continental philosophers in a shared project to construct what Patrick Colquhoun called “a general police system” to promote commerce and manage poverty. In this nascent science of social order, the critique of security has found the origins of public law, administrative science, political economy, public health, and urban planning.37 By end of the nineteenth century, however, the meaning of “police” contracted to “the police,” the uniformed officers “enforcing the law.” This narrowed meaning reflected the growing influence of liberalism, in which the individual and the market supplanted the sovereign and the state as the theoretical wellspring of social order. These philosophical shifts masked capital’s reliance on the state to fabricate social relations, but it did not end the structural necessity of such work. In this context, police science gave way to criminology, public health, urban planning, and varied administrative discourses, which sought to regulate different domains of social life in a manner consonant with the class biases of the old “police science.” In this sense, the different genres of social policy are also and always police discourses. They are examples of the prose of pacification.38
The concept of pacification highlights these systemic interconnections.39 Echoes of Colquhoun’s “general police system” are evident in the example of Camden, where police reform and economic development—today discussed as separate domains of public policy—are part of a common pacification project. Analytically and methodologically, the “prose of pacification” draws the conceptual and practical link between my primary research and the larger histories and processes that surround fusion centers. The prose of pacification is the productive integument of power and practice that links the aforementioned “wars” on drugs (Honduras), crime (Camden), and terror (Somalia). For example, one of the main security discourses animating fusion center is intelligence-led policing (ILP), which connects these wars through the circulation of ideas, people, and technologies. The chief proponent of ILP is Jerry Ratcliffe. A former officer with the London Metropolitan Police, Ratcliffe literally “wrote the book” on ILP.40 He’s also involved in its implementation. In the mid-2000s, he advised the NJSP on reorganizing their Investigations Branch, adopting ILP, and creating the ROIC.41 A few years later, Ratcliffe was working at the behest of the US State Department’s Institute for Narcotics and Law Enforcement on a program to introduce Honduran National Police to ILP. This meant a shift from the old tactic of military sweeps—that is, mass arrests—to more individual targeting. To facilitate this transition, “the government of Honduras has developed a central intelligence center,” trained more SWAT teams, and created a national interagency task force led by the Honduran military with participation of the police, the Attorney General’s Office, and intelligence agencies.42
Thinking of pacification as both a structured set of relations and prose to be spoken or practice to be enacted breaks the tendency to assume that particular discourses neatly and necessarily produce the orderly social relations envisioned by their authors. Instead, considering pacification as prose identifies the production, performance, and reception of “security” as an important moment to be considered on its own terms. Most security discourses do not describe reality as much as they help structure it through the redefinition or erasure of class struggle. The “prose of pacification” is a deliberate nod to Ranajit Guha’s “prose of counterinsurgency,” rhetoric that “serves a blinding function that renders . . . subaltern struggles . . . illegible, deemed ‘spontaneous’” and not the results of “motivated and conscious undertaking on the part of the . . . masses.”43 In Incarcerating the Crisis, a study of the political origins of mass incarceration, Jordan Camp recently invoked Guha to show how the “suffering that motivates rebellions, insurrections, and uprisings against police violence and mass criminalization are often poorly translated.”44 To return to the anecdote that introduces this book, the crime afflicting Camden is not the product of an indistinguishable and unscrupulous “criminal element” but the product of social insecurity and an expression of class struggle.
In this way, the prose of pacification centers the fact that pacification presupposes politics: the resistance of active agents and the oft-obscured class content of routine state administration. Hence, in 2012, when Camden was reeling from Governor Christie’s withdrawal of aid and struggling to manage a spectacular crescendo of violence, the city spent $77,000 on overtime for officers to provide “security”