This approach moves the analysis of fusion centers beyond the limiting confines of the policy debate. It reveals the broader meaning of Operation Padlock and the massive intelligence system upon which such police actions are predicated. The DHS-recognized National Network of Fusion Centers and the broader institutionalization of intelligence fusion in the United States is not a narrow topic with implications only for counterterrorism and security policy. Nor is it a legalistic matter of civil liberties and privacy protection. Instead, it offers insights into the changing administrative strategies that states use to pacify class struggle, administer poverty, and fabricate social order. While pacification highlights the issues obscured by other approaches, my research establishes the specificities of the current historical moment. The seventy-nine fusion centers recognized by DHS and the broader institutionalization of intelligence fusion are central, constitutive components of an increasingly prominent strategy of mass supervision. While mass supervision has long been an unacknowledged complement to mass incarceration, the dramatic expansion of the intelligence capacities of state and local police—during a time of falling prison populations—places empowered policing and ubiquitous surveillance at the center of mass supervision.
Mass supervision is an outgrowth and extension of the administrative strategies that constituted the state during the period of neoliberal globalization. This utopian project to radically remake world order largely succeeded, perhaps even pushing capitalism to its ecological and social limits. In the United States, many scholars and activists concluded that these changes produced either a workfare state, which imposed a new accord between labor and capital, or carceral state, which warehoused surplus workers, mostly racial minorities, who were left out of the new economic order. In today’s emergent post-neoliberal world defined by low growth, soaring inequality, and ever-expanding surplus populations, mass supervision helps shore up this workfare-carceral state and consolidate life organized around radical dependence on the market during a period of acute structural crisis. As the central component of mass supervision, the process of intelligence fusion mobilizes the decentralized surveillance capacities of state and private powers to render the complexity of social life legible as “intelligence.” The result is a potentially more supple system of social regulation that couples decentralized control with increased inter-institutional coordination across the state and private sector. In the short term, the institutionalization of intelligence fusion in the United States enables decarceration and an apparent rollback of the carceral state without addressing the underlying social problems at the root of mass incarceration. In the long term, it may be a novel strategy to pacify social unrest, necessary for a lasting reconfiguration of the state.
In the coming chapters, I will employ and elaborate the idea of pacification and its prose to confirm and clarify the central contention of this book: fusion centers and the broader institutionalization of intelligence fusion are a central component of mass supervision, a state strategy to pacify surplus populations in our nascent post-neoliberal world of low growth and soaring inequality. Pacifying the Homeland is divided into three parts, each of which is comprised of two chapters. The first part critiques security discourses and existing research that animate or otherwise make claims on fusion centers, while situating Pacifying the Homeland within conversations on surplus populations, the workfare state, and the carceral state. The first chapter, “Connecting the Dots beyond Counterterrorism and Seeing Past Organizational Failure,” shows how seemingly self-evident explanations for the spread of fusion centers—terrorism and counterterrorism—obscure more about intelligence fusion than they illuminate. Building on the introductory comments on the prose of pacification, the chapter shows how the concerns about counterterrorism, organizational dysfunction, and privacy miss the broader consequences of the long-term institutionalization of intelligence fusion. Instead, these administrative discourses are productive investments in fusion centers that shape the practice of intelligence fusion as much as they explain it. To this end, the chapter develops materialist methodology that recuperates the poststructural approach of discourse analysis to situate and analyze the relevant literature on fusion centers. This critical literature review clears the way for a different kind of comparative study, one that “incorporates” the comparison within historical time to illuminate the larger processes currently remaking the United States. The institutionalization of intelligence fusion in New York and New Jersey are not distinct “cases” that can be abstracted out of their time and space. Instead, they are mutually constituting “instances” that can illuminate the larger whole that other approaches tend to obscure.
To fully appreciate these changes, the next chapter, “The Rise and Present Demise of the Workfare-Carceral State,” synthesizes scholarship on the emergence of the carceral state—which largely ignores labor-formation and capital accumulation—with the literature on the workfare state, which is mostly silent on questions of incarceration, policing, and racial-formation. More specifically, this chapter theoretically develops the critique of security by demonstrating how processes of labor-formation, racial-formation, state-formation, and pacification interact to produce specific state-forms, developing this framework through an account of the emergence of the herrenvolk-welfare state and its transformation into the workfare-carceral state. This historical analysis provides the wider context to situate fusion centers within their constitutive conjuncture, a wider historical moment informed by decarceration, the politicization of “police-involved killings,” economic crises, and austerity. Understood within these parameters, it is possible to ask what the broader rise of intelligence fusion means for contemporary patterns of political order.
From here, parts 2 and 3 present the original research that provides the book’s core contribution. Part 2 deals with the way the institutionalization of intelligence fusion has transformed the state. The third chapter, “The Institutionalization of Intelligence Fusion,” details the exact mechanisms that undermine the dream of a seamless information-sharing environment and, instead, produce discontinuous pockets of increased intelligence cooperation and operational coordination. This uneven and conflictive intelligence system should not be simply dismissed as a “failure,” nor should it be understood as a natural outcome of the layered US federal government. Rather, it is a complex outgrowth of the workfarist emphasis on structural competitiveness and commitment to punitive criminal justice policies that produced mass incarceration. Following the comparative logic detailed in the first chapter, New York and New Jersey are not “cases.” They are formative moments that shaped the wider institutionalization of intelligence fusion. In the 1990s, New York City pioneered policing practices that would inform the eventual construction of the DHS-recognized National Network of Fusion Centers. The subsequent spread of intelligence fusion, however, did not occur in a vacuum. The experience of New York City shows the iterative nature of state-formation. Social struggles within and apart from the state produced intelligence fusion as a coherent state strategy. The apparent success of this strategy, as evidenced in the transformation of New York City from a blighted city of high crime and postindustrial decline to a dynamic cultural and economic center, created a structural predisposition toward the further spread of intelligence fusion. At the same time, intelligence fusion did not simply diffuse out from New York City. The institutional apparatus of the state mediates these changes in ways that produced complex and uneven results.
The fourth chapter, “Policing Decarceration,” focuses on a series of now-commonplace “intelligence-led manhunts.” These ILP operations emerged organically from a shifting composition of social forces: chronic unemployment, and deepening austerity that reduces the prison system and elevates a less labor-intensive form of policing. Both New York and New Jersey are leaders in criminal justice reform, having reduced their state prison populations by at least one-quarter in the last decade. This apparent decarceration,