Martial politics, MOVE and the racial violence of policing

Abstract

Recent scholarship on war and policing has begun to theorize the two in more intimate relation with each other, especially through connections to racialized violence and governance. Drawing on this body of work, and the concept of martial politics specifically, I examine how logics of war operate within domestic spaces and reproduce racialized conceptualizations of threat. I focus on a confrontation between the MOVE organization and the city of Philadelphia in 1985, which led to police firing 10,000 rounds of ammunition into a house where MOVE members and their children were living, and to the extensive use of military-grade explosives, culminating in the police dropping a bomb from a helicopter onto the house. The bomb ignited a fire that killed six adult MOVE members and five children, and destroyed 61 houses. I examine the decision of the city to bomb MOVE and consider the role that conceptions of war and threat played in shaping the event. This case shows not just the migration of military techniques into domestic spheres (and a long history of this in the United States), but more significantly, it reveals how violence and war-making have always been a foundation of liberal governance.