The Dream of Pacification: Accumulation, Class War, and the Hunt

Abstract

This article argues that the category ‘pacification’ offers the critique of security a means of thinking through the connection between war, police and accumulation. Pacification is a process in which the war power is used in the fabrication of a social order of wage labour. This aligns the war power with the police power, and suggests that their interconnection might be understood through the lens of pacification. The article explores this through one of the mechanisms through which the war power and police power combine: the hunt. Capital rests on the hunt: the hunt for vagabonds, beggars, enemies, criminals, terrorists. Behind this hunt lies capital’s original demand, Let there be Accumulation! ‘Pacification’ is a category that helps us make sense of the way the state responds to this demand.