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

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

McNally, David. 2011. Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism.

McNally, David. 2011. Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism

On Pacification: Introduction to the Special Issue

On Pacification: Introduction to the Special Issu

The Security imaginary: Explaining military isomorphism

This article proposes the notion of a security imaginary as a heuristic tool for exploring military isomorphism (the phenomenon that weapons and military strategies begin to look the same across the world) at a time when the US model of defence transformation is being adopted by an increasing number of countries. Built on a critical constructivist foundation, the security-imaginary approach is contrasted with rationalist and neo-institutionalist ways of explaining military diffusion and emulation. Merging cultural and constructivist themes, the article offers a ‘strong cultural’ argument to explain why a country would emulate a foreign military model and how this model is constituted in and comes to constitute a society’s security imaginary.Web of Scienc

Dreams and nightmares of liberal international law: capitalist accumulation, natural rights and state hegemony

This article develops a line of theorising the relationship between peace, war and commerce and does so via conceptualising global juridical relations as a site of contestation over questions of economic and social justice. By sketching aspects of a historical interaction between capitalist accumulation, natural rights and state hegemony, the article offers a critical account of the limits of liberal international law, and attempts to recover some ground for thinking about the emancipatory potential of international law more generally

The need for fresh blood: understanding organizational age inequality through a vampiric lens

YesThis article argues that older age inequality within and across working life is the result of vampiric forms and structures constitutive of contemporary organizing. Rather than assuming ageism occurs against a backdrop of neutral organizational processes and practices, the article denaturalizes (and in the process super-naturalizes) organizational orientations of ageing through three vampiric aspects: (un)dying, regeneration and neophilia. These dimensions are used to illustrate how workplace narratives and logics normalize and perpetuate the systematic denigration of the ageing organizational subject. Through our analysis it is argued that older workers are positioned as inevitable ‘sacrificial objects’ of the all-consuming immortal organization. To challenge this, the article explicitly draws on the vampire and the vampiric in literature and popular culture to consider the possibility of subverting existing notions of the ‘older worker’ in order to confront and challenge the subtle and persistent monstrous discourses that shape organizational life

La lógica de la pacificación : guerra-policía-acumulación

Este artículo mantiene que el concepto de pacificación nos permite entender el papel productivo que la violencia estatal juega a la hora de asegurar el capital y fabricar el orden burgués. Tomando como referencia la larga historia sobre el pensamiento de la clase dominante en la teoría y la práctica de la pacificación, el artículo argumenta que para propósitos tácticos, la teoría crítica necesita realmente reapropiarse el término de "pacificación" para dar cuenta de la naturaleza de la violencia en tanto que parte nuclear de la colonización sistemática. Esta es una violencia que se nos ha vendido como "paz y seguridad".This article argues that the concept of pacification allows us to understand the productive role that state violence plays in securing capital and fabricating bourgeois order. Using the long history of ruling class thinking on the theory and practice of pacification, the article claims that for tactical purposes critical theory really needs to re-appropriate the term 'pacification' to help grasp the nature of the violence at the heart of systematic colonization. This is a violence that is sold to us as 'peace and security'