Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 War as peace, peace as pacification
- 2 War on waste; or, international law as primitive accumulation
- 3 ‘O effeminacy! effeminacy!’: martial power, masculine power, liberal peace
- 4 The police of civilisation: war as civilising offensive
- 5 Air power as police power I
- 6 Air power as police power II
- 7 Under the sign of security: trauma, terror, resilience
- Notes
- Index
4 - The police of civilisation: war as civilising offensive
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 War as peace, peace as pacification
- 2 War on waste; or, international law as primitive accumulation
- 3 ‘O effeminacy! effeminacy!’: martial power, masculine power, liberal peace
- 4 The police of civilisation: war as civilising offensive
- 5 Air power as police power I
- 6 Air power as police power II
- 7 Under the sign of security: trauma, terror, resilience
- Notes
- Index
Summary
What they could do with round here is a good war. What else can you expect with peace running wild all over the place? You know what the trouble with peace is? No organization. And when do you get organization? In war … How many horses have they got in this town? How many young men? Nobody knows! They haven't bothered to count ‘em! That's peace for you! I've been in places where they haven't had a war for seventy years and you know what? The people haven't even been given names! They don't know who they are! It takes war to fix that. In war, everyone registers, everyone's name's on a list. Their shoes are stacked, their corn's in the bag, you count it all up – cattle, men, Et cetera – and you take it away! That's the story: no war, no order!
Brecht, Mother Courage (1939)Civilisation is back. The ‘war on terror’ is said be about many things: ‘freedom, democracy, and free enterprise’, as the US National Security Strategy of 2002 puts it. Or, as found in other quarters, ‘values’, ‘civil society’, ‘the rule of law’, ‘way of life’, even the return of ‘real men’ as we saw in the previous chapter. A regular item on such lists is ‘civilisation’. This view is found far and wide and in a variety of discursive forms.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- War Power, Police Power , pp. 121 - 137Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014