Christopher McMichael

Abstract

The article offers a critique of the ‘militarization of the police’ discourse, which has gained substantial attention in both academia and the media. Particularly influential in the United States, proponents of this concept claim that the ‘traditional’ boundaries between war and policing are blurring. However, this concept is both historically and politically problematic. The fact that right-wing libertarians have been at the forefront of calling attention to the militarization of the police highlights that while it is a thesis which critiques state power it fails to provide a critique of capital. As a result, it constantly falls back into a liberal frame of trying to delineate boundaries between military and police, rather than looking at how war and police power overlap and conjoin in everyday pacification.

From: Capital & Class 2017 41 (1)

Editor: Wang Yi