Pacification

1 Pacification GÜLDEN ÖZCAN AND GEORGE S. RIGAKOS Pacification is a military concept that was popularly used during the US war in Vietnam. Since then, however, the term had disappeared not only from the discourse of political power and the opposition but also from the academic literature until Mark Neocleous and George S. Rigakos revisited it. Neocleous and Rigakos theorized the rising concern for “security” in the post-9/11 period with recourse to the term’s historical significance and relationship to security as part of their broader project, called “Anti-Security” (Neocleous & Rigakos 2011). The concept’s genealogy goes back to the sixteenth century. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, pacification was first used in the Edicts of Pacification of 1563 and 1570 and the Edict of Nantes (1598). Here, the term meant “an ordinance or decree enacted by a monarch or state to put an end to strife or discontent” or “an instance of achieving or restoring peace; a reconciliation, a truce; a peace treaty.” The dual meaning inherent in the process of pacification is at issue in these definitions: first, ending a discontent most likely by means of force; second, making peace by enactment. With this dual meaning pacification came to replace the term “conquest,” when it appeared in official discourse. Philip II of Spain declared in July 1573 that “all further extensions of empire be termed ‘pacifications’ rather than ‘conquests’” as he observed that the violence during or after the conquests caused discontent among the people at home (Neocleous 2010: 14). Yet, pacification was not only meant simply to replace the term “conquest.” With his declaration Philip II also suggested a new war strategy that would include establishing “cooperation with the lords and nobles who seem most likely to be of assistance in the pacification of the land,” gathering “information about the various tribes, languages and divisions of the Indians in the province,” seeking “friendship with them through trade and barter, showing them great love and tenderness and giving them objects to which they will take a liking,” keeping their children as hostages “under the pretext of teaching them,” and finally he was adding that “[b]y these and other means are the Indians to be pacified and indoctrinated, but in no way are they to be harmed, for all we seek is their welfare and their conversion” (cited in Neocleous 2011a: 199–200). This initial definition of the process of pacification demonstrates that the main concerns of the empires were no longer mere territorial gain but also the population, gaining the “hearts and minds” of the people. Spanish conquistador Captain Bernardo de Vargas Machuca was the first to explore the meaning of the term pacification in his two books on his experiences in the Spanish colonies in America, Milicia Indiana (2008 [1599]) and Defending the Conquest (2010 [1603). He defines pacification as a way of confronting “recalcitrant and rebellious indigenous populations.” Rather than a pre-organized military army, Machuca suggests learning from the fighting methods of the indigenous populations. Colonialism and pacification went hand-inhand in the following centuries as well. General Galliéni, the governor of Madagascar and a leading strategist of French colonial warfare, issued instructions on colonial rule in a report called Rapport d’ensemble sur la pacification, l’organisation et la colonisation de Madagascar in 1898 (see Galliéni 1994 [1900]). Two years later, Lieutenant Colonel Lyautey quoted these instructions in his article “Du rôle colonial de l’Armée,” which played an important role during the French colonization of Vietnam (1900). Galliéni suggests that “it is by combined use of politics and force that pacification of a country and its future organization will be achieved” (1994 [1900]). Thus, it was revealed The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer. © 2014 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2014 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2 that the term pacification also indicated a war strategy that is not predetermined and conducted by pre-organized forces, but which will be defined and redefined in compliance with the characteristics of the population (or, the enemies) in question. This would require certain knowledge about the population. Studying the subject people and satisfying their social requirements are, therefore, key to pacification as much as are promoting development in the colonies through making use of natural resources for production and raw material and opening the space for European trade. Pacification, in this way, provides the opportunity of killing two birds with one stone: (1) the land and the people would be utilized for the expropriation of labor and extraction of raw material; (2) the conqueror would preempt the highly possible spirit of revolt among the masses once the initial shock passed. It is this second consequence that would not be possible without improving the empire’s new tactics of pacification. During the US war in Vietnam, pacification as a substitute term for counterinsurgency became vital for the war and gained popularity. The term’s imperial–military connotation persisted, with an additional aspect to it: security. In 1966, the US Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, described the same war as a “pacification security job” (Neocleous 2011a: 193). The Special Assistant for Pacification of the time, Robert W. Komer, acknowledged that “pacification required first and foremost the restoration of security” (Neocleous 2011a: 193). The restoration required a civil–military joint action in which the military part was only one dimension of a larger project affecting the everyday life of the Vietnamese, including land reform, economic development, health and educational services, roads, and communications. Accordingly, in Vietnam, the population was bombarded with ideological slogans and advertisements for commodities showing the charm of Western liberty. The strategy of pacification involved a dual meaning: production, in the sense of producing a civilized society and political order; and destruction, in the sense of destroying old values and those allegedly opposed to the newly fabricated order (Neocleous 2011c). During the social uprisings in the 1960s in North America and Europe against the Vietnam War, pacification came to connote bombing people into submission and waging an ideological war against the opposition (Manolov 2012: 24). However, after the Vietnam War, pacification was dropped from the official discourse as well as from the discourse of opposition. Although approaches to the term and practices of pacification in both the concept’s sixteenth-century and twentiethcentury colonial meanings were somehow related to the concepts of war, security, and police power, the real connection between pacification and these concepts has never been revealed in the literature on international relations, conflict studies, criminology, or political science. Recent works by Neocleous and Rigakos reveal the connection between pacification and increasingly ideological discourse on security, and relate the term to broader modern Western social and political thought in general and liberal theory in particular. Their argument relies on two interrelated theses on liberalism: (1) liberalism’s key concept is less liberty and more security (Neocleous 2007; 2008; 2011b; Neocleous & Rigakos 2011); (2) liberal doctrine is inherently less committed to peace and much more to ferocious violence while deploying its techniques to penetrate and organize subject peoples (Neocleous 2010; 2011b). From the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries onward, the growth of towns in Europe generated a concern over “masterlesse men,” as Thomas Hobbes puts it, and their forms of behavior exposed in urban life, such as gambling, drinking, adultery, blasphemy, and wandering (Neocleous 2011a: 200). According to Neocleous, internal pacification begins at this moment as “a process fabricating a ‘peace and security’ within the social order to match the ‘peace and security’ imposed on colonial subjects” (2011a: 200). At the center of the ideas about liberty, commerce, and civil 3 society lies the question of police and military organizations for the construction and maintenance of peace and security. Pacification, then, defines a police action as far as it is defined by peace (Neocleous 2010:14). Therefore, pacification also relates to concerns for peace along with security, police power, and military action. Security and peace in the works of classical liberals are never a reference to mere “defense” or “non-existence of war.” On the contrary, they always suggest “an active and militaristic practice” (Neocleous 2011b: 17). The logic of pacification, then, lays the ground for the construction of security and military structures, or better, pacifying powers of modern states targeting civilians in general, and “suspect communities” or the “enemies within” in particular. Pacification, then, functions as a thread that connects the US project in Vietnam to sixteenthcentury European colonialism and the fabrication of liberal social order in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Neocleous 2011a). Pacification as a security job is a reminder of modern police power directed toward enemies within and enemies abroad. Thus, it becomes interchangeable with domestic and international colonization in the making of the conquered spaces conducive to capital accumulation, the circulation of goods, the creation of productive and docile subjects, and securing the insecurity of bourgeois order (Manolov 2012). All these connections motivated policing theorists Neocleous and Rigakos to re-appropriate the term to offer an alternative and counterhegemonic approach to security as part of their broader Anti-Security project (see Neocleous & Rigakos 2011). In order to understand security not as a “universal or transcendental value but rather as a mode of governing or a political technology of liberal order-building,” we need the category of pacification, says Neocleous (2011a: 193). In this frame, pacification as an analytical category promises an understanding of security and police as a proactive, organized, and systematic war strategy targeting domestic and foreign enemies and as a process that actively shapes and fabricates a social order in which capitalist accumulation can function. Such an approach to police and security reveals the class war that had been repeatedly made and reinforced by “police intellectuals” since the eighteenth century (Rigakos et al. 2009). They argue that the history of security is a social history of pacification (Lamb & Rigakos 2014). To define security as pacification helps scholars grasp the inherent objectives and operation of security politics since the Scottish Enlightenment, and gives activists a ground to stand against the securitization of political discourse that increasingly surrounds the policing of dissent in the post-9/11 period. Since security is taken for granted as omnipotent and since it is malleable enough to be embedded in everything from commodities as in baby seat security to hunger as in food security to workplace as in job security, and thus since it is roundly seen as something we should always want, the concept of security is not deemed useful for contemporary critical analyses. It would otherwise be an oxymoron to talk about security in order to criticize security. Such a critique would also prove security correct, as security is something that “the more it fails the more it succeeds” and as “[s]ecurity breaches are met with security enhancements” (Rigakos 2011: 60). Given this fetishistic character of security, even the most critical analyses, when they start with the term security, always have a tendency to broaden the reach of security discourse. Rather than security, speaking of pacification and projects of pacification as security jobs brings forth new ways of understanding security fetish as well as security commodity. The study of pacification has some promise in terms of creating a space for radical inquiry. First, the study of pacification promises to materialize and problematize the vague and seemingly abstract objectives of security and police power. Knowing that the projects of pacification concern the practices of everyday life, human subjectivity, and social order, and therefore involve information-gathering, teaching trade and its values, education, the construction of a free market, and integration 4 into the global world economy, makes it possible to study these concrete objectives. Second, the study of pacification aims to build analytical and historical connections instead of masking them. The process and projects of pacification relate to colonization, invasion, war and peace, and political management of the population, and they link military power to police power, foreign missionaries to domestic ones, criminals to “good boys.” Third, the promise of studying pacification is to displace the ubiquity and reach of security and historicize it as a process invented by humans. The study of pacification sheds light on the objects, history, and politics of organized, systematic, and tactical interventions into the everyday life of people. Such an inquiry also displaces the so-called dichotomies of domestic–imperial, military–civilian, war–peace, and public–private, and the assumed tensions inherent in them (Rigakos 2011: 58). Finally, the study of pacification reveals an ongoing state of war and views security as an active, unfinished project rife with resistance (Rigakos 2011: 51). The war revealed by pacification does not only refer to the grand wars of the twentieth century. It also refers to the gamut of “wars” against enemies within, such as the wars on drug, crime, and poverty. From the perspective of pacification, these wars, which have for so long been treated as metaphorical by criminologists, are seen as real wars targeting everyday practices in order to replace them with new ones seen to be appropriate by the dominant forces (Neocleous 2011c). SEE ALSO: Anti-Security; Civil society; Colonialism; Crime; Food sovereignty; Indigenous peoples; Liberalism; Peace; Poverty; Security–insecurity; September 11th. REFERENCES Galliéni, J. (1994 [1900]) The conquest of Madagascar [Rapport d’ensemble sur la pacification, l’organisation et la colonisation de Madagascar]. In: Chaliand, G. (ed.) The Art of War in World History: From Antiquity to the Nuclear Age. University of California Press, Berkeley. Lamb, N. & Rigakos, G.S. (2014, forthcoming) Pacification through intelligence during the Toronto G20. In: The State on Trial: G20 and the Policing of Protest. UBC Press, Vancouver. Lyautey, L.-H. (1900) Du rôle colonial de l’Armée. La Revue des Deux Mondes 157(Jan. 15), 308–328. Machuca, Captain B. de V. (2008 [1599]) Milicia Indiana. In: The Indian Militia and Description of the Indies, ed. K. Lane, trans. T.F. Johnson. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Machuca, Captain B. de V. (2010 [1603]) Defense and discourse of the Western conquests. In: Lane, K. (ed.) Defending the Conquest: Bernardo de Vargas Machuca’s Defense and Discourse of the Western Conquests, trans. T.F. Johnson. Pennsylvania State University Press, Philadelphia. Manolov, M.V. (2012) Anti-security: Q & A, interview of George S. Rigakos. Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Justice Research 3, 9–26. 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Rigakos, G.S. (2011) “To extend the scope of productive labour”: pacification as a police project. In: Neocleous, M. & Rigakos, G.S. (eds.) Anti-Security. Red Quill Books, Ottawa, pp. 57–84.