Mark Neocleous's Pacification: The dark truth behind security and peace

Mark Neocleous has long been one of the most incisive thinkers on the political economy of policing. Across a career spanning more than two decades, his work has consistently revealed the dark underside of concepts we are taught to take as benign: “order,” “security,” “peace.”

With Pacification: Social War and the Power of Police, published this year by Verso, he pushes this critical project to its most ambitious horizon yet. The book is not just another contribution to the growing literature on police and security — it is, quite simply, a major theoretical statement about the modern state itself.

At the heart of Pacification is a deceptively simple claim: what we call “peace” under capitalist modernity is in fact a condition of endless war, carried out through the police power.

Neocleous insists that the bourgeois order has never been about a neutral framework for liberty or equality. Instead, it is the product of ceaseless “pacification,” a process in which ruling classes, through the state and its police apparatus, manufacture obedience, contain rebellion, and wage permanent war on those deemed social enemies.

This argument builds directly on Neocleous’s earlier works. In The Fabrication of Social Order (2000), later revised as A Critical Theory of Police Power (2021), he showed how policing was never primarily about crime-fighting but about producing disciplined subjects and organising the working class into a manageable form.

Critique of Security (2008) unmasked security as the supreme concept of bourgeois society, exposing its function as an ideology that legitimates repression while masquerading as protection.

War Power, Police Power (2014) demonstrated that the lines we draw between foreign war and domestic policing are illusory, and that both are woven from the same fabric of coercion. The Politics of Immunity (2022) extended these insights into the biopolitical terrain, revealing how security discourses penetrate the very body itself.

Pacification synthesises and radicalises all these strands. Neocleous positions pacification as the essential element of modernity, the condition without which capitalist society could not exist.

Capitalism, he argues, is inherently unstable. Dispossession, exploitation, and commodification constantly generate resistance.

To survive, the system must incessantly repress, contain, and re-engineer its populations. Pacification is this process of containment, sometimes overt as in counterinsurgency campaigns, and occasionally subtle as in the bureaucratic “social wars” waged under the banner of crime control, welfare discipline, or moral regulation.

'Social wars have no end'

One of the book’s most powerful interventions is its recovery of “social war” as an analytic. The modern state, Neocleous argues, has perfected the art of declaring endless wars on its own population.

The familiar litany of the war on drugs, the war on crime, and the war on poverty is not metaphorical but literal. These are wars fought by one side, the ruling class, against the disorderly and the poor.

Such wars stretch back through centuries of campaigns against vagrants, paupers, “degenerates,” strikers, and more. Even when civil war is officially disavowed, the bourgeois state sustains itself by constantly manufacturing new internal enemies, transmuting political conflict into endless “wars” on social problems.

In this framework, the figure of the criminal emerges as central. As Neocleous demonstrates, early modern theories of the state and of policing cast the criminal as “at war with all mankind.”

The outlaw, the brigand, the gang member, and other figures of disorder all become avatars of rebellion to be relentlessly targeted by police war. In this sense, police do not simply keep the peace. They produce a very specific kind of peace, the peace of pacification, the peace of ongoing war.

One of Neocleous’s great strengths as a writer is his archival excavation. Pacification is saturated with references to the “prose of pacification,” the dense body of legislation, military manuals, official reports, counterinsurgency doctrines, and political theory that together make up the ruling class’s dream of order.

By closely reading this corpus, Neocleous shows that the liberal distinction between war and police is a myth. Police power is war power turned inward, and war is policing projected outward. The much-vaunted “liberal peace” is revealed as nothing but a fragile façade covering layers of violence.

Another striking contribution of the book is its confrontation with the idea of security. Here, Neocleous returns to a theme that has animated his work since Critique of Security: security is not a value to be pursued but the ideological justification for domination.

Drawing on Marx, he shows how security, far from being a neutral good, is the assurance of bourgeois egoism. In the Vietnam War, US generals openly described pacification as a “security job.” In Brazil, “Police Pacification Units” marched into favelas.

In the War on Terror, RAND analysts reframed pacification as a combination of “security and development.” Again and again, security provides the alibi for permanent repression. Security is pacification.

If the book has a tragic dimension, it lies in its insistence that there is no endpoint. “Social wars have no end,” Neocleous writes.

This is not a temporary pathology but the normal condition of capitalist modernity. Bourgeois society endlessly disavows civil war even as it reproduces perpetual social wars. The dream of peace is always also the dream of pacification.

Yet Pacification is not a counsel of despair. Its achievement is to arm readers with a new conceptual lens.

By naming pacification as the logic of the modern state, Neocleous equips us to see through the endless parade of security measures and wars on social problems. He allows us to understand that these are not policy mistakes or unfortunate excesses, but the very essence of how capitalism governs.

Repression disguised as protection

For readers familiar with Neocleous’s earlier works, this book feels like the culmination of a long trajectory.

Where The Fabrication of Social Order offered a genealogy of police power, and Critique of Security dismantled the ideology of security, Pacification fuses these insights into a single, unifying concept. It shows how security, police, and war are not separate spheres but variations of a single pacificatory logic.

For newcomers, the book is an accessible yet profound entry point. Neocleous writes with clarity and urgency, never allowing theoretical density to cloud his argument.

His prose is sharp, polemical, and often laced with wit. He has the rare ability to turn abstract concepts into vivid, concrete insights.

When he lists the litany of “wars” waged on paupers, vagrants, and the “undeserving poor,” the sheer absurdity of bourgeois order is laid bare.

It is also worth noting the timeliness of this book. In an era of proliferating “wars” on everything from migrants to “fake news,” Neocleous provides the critical tools to decode what is really happening.

As states double down on security in response to climate crisis, pandemics, and geopolitical upheaval, Pacification reminds us that these measures are less about protection than about policing dissent and reproducing exploitation.

Ultimately, Pacification is a celebratory moment in critical theory, not in the sense of celebrating the conditions it describes, but in celebrating the intellectual breakthrough Neocleous achieves. He has given us a concept that captures the essence of the capitalist order with devastating precision. The book consolidates him as one of the most important theorists of policing and security in our time.

To read Neocleous is to be unsettled. But it is also to be armed with clarity. Pacification will shape debates on policing, war, and security for years to come. For those committed to understanding, and ultimately undoing, the machinery of repression, it is indispensable.

Hossam el-Hamalawy is an Egyptian scholar-activist in Germany, focusing on the military, policing, and labour

Follow him on Instagram: @countermaspero