The Brutality of Peace: Neocleous on Policing and Social War

Book Review

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.