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A Critical Theory of Police Power

Author : Mark Neocleous

Publisher : Verso Books

Page : 241 pages

File Size : 23,57 MB

Release : 2021-01-12

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 178873520X

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Book Description

Putting police power into the centre of the picture of capitalism The ubiquitous nature and political attraction of the concept of order has to be understood in conjunction with the idea of police. Since its first publication, this book has been one of the most powerful and wide-ranging critiques of the police power. Neocleous argues for an expanded concept of police, able to account for the range of institutions through which policing takes place. These institutions are concerned not just with the maintenance and reproduction of order, but with its very fabrication, especially the fabrication of a social order founded on wage labour. By situating the police power in relation to both capital and the state and at the heart of the politics of security, the book opens up into an understanding of the ways in which the state administers civil society and fabricates order through law and the ideology of crime. The discretionary violence of the police on the street is thereby connected to the wider administrative powers of the state, and the thud of the truncheon to the dull compulsion of economic relations.



A Critique of Sovereignty

Author : Daniel Loick

Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield

Page : 279 pages

File Size : 49,2 MB

Release : 2018-11-06

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 1786600404

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Book Description

In this important new book, Daniel Loick argues that in order to become sensible to the violence imbedded in our political routines, philosophy must question the current forms of political community – the ways in which it organizes and executes its decisions, in which it creates and interprets its laws – much more radically than before. It must become a critical theory of sovereignty and in doing so eliminate coercion from the law. The book opens with a historical reconstruction of the concept of sovereignty in Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant. Loick applies Adorno and Horkheimer’s notion of a ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ to the political sphere, demonstrating that whenever humanity deemed itself progressing from chaos and despotism, it at the same time prolonged exactly the violent forms of interaction it wanted to rid itself from. He goes on to assemble critical theories of sovereignty, using Walter Benjamin’s distinction between ‘law-positing’ and ‘law-preserving’ violence as a terminological source, engaging with Marx, Arendt, Foucault, Agamben and Derrida, and adding several other dimensions of violence in order to draw a more complete picture. Finally, Loick proposes the idea of non-coercive law as a consequence of a critical theory of sovereignty. The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publisher & Booksellers Association)



Illusion of Order

Author : Bernard E. Harcourt

Publisher : Harvard University Press

Page : 310 pages

File Size : 33,77 MB

Release : 2005-02-15

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 9780674038318

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Book Description

This is the first book to challenge the broken-windows theory of crime, which argues that permitting minor misdemeanors, such as loitering and vagrancy, to go unpunished only encourages more serious crime. The theory has revolutionized policing in the United States and abroad, with its emphasis on policies that crack down on disorderly conduct and aggressively enforce misdemeanor laws. The problem, argues Bernard Harcourt, is that although the broken-windows theory has been around for nearly thirty years, it has never been empirically verified. Indeed, existing data suggest that it is false. Conceptually, it rests on unexamined categories of law abiders and disorderly people and of order and disorder, which have no intrinsic reality, independent of the techniques of punishment that we implement in our society. How did the new order-maintenance approach to criminal justice--a theory without solid empirical support, a theory that is conceptually flawed and results in aggressive detentions of tens of thousands of our fellow citizens--come to be one of the leading criminal justice theories embraced by progressive reformers, policymakers, and academics throughout the world? This book explores the reasons why. It also presents a new, more thoughtful vision of criminal justice.



The Politics of Immunity

Author : Mark Neocleous

Publisher : Verso Books

Page : 369 pages

File Size : 15,84 MB

Release : 2022-03-22

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1839764864

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Book Description

The violence and destruction hiding behind the obsession with immunity Our contemporary political condition is obsessed with immunity. The immunity of bodies and the body politic; personal immunity and herd immunity; how to immunize the social system against breakdown. The obsession intensifies with every new crisis and the mobilization of yet more powers of war and police, from quarantine to border closures and from vaccination certificates to immunological surveillance. Engaging four key concepts with enormous cultural weight – Cell, Self, System and Sovereignty – Politics of Immunity moves from philosophical biology to intellectual history and from critical theory to psychoanalysis to expose the politics underpinning the way immunity is imagined. At the heart of this imagination is the way security has come to dominate the whole realm of human experience. From biological cell to political subject, and from physiological system to the social body, immunity folds into security, just as security folds into immunity. The book thus opens into a critique of the violence of security and spells out immunity’s tendency towards self-destruction and death: immunity, like security, can turn its aggression inwards, into the autoimmune disorder. Wide-ranging and polemical, Politics of Immunity lays down a major challenge to the ways in which the immunity of the self and the social are imagined.



The Global Police State

Author : William I. Robinson

Publisher : Pluto Press (UK)

Page : 0 pages

File Size : 50,85 MB

Release : 2020

Category : Discrimination in law enforcement

ISBN : 9780745341644

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Book Description

A critical look at the terrifying ways the police are used to control'surplus' populations worldwide.



Our Enemies in Blue

Author : Kristian Williams

Publisher : AK Press

Page : 532 pages

File Size : 40,52 MB

Release : 2015-08-03

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 1849352151

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Book Description

Let's begin with the basics: violence is an inherent part of policing. The police represent the most direct means by which the state imposes its will on the citizenry. They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent. Using media reports alone, the Cato Institute's last annual study listed nearly seven thousand victims of police "misconduct" in the United States. But such stories of police brutality only scratch the surface of a national epidemic. Every year, tens of thousands are framed, blackmailed, beaten, sexually assaulted, or killed by cops. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on civil judgments and settlements annually. Individual lives, families, and communities are destroyed. In this extensively revised and updated edition of his seminal study of policing in the United States, Kristian Williams shows that police brutality isn't an anomaly, but is built into the very meaning of law enforcement in the United States. From antebellum slave patrols to today's unarmed youth being gunned down in the streets, "peace keepers" have always used force to shape behavior, repress dissent, and defend the powerful. Our Enemies in Blue is a well-researched page-turner that both makes historical sense of this legalized social pathology and maps out possible alternatives.



Police: A Field Guide

Author : David Correia

Publisher : Verso Books

Page : 384 pages

File Size : 13,97 MB

Release : 2018-03-13

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 1786630133

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Book Description

A radical guide to the language of policing This field guide arms activists—and indeed anyone concerned about police abuse—with critical insights that ultimately redefine the very idea of policing. When we talk about police and police reform, we speak the language of police legitimation through euphemism. So state sexual assault becomes “body-cavity search,” and ruthless beatings “non-compliance deterrence.” In entries such as “police dog,” “stop and frisk,” and “rough ride,” the authors expose the way “copspeak” suppresses the true meaning and history of law enforcement. In field guide fashion, they reveal a world hidden in plain view. The book argues that a redefined language of policing might help us chart a future that’s free. Including explanations of newsmaking terms such as “deadname,” “kettling,” and “qualified immunity,” and a foreword by leading justice advocate Craig Gilmore.



A Critical Theory of Police Power

Author : Mark Neocleous

Publisher : Verso Books

Page : 294 pages

File Size : 42,27 MB

Release : 2021-01-12

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 1788735218

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Book Description

The ubiquitous nature and political attraction of the concept of order has to be understood in conjunction with the idea of police. Since its first publication, this book has been one of the most powerful and wide-ranging critiques of the police power. Neocleous argues for an expanded concept of police, able to account for the range of institutions through which policing takes place. These institutions are concerned not just with the maintenance and reproduction of order, but with its very fabrication, especially the fabrication of a social order founded on wage labour. By situating the police power in relation to both capital and the state and at the heart of the politics of security, the book opens up into an understanding of the ways in which the state administers civil society and fabricates order through law and the ideology of crime. The discretionary violence of the police on the street is thereby connected to the wider administrative powers of the state, and the thud of the truncheon to the dull compulsion of economic relations.



Authoritarian Police in Democracy

Author : Yanilda María González

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 375 pages

File Size : 12,1 MB

Release : 2020-11-12

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 1108900380

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Book Description

In countries around the world, from the United States to the Philippines to Chile, police forces are at the center of social unrest and debates about democracy and rule of law. This book examines the persistence of authoritarian policing in Latin America to explain why police violence and malfeasance remain pervasive decades after democratization. It also examines the conditions under which reform can occur. Drawing on rich comparative analysis and evidence from Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia, the book opens up the 'black box' of police bureaucracies to show how police forces exert power and cultivate relationships with politicians, as well as how social inequality impedes change. González shows that authoritarian policing persists not in spite of democracy but in part because of democratic processes and public demand. When societal preferences over the distribution of security and coercion are fragmented along existing social cleavages, politicians possess few incentives to enact reform.



Anti-Security

Author : Mark Neocleous

Publisher :

Page : 270 pages

File Size : 36,38 MB

Release : 2011

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 9781926958149

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Book Description

Security has reached an analytic blockage. The more security seems post-political, post-social, or even post-modern the more it escapes analytic scrutiny. The more security attaches itself to innumerable social relationships the more it becomes the very glue that binds social reality. Social problems become security problems while projects of pacification continue to be legitimized under the rubric of security. To be against security today is to stand against the entire global economic system. If security has become the dominant, perhaps impenetrable concept of our times, then we must start entertaining the impossible. We must begin asking: what would doing anti-security look like? Also contains "Anti-Security: A Declaration" (by Neocleous & Rigakos) Contents: Introduction 7; Anti-Security: A Declaration 15; [1] Security as Pacification, by: Mark Neocleous; [2] 'To Extend the Scope of Productive Labour': Pacification as a Police Project, by: George S. Rigakos; [3] Public Policing, Private Security, Pacifying Populations, by: Michael Kempa; [4] War on the Poor: Urban Poverty, Target Policing and Social Control, by: Gaetan Heroux; [5] 'Poor Rogues' and Social Police: Subsistence Wages, Payday Lending and the Politics of Security, by: Olena Kobzar; [6] Liberal Intellectuals and the Politics of Security, by: Will Jackson; [7] Security: Resistance, by: Heidi Rimke; [8] Security and the Void: Aleatory Materialism contra Governmentality, by: Ronjon Paul Datta; [9] 'All the People Necessary Will Die to Achieve Security', by: Guillermina Seri; Notes on contributors ..".'punches a hole' in the body of the depressingly 'pacified' strand of scholarship that police sociology has become..." - Georgios Papanicolaou, Teeside University