Pacifying the Homeland. Brendan McQuade
own conception of the productive and relational nature of power, reconceptualizing state institutions as “organically present in the generation of class powers.” The state plays a productive role in the reproduction of a social formation through the maintenance of production relations and the management of class conflict by varied means (repression, material concessions, institutional incorporation of subordinate classes and class fragments, and ideological and cultural production). At the same time, the state is neither an autonomous actor nor the subject of a greater locus of (economic) power. Instead, it is the “specific material condensation of a given relationship of forces.”31 The state does not wield power. Instead, it is the structural effect of the cacophony of competing class powers, defined as the capacity to realize historically specific material interests. In this way, Poulantzas conceptualized a relational “field of class practices,” where class interests could not be deduced from an “objective” position within the relations of production. Instead, class interests are historically specific outcomes formed through the subjective experience of individual and collective class relations.32
The critique of security extends and elaborates Poulantzas’s state theory. The notion of pacification and the broader conception of policing derived from the critical read of police science add further specificity by identifying the key class strategies that have organized and animated state administration. In contrast to Foucaultian categories like discipline and biopower, which de-emphasize the state as “nothing more than the mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities,” the idea of pacification brings together a variety of social regulatory mechanisms—the coercive power of police and military agencies, the light touch of surveillance, and social policy more broadly—into a holistic and integrative account of the productive power of capitalist states to shape the societies they govern.33
The critique of security also continues Poulantzas’s polemics toward Foucault and extends it to contemporary debates. In this way, the critique of security represents an alternative research agenda to largely Foucaultian subfields like critical terrorism studies, surveillance studies, or securitization theory. Consonant with Poulantzas’s remarks on Foucault, these fields also advance a self-referential theorization of “power”: the discourse and practices of counterterrorism, surveillance, and security are freestanding processes grounded in themselves. In contrast, the critique of security considers these discourses and practices in relation to social relations expressed in given moments of the world-economy and specific instances of state-formation.34 As a project of critique, it begins with deep engagement with the histories and constitutive ideas that produced—and are produced within—the capitalist world-economy and the modern administrative state.
To advance this project, I read the relevant literature and my primary research as examples of the prose of pacification, or the discourses and performances that provide practical logic and functional coherence to the state apparatus. Pacification is both an administrative strategy to manage class struggle and a prose, a loosely connected but still coherent body of ideas, practices, and performances that animate and organize the provisioning of “security.” In contrast to the now well-known notion of discourse, my effort to highlight the discursive aspect of pacification is a deliberate attempt to avoid poststructuralism’s drift toward idealism. Rather than a free-floating idea of discourse, which can often be seen as the productive nexus of social relations, as in Foucault’s ambiguous and self-referential conception of power, the prose of pacification centers the discursive aspects of administration in the historically specific and changing relations among capital, the state, and class struggle. In this way, the prose of pacification is a reformulation of what Poultanzas called “a state discourse.” “[B]roken into segments and fragments according to lines intersecting the strategy of power,” these “discourses of organization” are “elements of state knowledge to be used for the purposes of political strategy.”35 The prose of pacification, while productive of social relations, is also produced by historically enduring relations that cannot be reduced, in a circular fashion, to the effects of discourse. The relationship is dialectic and nonlinear. Hence, “the state is not aware of its own strategy in advance and cannot formulate it at the level of discourse.” Rather, what I term the prose of pacification “constitutes the state as a strategic field by giving expression to class interests in a selective manner consistent with the social relations of forces.”36
In the following two sections, I consider the counterterrorism intelligence produced at fusion centers and the related concerns about dysfunction and civil liberties voiced by criminologists, civil libertarians, and surveillance scholars. As examples of the prose of pacification, these expert debates provide voice and consistency to different classes and class fragments vying to control the state apparatus and dictate its dominant strategies. In the case of counterterrorism, police officers, intelligence analysts, and other security professionals speak the language of counterterrorism to claim authority over the definition of “threats” and, in so doing, assert control over distribution of resources within the state apparatus. Criminologists, surveillance scholars, and civil libertarians engage in similar struggle but at a distance from the state. They position themselves as experts capable of remedying the dysfunction and redressing the civil liberties violations associated with fusion centers. Insofar as criminologists form an essential part of what might be thought of as the law-and-order lobby, surveillance scholars and civil libertarians get caught up in traditional reformist politics; both of these expert conversations are constructive contributions to the institutionalization of intelligence fusion that do more to refine and perpetuate fusion centers than explain or analyze them.
CONNECTING THE DOTS BEYOND COUNTERTERRORISM
Concerns about their poor performance fail to acknowledge the actual work done at fusion centers. The politically inconvenient reality is that the threat from political violence is insufficient to warrant the amount of resources invested in counterterrorism. Since 9/11, there have been few fatalities from terrorism in the United States. According to the Global Terrorism Database, a comprehensive collection of open-source data on all attacks deemed “terrorism,” these incidents of political violence have killed 197 people in the United States from 9/11 to the end of 2016.37 In other words, the threat of terrorism is exceedingly remote. The chance of dying from terrorism in the United States is one in twenty million. These odds pale in comparison to other, more mundane threats like heart disease and cancer (one in seven); the flu, pneumonia, and emphysema (one in twenty-eight); suicide (one in a hundred); motor vehicle accidents (1 in 112); falling (1 in 144); assault by firearms (1 in 358); and even a host of exceedingly remote causes of death such as accidental suffocation during sleep (1 in 5,721), bee stings (1 in 55,764), or lightning strikes (1 in 164,968).38
While the threat of terrorism is statistically unlikely, mounting fears cannot be simply discounted. However, terrorism must be placed in a wider political context, beyond the hyperbolic rhetoric of security professionals, politicians, and terrorism experts. Acts labeled “terrorism” are forms of political violence that most often emerge from the breakdown of social order: civil war, revolution, and state failure or collapse. As such, most terrorism takes place in destabilized regions beset by armed conflict. In 2016, for example, most incidents of terrorism occurred in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria.39 The weakening of these states and surrounding regions, moreover, cannot be fully explained without considering military interventions and covert operations of Western states and, particularly, the United States. The current crisis is a day of reckoning that has been long in the making. It extends beyond the aggressive attempt to remake the Greater Middle East during the “War on Terror” to the long history of Western support for dictatorial regimes that constrained politics in much of the formerly colonized world during the Cold War. Such sober public policy data and broader historical context notwithstanding, the federal government has poured at least a trillion dollars into DHS, including, by some counts, over a billion dollars into fusion centers.40
There is also little evidence to show that these counterterrorism programs actually prevent terrorism. Many of the highest-profile attempted terrorist attacks since 9/11—the “shoe bomber” in 2001, the “underwear bomber” in 2009, and the “subway bomber” in 2010—were not foiled by counterterrorism programs. Instead, bystanders observed alarming behavior and responded accordingly.41