interesting example of a call for papers that invites actual discussion!

As Tom Wengraf pointed out, the merging of the police and military function on behalf of large-scale intervention doesn't seem particularly new to anyone who has been paying attention to Latin America, and in particular the war on drugs (hat tip to Jon Cloke for bringing that up in recent emails).  And I don't just mean in Mexico and Colombia ... I hope that this call for papers brings the militarization of the police function via the war on drugs into conversation with "new war" literatures that the call seems to be aimed at.  I'd love to be there but as a recent PhD (ok, 2 years ago now!) without a tenure-track job I'm limited financially.

fun facts: the US military became institutionally involved in policing illicit drug subjects and spaces through the initiative of Dick Cheney in 1989, and it became US policy to convince Latin American countries (and others) to turn the policing of illicit drug flows over to military forces since then -- initially something "democratizing" Latin American states were quite reluctant to do.  One side effect of this was to demonstrate to Andean states that the US was willing to walk the walk against its own illicit agriculturalists, and in 1990 there were five distinct military operations against cannabis agriculture: Operation Wipeout in Hawaii, which crashed that state's substantial (partially export) industry; Operation Greensweep in Humboldt County which didn't eradicate much cannabis but terrorized rural communities; Operation Ghost Dancer in Oregon which was basically just an exercise with almost no results; and two others -- one in Southern California and the other I think, in Georgia or Kentucky -- have to look at my notes.  These exercises were quite independent of annual eradication operations throughout the US that deployed military personnel and equipment.  In California, the largest and most prominent of these, that seasonal deployment was called CAMP -- which these days is mostly used to police large-scale public and private grows and has a surprising amount of support from folks who live in the communities the helicopters used to terrorize, but who are pretty keen on environmental politics.

On the urban side of things, of course, the war on drugs made it completely normal for SWAT teams to flourish ... lots of other fun facts to consider, including of course the explosion of the prison-industrial complex.

in the spirit of conversation,

Dominic

________________________________________
From: A forum for critical and radical geographers [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Colleen Bell [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, July 20, 2012 11:25 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: CFP Military-Police Assemblages in Western Intervention

Call For Papers


From defeating the enemy to creating order?

Exploring military-police assemblages in Western interventionism


Gothenburg University, Sweden

September 25-26 2012



Contemporary, large-scale, international interventions in the ‘global South’ combine military, civilian and humanitarian aims, means, and methods. This development has led to them being variously described as ‘humanitarian intervention’, ‘peace-building’, ‘stabilisation’ or even ‘counterinsurgency’ operations. While the level of coordination between civilian and military actors has increased in the last two decades, it has been suggested that the intermingling of military and civilian international activity in Iraq and Afghanistan has effectively dissolved any meaningful distinction between civilian and military engagement.


A promising way of investigating the blurring line between humanitarian/civilian and military forms of engagement is found in the concept of ‘policing’, understood as regulating practices that aim at the good administration of the social realm. We invite papers that engage with the concept of ‘policing’ as a common entry point to analyse ideas on social ordering in contemporary interventions in hybrid situations that defy an easy dichotomy between war and peace. The main objective of the workshop is, thus, to investigate the utility of the concept of policing as an ordering principle for the analysis of international intervention. This involves critically examining the aims, means and methods of international large-scale intervention with equal attention to the discourses, epistemologies and materialities involved.


Prospective participants are invited to address questions such as:


 *   What are the defining logics of contemporary war and peace?

 *   What insights can be gleaned from the characterization of contemporary war as ‘policing’?

 *   What does of the concept of ‘policing’ as social ordering offer to our understanding of contemporary dynamics of North-South relations in global politics?

 *   How should the use of the military be understood in the wider politics of humanitarian and development assistance?

 *   Which normative ideas of a ‘good order’ in societies of the global South facilitate the construction of large-scale international intervention?


Abstracts of 250 words (max.) should be submitted to Jan Bachmann [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>, Colleen Bell ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) and Caroline Holmqvist-Jonsater ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) The deadline for abstracts is July 30th 2012.