UK professor talks about security and pacification at Critical Thinkers seminar

Professor Mark Neocleous, head of the Department of Politics & History at Brunel University in the United Kingdom, will talk about security as pacification as part of the York Centre for International & Security Studies (YCISS) Distinguished Critical Thinkers in World Politics Seminar Series.

“War on…What? Security as Pacification” will take place Thursday, March 18, from 2:30 to 4:30pm at 519 York Research Tower, Keele campus.

Right: Mark Neocleous

A professor of the critique of political economy, Neocleous will bring together two concepts with very different histories. The first is one of the major political fetishes of modern times – security – while the second is a concept which is seldom talked about nowadays – pacification.

Neocleous will explore the ways in which these two terms have resonated through their early history, with the aim of unravelling the logic of pacification to contemporary security politics. In doing so, he will criss-cross through the terrains of war and peace, and law and police, making links between original accumulation and the current war on terror.

Neocleous is the author of Critique of Security (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), The Monstrous and the DeadBurke, Marx, Fascism (University of Wales Press, 2005), Imagining the State (Open University Press, 2003), The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power (Pluto Press, 2000) and Fascism (Open University Press, 1997). He is a member of the editorial collective of the journal Radical Philosophy.

For more information, visit the YCISS Web site.