Mark Neocleous
Biographic Data
| ID | 246077 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mark Neocleous |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mark |
| FAMILY NAME | Neocleous |
| SIGNATURE | NEOCLEOUS M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brunel University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3893-7267 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 391 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Spooks
This article considers the double meaning of ‘spook’ as both ghost and spy. Building on but moving beyond the hauntological or spectral turn in the recent humanities, the article explores this double meaning of ‘spook’ and what it might tell us about security politics. In so doing, the article moves through a diverse range of topics: from Hamlet to Bentham, from undercover cops to the anxieties of security intellectuals, and from moles to the gho…
Guerra como paz, paz como pacificação
Tomando o consenso estabelecido em torno da ideia de “paz e “guerra”, o autor provoca questionamentos aos saberes constituídos, a exemplo dos pressupostos da teoria política moderna, e a permanência de temporalidades como o período colonial, a partir do padrão reiterado de contato entre europeus e “outros” povos. São examinados os sentidos dos termos “paz” e “guerra”, reconhecendo estar presente no direito das nações o uso da guerra para a produç…
Policía beyond the police
This article develops and extends the critical theory of police power by applying it to Colombia. Scholarship on police in Colombia has been undermined by a focus on the kind of creation myth that one finds in most histories of police: that policing only properly begins in a key foundational year. In Colombia, that year is 1891. This approach overlooks or downplays the importance of the concept of policía. This is the original and far more expans…
Debt as Pacification
Debt is pacification’s dirtiest little secret and its cleanest weapon. Pacification is the name we give to the fabrication of social order; it is the goal of the police power and the police wars that dominate our political landscape. To understand pacification, we need to pay close attention not only to professional violence workers, but also to the far more subtle ways in which subjects are rendered obedient to a social order of exploitation and…
Kettle Logic
This article unearths the political logic of the police kettle. Rather than add to the mundane debate about civil liberties or models of policing, this article argues that the kettle reveals nothing less than the police war at the heart of modernity. This is a police war carried out as a logic of containment against the enemy within—within the kettle and within society. The kettle is a microcosm of the police war of containment
The Universal Adversary: Security, Capital and 'The Enemies of All Mankind'
The history of bourgeois modernity is a history of the Enemy. This book is a radical exploration of an Enemy that has recently emerged from within security documents released by the US security state: the Universal Adversary. The Universal Adversary is now central to emergency planning in general and, more specifically, to security preparations for future attacks. But an attack from who, or what? This book – the first to appear on the topic – sho…
The logic of pacification: War-police-accumulation
This article argues that the concept of pacification allows us to understand the productive role that state violence plays in securing capital and fabricating bourgeois order. Using the long history of ruling class thinking on the theory and practice of pacification, the article claims that for tactical purposes critical theory really needs to re-appropriate the term ‘pacification’ to help grasp the nature of the violence at the heart of systemat…
The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power
The Universal Adversary will attack: Pigs, pirates, zombies, Satan and the class war
This article explores a category to have recently emerged out of the national security state: the Universal Adversary. The category appears in emergency planning documents and suggests a new way of thinking about the enemy that is becoming embedded in the logic of security and emergency. However, the radical expansiveness of the category offers new possibilities for thinking about the “universality” with which the enemy of bourgeois order has his…
War Power, Police Power
O Effeminacy! Effeminacy!’ War, masculinity and the myth of liberal peace
This article challenges a received wisdom in the liberal peace thesis, namely that the roots of the conjunction of liberalism and peace can be traced back to the idea of an essentially pacific commercial civil society in the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment. The article instead shows that the Scottish Enlightenment was committed to the idea of military virtue. Textual analysis of the work of Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson reveals a deep and abid…
Air Power as Police Power
This paper makes a case for understanding air power through the lens of police. After first rethinking a key period in the history of air power (colonial bombing campaigns) as a police mechanism, the paper then moves to consider the impoverished conception of war and police in contemporary critical theory. The final section turns to perhaps the most pressing issue in current air power debates, namely drones, and suggests that a consideration of a…
Don’t Be Scared, Be Prepared”: Trauma-Anxiety-Resilience
Rather than concerning ourselves with “governing trauma” we should instead be concerned with how trauma has come to govern us. Trauma talk now comes naturally, and the article explores what all this trauma talk might be doing, ideologically and politically, especially in the context of the relationship between security and anxiety. The management of trauma and anxiety has become a way of mediating the demands of an endless security war: a war of …
International Law as Primitive Accumulation; Or, the Secret of Systematic Colonization
This article aims to bring the category of 'primitive accumulation' into the vocabulary of critical and Marxist international legal theory. It does so by first elaborating the critique of international law that has recently developed through the lens of colonialism, by bringing to bear on the issue Marx's thinking about colonization and thus his arguments concerning accumulation. In so doing the article also seeks to be an immanent critique of cr…
A Brighter and Nicer New Life’: Security as Pacification
The article argues that the process of securing the insecurity of capitalist accumulation might best be understood as a process of pacification. Pacification is closely connected to the Vietnam War, but the article suggests that pacification has a much longer history, linking the original accumulation in the colonies with the movement towards capitalism in the West. Read in this way, pacification is a form of police power, securing the insecurity…
War on Waste: Law, Original Accumulation and the Violence of Capital
Bourgeois thought has been haunted by the idea of waste: waste land, waste persons, and wasted resources. Bourgeois law has facilitated the use of violence to eliminate this waste. This is especially the case with the early laws of war. In this sense, the fabrication of capitalist order was organized through nothing less than a war on waste. It is this war that has been at the heart of original accumulation. This can be seen historically in the w…
The Police of Civilization: The War on Terror as Civilizing Offensive
This article deals with two contemporary issues: the return of “civilization” as a category of international power and the common refrain that war is now looking more and more like a police action. The article shows that these two issues are deeply connected. They have their roots in the historical connection between “civilization” and “police.” Through an exercise the history of ideas as an essay in international political sociology, the article…
The Fascist Moment: Security, Exclusion, Extermination
Security is cultivated and mobilized by enacting exclusionary practices, and exclusion is cultivated and realized on security grounds. This article explores the political dangers that lie in this connection, dangers which open the door to a fascist mobilization in the name of security. To do so the article first asks: what happens to our understanding of fascism if we view it through the lens of security? But then a far more interesting question …
Critique of Security
Critique of Security
Critique of Security brings together very diverse discussions about security in order to sustain a genuine critique of security and its study
La tératologie politique: De La Canaille Et Des Monstres
Cette étude enquête sur le sens politique d'un des aspects de la pensée d'Edmund Burke qui est resté relativement inexploré : le monstre. Après avoir montré comment la figure du monstre apparaît dans l'esthétique de Burke, l'auteur examine les raisons politiques de l'usage de la métaphore du monstrueux. L'article suggère que ces raisons sont politiques et qu'elles reposent sur la crainte que Burke éprouve pour la canaille [ mob ] et que cette cra…
Security, Liberty and the Myth of Balance: Towards a Critique of Security Politics
From Social to National Security: On the Fabrication of Economic Order
This article explores some of the conceptual, political and historical links between social and national security. Social security and national security are not often talked about together, despite the recent surge of interest in widening the security agenda. The first aim of this article is to contribute to critical ways of thinking security by identifying the issues connecting social and national security. The second aim is to suggest that if t…
The Problem with Normality: Taking Exception to “Permanent Emergency”
This article challenges the increasingly prevalent idea that since September 11, 2001, we have moved into a state of permanent emergency and an abandonment of the rule of law. The article questions this idea, showing that historical developments in the twentieth century have actually placed emergency powers at the heart of the rule of law as a means of administering capitalist modernity. This suggests we need to rethink our understanding of the r…
"What do you think of female chastity?" Identity and Loyalty in the National Security State
This article explores the relationship between security, identity and loyalty. Focusing on the formative texts and practices underpinning the rise of the national security state in America, while alluding to more recent developments, the article claims that security and identity are inextricably linked, not just in the obvious existential ways, but also in a far more political way: that the fabrication of national security goes hand in hand with …
The Problem with Normality: Taking Exception to “Permanent Emergency”
This article challenges the increasingly prevalent idea that since September 11, 2001, we have moved into a state of permanent emergency and an abandonment of the rule of law. The article questions this idea, showing that historical developments in the twentieth century have actually placed emergency powers at the heart of the rule of law as a means of administering capitalist modernity. This suggests we need to rethink our understanding of the r…
A Brighter and Nicer New Life’: Security as Pacification
The article argues that the process of securing the insecurity of capitalist accumulation might best be understood as a process of pacification. Pacification is closely connected to the Vietnam War, but the article suggests that pacification has a much longer history, linking the original accumulation in the colonies with the movement towards capitalism in the West. Read in this way, pacification is a form of police power, securing the insecurity…
Off the Map: On Violence and Cartography
This article explores the link between the territorial imperative of the modern state, the exercise of violence and the practice of cartography. After first tracing the ways in which the exercise of 'non-state' coercion has been either eliminated historically or isolated ideologically, the question of the map is brought to bear on the issue of violence and territoriality. The article thus illustrates the importance of cartographic violence: the w…
Air Power as Police Power
This paper makes a case for understanding air power through the lens of police. After first rethinking a key period in the history of air power (colonial bombing campaigns) as a police mechanism, the paper then moves to consider the impoverished conception of war and police in contemporary critical theory. The final section turns to perhaps the most pressing issue in current air power debates, namely drones, and suggests that a consideration of a…
Security, Liberty and the Myth of Balance: Towards a Critique of Security Politics
Don’t Be Scared, Be Prepared”: Trauma-Anxiety-Resilience
Rather than concerning ourselves with “governing trauma” we should instead be concerned with how trauma has come to govern us. Trauma talk now comes naturally, and the article explores what all this trauma talk might be doing, ideologically and politically, especially in the context of the relationship between security and anxiety. The management of trauma and anxiety has become a way of mediating the demands of an endless security war: a war of …
From Social to National Security: On the Fabrication of Economic Order
This article explores some of the conceptual, political and historical links between social and national security. Social security and national security are not often talked about together, despite the recent surge of interest in widening the security agenda. The first aim of this article is to contribute to critical ways of thinking security by identifying the issues connecting social and national security. The second aim is to suggest that if t…
International Law as Primitive Accumulation; Or, the Secret of Systematic Colonization
This article aims to bring the category of 'primitive accumulation' into the vocabulary of critical and Marxist international legal theory. It does so by first elaborating the critique of international law that has recently developed through the lens of colonialism, by bringing to bear on the issue Marx's thinking about colonization and thus his arguments concerning accumulation. In so doing the article also seeks to be an immanent critique of cr…
The Police of Civilization: The War on Terror as Civilizing Offensive
This article deals with two contemporary issues: the return of “civilization” as a category of international power and the common refrain that war is now looking more and more like a police action. The article shows that these two issues are deeply connected. They have their roots in the historical connection between “civilization” and “police.” Through an exercise the history of ideas as an essay in international political sociology, the article…
War on Waste: Law, Original Accumulation and the Violence of Capital
Bourgeois thought has been haunted by the idea of waste: waste land, waste persons, and wasted resources. Bourgeois law has facilitated the use of violence to eliminate this waste. This is especially the case with the early laws of war. In this sense, the fabrication of capitalist order was organized through nothing less than a war on waste. It is this war that has been at the heart of original accumulation. This can be seen historically in the w…
Protest’ and Fail to Survive: Le Pen and the Great Moving Right Show
This article challenges the widespread belief that the recent success of Jean-Marie Le Pen and the Front National is due to a ‘protest vote’ on the part of the French electorate, a vote which thus lacks any ‘core identity’ and is therefore unsustainable in the long term. Through a geographical and sociological breakdown of the 2002 presidential and legislative elections the article first shows the extent to which support for Le Pen is clearly not…
The Universal Adversary will attack: Pigs, pirates, zombies, Satan and the class war
This article explores a category to have recently emerged out of the national security state: the Universal Adversary. The category appears in emergency planning documents and suggests a new way of thinking about the enemy that is becoming embedded in the logic of security and emergency. However, the radical expansiveness of the category offers new possibilities for thinking about the “universality” with which the enemy of bourgeois order has his…
Social Police and the Mechanisms of Prevention
This article reassesses the work of Patrick Colquhoun by reconsidering his notion of prevention. It argues that Colquhoun has been badly served by having his notion of prevention understood in the light of the emergence of the new police in 1829. This has obscured the importance of poverty, indigence and political economy to Colquhoun’s understanding of police. I suggest that Colquhoun’s work should be of interest as much to the discipline of soc…
Policing and pin‐making: Adam smith, police and the state of prosperity
This article explores contrasting uses of the concept of police in the work of British and Continental writers in the eighteenth century. The shifting use of the term in the work of Adam Smith is placed in the wider context of debates concerning the nature of police in Britain and on the Continent. A comparison is made between the broad use of the concept in cameralism and police science in Europe and the far narrower meaning attached to the term…
From Civil Society to the Social
Cet article examine les conceptions de la societe civile qui sont au coeur de l'oeuvre de Hegel et de celle de Marx. L'A. etudie comment ils concoivent la representation que l'individu se fait de sa position sociale. Il montre que la distinction entre societe civile et Etat joue un role fondamental dans l'oeuvre de Marx, que la critique que ce dernier fait de la notion de societe civile est liee a sa conception de ce que l'on doit entendre par so…
Debt as Pacification
Debt is pacification’s dirtiest little secret and its cleanest weapon. Pacification is the name we give to the fabrication of social order; it is the goal of the police power and the police wars that dominate our political landscape. To understand pacification, we need to pay close attention not only to professional violence workers, but also to the far more subtle ways in which subjects are rendered obedient to a social order of exploitation and…
Long live death! Fascism, resurrection, immortality
This article argues that we need to take seriously the centrality of the dead to fascist ideology. Organized around the fascist slogan 'Long Live Death!', the article examines a host of fascist claims and practices centered on the dead. These include Martin Heidegger's suggestion that we can be with the dead, and a range of provocations, tropes and ceremonies which suggest that the dead are either still present or are about to be resurrected. Thr…
Policing the system of needs: Hegel, political economy, and the police of the market
Perpetual war, or 'war and war again: Schmitt, Foucault, fascism
This article seeks to explore the way that warfare, and categories gleaned from warfare and military practice, are used in the work of Carl Schmitt and Michel Foucault. Despite their profound political and theoretical differences both writers seek to understand politics and society through the idea of war. Because both writers resist the use of the state-civil society distinction their account of war renders it a perpetual phenomenon of the socia…
O Effeminacy! Effeminacy!’ War, masculinity and the myth of liberal peace
This article challenges a received wisdom in the liberal peace thesis, namely that the roots of the conjunction of liberalism and peace can be traced back to the idea of an essentially pacific commercial civil society in the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment. The article instead shows that the Scottish Enlightenment was committed to the idea of military virtue. Textual analysis of the work of Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson reveals a deep and abid…
The Fascist Moment: Security, Exclusion, Extermination
Security is cultivated and mobilized by enacting exclusionary practices, and exclusion is cultivated and realized on security grounds. This article explores the political dangers that lie in this connection, dangers which open the door to a fascist mobilization in the name of security. To do so the article first asks: what happens to our understanding of fascism if we view it through the lens of security? But then a far more interesting question …
"What do you think of female chastity?" Identity and Loyalty in the National Security State
This article explores the relationship between security, identity and loyalty. Focusing on the formative texts and practices underpinning the rise of the national security state in America, while alluding to more recent developments, the article claims that security and identity are inextricably linked, not just in the obvious existential ways, but also in a far more political way: that the fabrication of national security goes hand in hand with …
Gothic fascism
This article explores the place of fear in fascism ‐ the fear experienced by fascism, as found throughout Hitler's writings and speeches, and the fear fascism fabricates in order to sustain itself. The article suggests that this fear overlaps and intersects with a shift in the culture of the Gothic in the late‐nineteenth century, such that fascism's enemy comes to be interpellated as a truly monstrous figure. An exploration of the shifting place …
The Monstrous Multitude: Edmund Burke's Political Teratology
Privacy, Secrecy, Idiocy
Dans cet article, l'A. se penche sur l'ambiguite des democraties contemporaines a demander plus de transparence des politiques publiques, en meme temps qu'une protection accrue de la vie privee des individus. L'A. revient ici sur les notions d'intimite et de prive qui ont emerge avec l'essor du capitalisme, pour s'interesser au secret et raison d'Etat dans la culture politique, notamment aux Etats-Unis et en Grande Bretagne
From Civil Society to the Social
Cet article examine les conceptions de la societe civile qui sont au coeur de l'oeuvre de Hegel et de celle de Marx. L'A. etudie comment ils concoivent la representation que l'individu se fait de sa position sociale. Il montre que la distinction entre societe civile et Etat joue un role fondamental dans l'oeuvre de Marx, que la critique que ce dernier fait de la notion de societe civile est liee a sa conception de ce que l'on doit entendre par so…
Administering Civil Society: Towards a Theory of State Power
To preserve social order the state must administer civil society, with a threefold purpose - the fashioning of the market, the constitution of legal subjectivity and the subsumption of struggle. In Ad
Perpetual war, or 'war and war again: Schmitt, Foucault, fascism
This article seeks to explore the way that warfare, and categories gleaned from warfare and military practice, are used in the work of Carl Schmitt and Michel Foucault. Despite their profound political and theoretical differences both writers seek to understand politics and society through the idea of war. Because both writers resist the use of the state-civil society distinction their account of war renders it a perpetual phenomenon of the socia…
Policing and pin‐making: Adam smith, police and the state of prosperity
This article explores contrasting uses of the concept of police in the work of British and Continental writers in the eighteenth century. The shifting use of the term in the work of Adam Smith is placed in the wider context of debates concerning the nature of police in Britain and on the Continent. A comparison is made between the broad use of the concept in cameralism and police science in Europe and the far narrower meaning attached to the term…
Policing the system of needs: Hegel, political economy, and the police of the market
Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity
Preface. The Sociology of Anthony Giddens: An Introduction by Martin O'Brien. Interview 1: Life and Intellectual Career. Interview 2: The Sociological Classics and Beyond. Interview 3: Structuration Theory. Interview 4: Modernity. Interview 5: From the Transformation of Intimacy to Life Politics. Interview 6: Politics Beyond Left and Right. Interview 7: World Politics. Centre Left at Centre Stage. The Politics of Risk Society. Beyond Chaos and Do…
Social Police and the Mechanisms of Prevention
This article reassesses the work of Patrick Colquhoun by reconsidering his notion of prevention. It argues that Colquhoun has been badly served by having his notion of prevention understood in the light of the emergence of the new police in 1829. This has obscured the importance of poverty, indigence and political economy to Colquhoun’s understanding of police. I suggest that Colquhoun’s work should be of interest as much to the discipline of soc…
The Fabrication Of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power
Privacy, Secrecy, Idiocy
Dans cet article, l'A. se penche sur l'ambiguite des democraties contemporaines a demander plus de transparence des politiques publiques, en meme temps qu'une protection accrue de la vie privee des individus. L'A. revient ici sur les notions d'intimite et de prive qui ont emerge avec l'essor du capitalisme, pour s'interesser au secret et raison d'Etat dans la culture politique, notamment aux Etats-Unis et en Grande Bretagne
Imagining the state
Protest’ and Fail to Survive: Le Pen and the Great Moving Right Show
This article challenges the widespread belief that the recent success of Jean-Marie Le Pen and the Front National is due to a ‘protest vote’ on the part of the French electorate, a vote which thus lacks any ‘core identity’ and is therefore unsustainable in the long term. Through a geographical and sociological breakdown of the 2002 presidential and legislative elections the article first shows the extent to which support for Le Pen is clearly not…
The Hegel–Marx Connection
Off the Map: On Violence and Cartography
This article explores the link between the territorial imperative of the modern state, the exercise of violence and the practice of cartography. After first tracing the ways in which the exercise of 'non-state' coercion has been either eliminated historically or isolated ideologically, the question of the map is brought to bear on the issue of violence and territoriality. The article thus illustrates the importance of cartographic violence: the w…
The Monstrous Multitude: Edmund Burke's Political Teratology
Monstrous and the Dead: Burke, Marx, Fascism (University of Wales Press - Political Philosophy Now)
Long live death! Fascism, resurrection, immortality
This article argues that we need to take seriously the centrality of the dead to fascist ideology. Organized around the fascist slogan 'Long Live Death!', the article examines a host of fascist claims and practices centered on the dead. These include Martin Heidegger's suggestion that we can be with the dead, and a range of provocations, tropes and ceremonies which suggest that the dead are either still present or are about to be resurrected. Thr…
Gothic fascism
This article explores the place of fear in fascism ‐ the fear experienced by fascism, as found throughout Hitler's writings and speeches, and the fear fascism fabricates in order to sustain itself. The article suggests that this fear overlaps and intersects with a shift in the culture of the Gothic in the late‐nineteenth century, such that fascism's enemy comes to be interpellated as a truly monstrous figure. An exploration of the shifting place …
From Social to National Security: On the Fabrication of Economic Order
This article explores some of the conceptual, political and historical links between social and national security. Social security and national security are not often talked about together, despite the recent surge of interest in widening the security agenda. The first aim of this article is to contribute to critical ways of thinking security by identifying the issues connecting social and national security. The second aim is to suggest that if t…
The Problem with Normality: Taking Exception to “Permanent Emergency”
This article challenges the increasingly prevalent idea that since September 11, 2001, we have moved into a state of permanent emergency and an abandonment of the rule of law. The article questions this idea, showing that historical developments in the twentieth century have actually placed emergency powers at the heart of the rule of law as a means of administering capitalist modernity. This suggests we need to rethink our understanding of the r…
"What do you think of female chastity?" Identity and Loyalty in the National Security State
This article explores the relationship between security, identity and loyalty. Focusing on the formative texts and practices underpinning the rise of the national security state in America, while alluding to more recent developments, the article claims that security and identity are inextricably linked, not just in the obvious existential ways, but also in a far more political way: that the fabrication of national security goes hand in hand with …
Security, Liberty and the Myth of Balance: Towards a Critique of Security Politics
Critique of Security
Critique of Security
Critique of Security brings together very diverse discussions about security in order to sustain a genuine critique of security and its study
La tératologie politique: De La Canaille Et Des Monstres
Cette étude enquête sur le sens politique d'un des aspects de la pensée d'Edmund Burke qui est resté relativement inexploré : le monstre. Après avoir montré comment la figure du monstre apparaît dans l'esthétique de Burke, l'auteur examine les raisons politiques de l'usage de la métaphore du monstrueux. L'article suggère que ces raisons sont politiques et qu'elles reposent sur la crainte que Burke éprouve pour la canaille [ mob ] et que cette cra…
The Fascist Moment: Security, Exclusion, Extermination
Security is cultivated and mobilized by enacting exclusionary practices, and exclusion is cultivated and realized on security grounds. This article explores the political dangers that lie in this connection, dangers which open the door to a fascist mobilization in the name of security. To do so the article first asks: what happens to our understanding of fascism if we view it through the lens of security? But then a far more interesting question …
Political science (35 works) · Sociology (33 works) · Law (31 works) · Politics (28 works) · Law (23 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Global Security and Public Health (10 works)