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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 of capitalist order. This helps us make sense of the permanent 'wars on . . . ' being declared by capitalist states, from the war on drugs to the war on terror, and suggests that 'pacification' is a crucial concept for understanding security.Early in The Manifesto of the Communist Party Marx and Engels make the following claim:The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are

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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 role of emergency measures in the “war on terror” and, more generally, to reconsider the relationship between the rule of law and violence.