Dr Anna Feigenbaum

Daniel Weissman

2^nd December 2015, Royal London House, R303, 1-1:50 pm

All staff and students welcome to the last Social Science seminar in 2015.

Abstract:

This paper seeks to better understand the cultural and material processes of police militarization and its relationship to security infrastructures and geo-political practices of social control. In this paper we trace the rise the ‘Warrior Cop’ through an analysis of changes in the circulation of advertisements of policing and policing products at security expose between the late 1990s and the present, taking our analysis up through the recent Paris attacks and the Milipol Security expo held days after.

This analysis is framed against the backdrop of existing research on the shift in the post-Cold War period from a security focus on the threat of the nation-state to the threat of insurgency and non-state actors. This period was characterized by national and transnational changes to policing: intelligence gathering and information sharing, as well as equipment supply and transfer and knowledge exchange around training and operations.

We begin this paper with an overview of the key shifts in the military and policing sectors that gave rise to the phenomenon of ‘Warrior Cops’. In contrast to dominant narratives of police militarisation that see power and tactics shift directly from the military to the police, we outline what we refer to as the militarization of security, a process through which not only the police, but also judicial and emergency response services, infrastructures, feelings and attitudes become transformed in ways that position the need for warriors against the threat of risky spaces and vulnerable bodies.

For any enquiries regarding the Social Science seminar series please contact Dr Mastoureh Fathi: mfathi@bournemouth.ac.uk