Violent Peacekeeping: The Rise and Rise of Repressive Techniques and Technologies

Violent ‘peace keeping’ is a contradiction in terms but not if we analyse the provision of coercive law enforcement as just another organising process in state bureaucracies. This paper argues that events surrounding 9/11 merely accelerated processes of coercive peace keeping, which were already re-orientating following the end of the Cold-war. Abstract : Violent ‘peace keeping’ is a contradiction in terms but not if we analyse the provision of coercive law enforcement as just another organising process in state bureaucracies. This paper argues that events surrounding 9/11 merely accelerated processes of coercive peace keeping, which were already re-orientating following the cold war. The technologies used for coercive peacekeeping operations are designed to mask the level of violence being used. These include new methods of tracking and punishing dissent as well as prison techniques and technologies for disabling resistance. Such tools to quash dissent are big business and the security apparatus is permeated by commercial interests aggressively marketing technical fixes. Future researchers and NGOs will need to deconstruct these masks, without themselves rising up the food chain of