Martial politics,MOVE and the racial violence of policing

Abstract

Recent scholarship on war and policing has begun to theorize the two in more intimate relation with each other, especially through connections to racialized violence and governance. Drawing on this body of work, and the concept of martial politics specifically, I examine how logics of war operate within domestic spaces and reproduce racialized conceptualizations of threat. I focus on a confrontation between the MOVE organization and the city of Philadelphia in 1985, which led to police firing 10,000 rounds of ammunition into a house where MOVE members and their children were living, and to the extensive use of military-grade explosives, culminating in the police dropping a bomb from a helicopter onto the house. The bomb ignited a fire that killed six adult MOVE members and five children, and destroyed 61 houses. I examine the decision of the city to bomb MOVE and consider the role that conceptions of war and threat played in shaping the event. This case shows not just the migration of military techniques into domestic spheres (and a long history of this in the United States), but more significantly, it reveals how violence and war-making have always been a foundation of liberal governance.

Attention MOVE, this is America.

– Philadelphia Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor (13 May 1985)

This is America

Don’t catch you slippin’ up.

– Childish Gambino

If we do not arrest you, we will fire at you, as many bullets as necessary.

– Denise Ferreira da Silva (2007: xii)

Introduction

On 13 May 1985, the Philadelphia Police Commissioner, standing with a bull horn outside of a row house on Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia, was supposed to read a prepared statement announcing arrest warrants for Frank James Africa, Ramona Johnson Africa, Theresa Brooks Africa and Conrad Hampton Africa. These warrants were to be served to these individuals who were inside the house, and those named would have 15 minutes to come outside. Commissioner Sambor was directing nearly 500 police officers who had evacuated the surrounding area. It was early on Mother’s Day and police were set up for a standoff along the street, behind police cars and perched in windows of neighbouring buildings. The equipment they brought with them included military-grade explosives, sharpshooting high-powered rifles, M-16 assault rifles, Uzi machine guns, a silenced .22-caliber rifle and an anti-tank gun (Wagner-Pacifici, 2000: 31). The fire department was there and Philadelphia Mayor Wilson Goode followed the events from his office. The event had been planned by the city – an operation led by the police department but coordinated with the fire department and the mayor’s office. The individuals named in the warrants were a part of a group called MOVE, which defined itself by both a Black revolutionary politics and a back-to-nature life philosophy. MOVE had fortified this house that some of its members lived in, boarding up windows and constructing a bunker-style lookout on the roof. Ongoing confrontations between the police, MOVE and the neighbourhood had culminated in this moment. As part of his statement, Police Commissioner Sambor was supposed to say, ‘We do not wish to harm anyone’.

Improvising, what he began with instead was, ‘MOVE, this is America. You have to abide by the laws of the United States’. By the end of the day, the police had fired over 10,000 rounds of ammunition into the house, entered adjoining homes and used explosives to blow holes to flood the house with tear gas, and dropped a bomb from a helicopter onto the house. The bomb ignited a fire, which officials decided to let burn, and which killed 11 people in the house, including 5 children, and destroyed 61 homes in the neighbourhood. One adult and one child from the MOVE house survived. An investigatory commission established by Mayor Goode after the event found city administrators (including the mayor and the police commissioner) grossly negligent and failing to perform their responsibilities, and found that both dropping the bomb and the excessive amount of force used were ‘unconscionable’, especially with the city’s prior knowledge that there were children in the house (Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission, 1986). However, no member of the administration or the police department faced trial or any penalty for what happened on 13 May. The surviving MOVE adult, Ramona Africa, did face trial and served 7 years in prison for the charges of conspiracy to riot and riot.

It is an understatement to say there is a lot going on in this event – no article-length account can capture the complexities of what happened that day. The violence of the 1985 event was the product of a long history of state violence that continues to reverberate in its aftermath. The predominately white Philadelphia police force (Burnley and Kerkstra, 2015) and the heavy use of military-grade and military-like weapons against Black MOVE members in a Black neighbourhood in the city draw parallels to Ferguson, Baltimore, Minneapolis and other contemporary examples of police violence in the United States. Yet, not a lot of attention has been given to the MOVE case (Demby, 2015). This article asks: what can revisiting the MOVE confrontation tell us about today’s enactments of police violence, the framing of these events under the rubric of militarization and the relationship between race, violence and security more broadly?

In examining this event, I do so through the lens of martial politics (Howell, 2018). I take as a starting assumption that the police violence enacted here is an example of liberal violence, which not only frames the MOVE bombing as a racialized violence at the constitutive centre of liberal governance but also enables us to see the 1985 event as extraordinary but not anomalous – it is part of the normal functioning of the liberal state. By approaching the study of the event in this way, I demonstrate how conceptions of war and representations of MOVE members and their way of living as threat worked together to shape the response of the city to MOVE as a fundamentally violent one. This places the response to MOVE by the Philadelphia police within a much longer history of the militarization of policing in the United States but more importantly shows how violence and war-making have always been a part of this project of domestic governance through anti-Black racism. It also allows us to draw further connections between various forms of liberal violence, enacted both within and outside the state.

Three important claims relation to the event itself, nothing ‘went wrong’ on 13 May. The excessive use of force by the city of Philadelphia was not the result of a rogue police department or a set of ‘bad apples’, and it should not be separated from the spectrum of violences that produce marginalized communities in the United States. Second, this examination of the MOVE case advances our understanding of the concept of martial politics. Martial politics not only weighs in on the militarization debate but also signals the centrality of racist violence to liberal state power. Here, I dig further into how we should conceptualize this violence and specifically how war and the construction of the category of the human are fundamentally intertwined. Finally, the arguments of this article speak directly to international relations (IR) following in line with arguments of methodological whiteness (Anievas et al., 2015; Bhambra, 2017; Howell and Richter-Montpetit, 2020; Rutazibwa, 2016). Racism and anti-Blackness cannot be ignored in the events and practices of state power that we study and how we study them – they are in fact foundational to the political categories we so often take as given. The liberal subject to be ‘secured’ and the human seen by the project of liberal governance – both of which MOVE members were written out of – are overdetermined as white. We cannot truly understand (and resist) the functioning of the state without coming to terms with that.

The next section reviews the concept of martial politics and the importance of this literature for the study of IR. It also connects this literature to similar scholarship on race, policing and militarization in other fields. After this, I turn to the case of the MOVE event, looking first at the ways the conceptions and technologies of war circulated through the actors and institutions involved. I then show how city officials constructed MOVE members as a threat, predominately through representations of their way of life. The final section before the conclusion revisits the framing of martial politics with these findings from the MOVE event and shows how this understanding of racialized and anti-Black violence develops our theorizations of the relationship between war/policing and liberal governance.

Militarization, race and martial politics

This section lays out the concept of martial politics and in particular its significance for thinking about the connections between militarization and race. Martial politics requires the placement of the event of 1985 more broadly within a framework (and history) of liberal violence, and in doing so I develop on and extend these recent debates in IR on race, war and militarization. Here, I also push the concept of martial politics further to explicitly engage the importance of the construction of the human to liberal violence. At the end of the section, I reflect on the importance of the relationship between war and the construction of the human to thinking about police violence, but I develop this further in the ‘Racialized violence of martial politics’ section after discussing the case of MOVE.

In a 2018 article, ‘Forget “militarization”’, Alison Howell makes the case for a concept of martial politics over militarization. Arguing that liberal politics always already are ‘of war’, she is concerned about the potentially empty politics that emerge from an understanding of militarism functionally as a process that can be reversed. Martial politics thus are co-constitutive of liberal governance. They are its norm (Howell, 2018: 121); as she writes they ‘inhere in liberal politics as they are enacted on those who are racialized, Indigenous, disabled, queer or otherwise constituted as a threat to civil order’. (Howell, 2018: 118) Martial politics, in other words, helps us to see how processes of militarization, or perhaps more simply the violence ‘of war’, have been variously directed against racialized groups and spaces throughout the longer modern history of liberal governance and specifically throughout the history of policing in the United States.

While directed into debates about militarization, Howell’s intervention connects to broader discussions and framings of war and liberal violence in IR. Martial politics, naming a politics of war at the basis of liberal governance, also begins to formulate a framework to think about the ways that liberal violence (and the process of militarization that comes along with it) is always already racialized, and is enacted unevenly, an argument that also forms the basis of Howell’s critique with Melanie Richter-Montpetit (2019) of Foucauldian Security Studies. Martial politics in this way makes sense of the violence that liberal governance enacts on marginalized people and communities.

I am not interested here in weighing in further on the militarization debates following Howell in order to redefine militarism – Manchanda and Rossdale (2021) do this, for example, in relation to the Black Panther Party. ¹ Rather, I want to take martial politics as a starting point to think further through the relationship between liberal violence and race in the context of militarization and the relationship of war/policing. Simply put, from this view, violence is foundational to the project of liberal governance and continues to be reproduced through practices such as community policing (Camp and Heatherton, 2016), humanitarian interventions (e.g. Jones, 2016; Weizman, 2011) and housing/city planning (Shabazz, 2015). In relation to liberalism, this is both an ontological and epistemological violence – a distinction that is important to understand the multiple ways that violence operates in and through liberal governance. It is ontological in the sense that violence is a function of liberalism’s creation and ongoing remaking. In a sense, this co-production of violence and liberalism is one identified by Dillon and Reid’s concept of the liberal way of war and others on the liberal state and warfare (e.g. Jabri, 2006; Mabee, 2016; Reid-Henry, 2015); however, what is missed is how racism is central to the constitution of liberal war. Here, I follow more the foundational violence Losurdo (2011) identifies in the twin birth of liberalism and chattel slavery. This violence is echoed in the violence of the frontier (Negri, 1999) and puts the violence of slavery at the centre of liberal governance not as a continual project of memorialization but as an ongoing process of violent demarcation.

This process of violent ground clearing goes hand in hand with liberalism’s epistemological violence and the two cannot be thought apart from each other (Canovan, 1990; Mehta, 1999). Liberalism traces out its political categories – freedom, the individual, humanity and so on – with a sword and none perhaps more violently than the category of the human. Martial politics, as a concept, needs to engage with this more directly and through applying it to the MOVE case, we can see directions to extend it. Black feminists have shown how the process of defining the human has always been a racialized one, albeit not just for liberal political thought but for modernity more generally. As Sylvia Wynter (2003: 264) writes,

‘Race’ was therefore to be, in effect, the non-supernatural but no less extrahuman ground (in the reoccupied place of the traditional ancestors/gods, God, ground) of the answer that the secularizing West would now give to the Heideggerian question as to the who, and the what we are.

Following Wynter, the construction of the human within the framework of liberal governance – the human that liberal governance ‘fosters’ or ‘secures’ – is a violent politics of being. To link this back to martial politics, we can understand how the violence that liberal governance enacts, say through the police, is not just an inherent violence of the state carried out against marginal groups. It is that – but it is also a practice of liberal governance actively reproducing itself through rearticulations of the demarcation of who counts as human.

Developing a further understanding of the violence of liberal governance and the construction of the human in this way enables us to see police violence and militarization – and the relationship between policing and war – more intimately connected with the broader project of the liberal (modern) state in three main ways. First, liberal governance is always of war, as Howell argues. The police as an apparatus of the liberal state thus is as well. It is the violence work of the state (Seigel, 2018). Violence takes many forms, meaning we should question calls for reform or ‘return’ to community policing. Second, this violence is productive. As Correia and Wall (2018) argue, the function of policing is order making, and so too is the relationship of violence to the liberal state. Whether as ‘liberal war’ or domestic policing (as it is global in its reach), liberal violence is the violence through which the liberal state is made, and made racist. Finally, and related to the function of order making, policing is one technology of power through which the category of the human and what it means to be human within the project of liberal governance is demarcated. Through this lens, contemporary ‘militarized’ policing is connected to a longer modern history of racial and anti-Black violence, as Simone Browne (2015) shows through the manhunts of slavery, lantern laws and the carceral surveillance and violence of the plantation, as well as connected to other modes and technologies of state power that enact violence across a spectrum of registers. Through these three understandings of the relationship between liberalism and violence, we see how the response of the police to MOVE was ‘of war’ in this much more fundamental sense and also how MOVE presented to the police and to the city an existential threat – one that required a reclaiming of the category of human by the police through violence. I turn to both of these now in the following section.

War and threat production in the 1985 bombing of MOVE

In this section, I turn to the event of 13 May 1985 and interactions between MOVE members and city officials, especially focusing on the Philadelphia police department. This is not meant to provide a comprehensive account of this event but rather to give an account of how violence and anti-Blackness suffused the city’s response. Looked at through the lens of martial politics, this response was clearly ‘of war’ and the next section demonstrates how conceptions of the city at war circulated through the event. But also this confrontation was a contestation over who counts as human, and the production of threat and the categorization of MOVE by the city are discussed after.

This section draws on information about the MOVE case from the MOVE Commission investigation, published accounts from participants and city officials in the event, and academic scholarship on the group and the 1985 bombing. While there is relatively little sustained scholarly engagement with MOVE’s relationship with the police and the city of Philadelphia (notable exceptions include Wagner-Pacifici’s work and Heather Ann Thompson’s forthcoming book), the group and the bombing feature in some texts that engage with the relationship between war and policing. For example, while not described in detail, Stuart Schrader (2019: 210) cites police action against MOVE – and specifically the use of tear gas in the 1985 confrontation – as an example of practices that circulate between domestic policing and international counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts. As Schrader argues, the carceral state and the national security state are intertwined, and policing and COIN have developed together. This relationship is seen clearly in the case of the MOVE bombing described below with, for example, the echoes of the Vietnam War that reverberate through the event. However, here I focus on the event and the relationship between the city and MOVE to bring out how racialized violence and the construction of the threat is produced at the intersection of war and policing.

A city at/of war

Linking the event of the MOVE bombing to war is not hard to do. In fact, Mayor Goode did this himself, making it clear that war in this case was more than metaphor. Speaking at a news conference later in the day on 13 May, he said, ‘This is not child’s play. What we have out there is war. And I knew from the very beginning that once we made that decision to go in there, it would in fact be war . . .’ (quoted in Anderson and Hevenor, 1987: 175). While he would soon begin to roll back his responsibility, Goode’s characterization of this event as war was echoed by other participants and through the testimonies in the MOVE Commission hearings. Here, I look at these circulations of war as well as the role that technology played in the militarization of the Philadelphia police. Through these imageries and weapons of war, I show how this event connects to a much longer history of violence within liberal governance.

In accounts of the MOVE event, there is a sense that violence was inevitable. As was a pattern in the City’s dealings with MOVE, the City viewed MOVE first and foremost as a police matter. Because of this, as a member of the Crisis Intervention Network argued, the city did not see confrontation as avoidable (Assefa and Wahrhaftig, 1990: 122). As Wagner-Pacifici (1994: 101) writes,

In the MOVE case the specter of violence was always present. Those responsible for policy and for legal processing were well aware of their own participation in the violence of the state . . . But they represented their violence-activating actions as having been willed by a force greater than themselves, something almost like fate.

We can also see the circulation of war in the way that past wars and deployment experiences shaped responses and ways of seeing MOVE and the events that unfolded. In particular, the Vietnam War seemed to shape many officials and police officers’ experiences of the MOVE events, relating also to the racial threat coding of MOVE members discussed in the next section. During the MOVE Commission hearings, testimonies were taken from some officers, witnesses, MOVE members and officials. One officer, for example, made the explicit connection of the violence in Philadelphia to Vietnam and compared the MOVE children to guerrilla fighters (Osder, 2013). This was part of an ongoing debate throughout the hearings about whether the children of MOVE members were innocent or culpable, the latter implying that their deaths might be less tragic. Much of this was expressed in the fear that children and adults, who were trying to escape the house through the back alley as the fire burned, had booby-trapped their bodies with explosives. Police gunfire prevented their escape (The New York Times, 1986). The officer who arrested Ramona Africa thought she at first might have been wired with a bomb like one he had seen in Vietnam (Wagner-Pacifici, 1994: 59). As Wagner-Pacifici (1994: 58) argues in her book Discourse and Destruction, ‘The analogy of Vietnamese children and explosives is significant. The specter of Vietnam, its weapons, personnel, psychological damage, hung heavily over the MOVE conflict and confrontation’. For Wagner-Pacifici (1994: 130), war was one of a few discourses that shaped the MOVE confrontation and was mobilized by officers and officials to justify the use of force. It is clear, however, that the state of war was manifest materially as well as in the city’s approach to MOVE.

As mentioned above, the variety of military-like weapons brought by the police on 13 May was staggering. This is compared to five guns found after the event in the MOVE house (Wagner-Pacifici, 1994: 134). It was also not the first time that tactics like this had been used against MOVE. In 1977, the police maintained a 10-month ‘siege’ of a MOVE house in another Philadelphia neighbourhood, limiting food, water and other supplies to the house (Assefa and Wahrhaftig, 1990: 27). As Achille Mbembe (2003: 30) has argued, ‘The state of siege is itself a military institution’ linking police violence in this case to a wider set of necropolitical practices of control (see also Floyd-Thomas, 2002: 17). In 1978, this conflict ended in a shootout with the police, resulting in the death of an officer and the beating of a MOVE member. Frustrated at the limitations on police action in the face of MOVE, then-Mayor Frank Rizzo said at a 1978 press conference, ‘Here is a group who for months have said that the police were out to kill them. The only people hurt were the police. Only in a democracy would they get away with what they’ve done’ (quoted in Anderson and Hevenor, 1987: 38).

One way to think about this police violence is to place 13 May within a longer history in the United States of the militarization of the police, especially in urban centres, understood through the transfer of military technologies and COIN tactics to police department (Graham, 2010; Schrader, 2019). This is undoubtedly true. The Philadelphia Bomb Squad wanted to acquire military-grade explosives and the weapons brought to the standoff demonstrated a long-standing incorporation of heavy weapons into the department. However, the disposition to war – in the mayor’s discourse, in the haunting of Vietnam, in the retelling of the event and so on – demonstrates a more fundamental relationship of war and violence to the police, which the incorporation of military weapons and tactics was an expression of. War, here, was not something that had merged with policing, but rather war named an orientation of violence to MOVE that was always already present in the Philadelphia police and city governance. What linked war to policing here was a shared violence: a violence foundational, or ontological, to liberal thought, and to the functioning of liberal governance.

Threat construction

The project of liberal governance has at its basis a function of order making and demarcation, and involved in this is the production and protection of the individual valued by that project. This valuation of the individual – of what life counts – is a violent valuation. In this understanding, it is not simply liberal governance fostering life and waging war on those antithetical to that fostering of life as Dillon and Reid (2009) and others argue. Rather it is the determination of this life itself, of the human secured by liberal governance, that is a process of violence, and therefore, as I come back to at the end of this section, our theorizations of liberal violence need to understand it as inherently racialized and centred around the construction of the category of the human. Seeing how life was valued and how MOVE as threat was produced on the side of the city and the police in the case of the 13 May event demonstrates this foundational violence, connecting policing and war in a different way that places both practices at the heart of the functioning liberal governance.

Police Commissioner Sambor and city officials more broadly viewed MOVE as an outside threat, and many pointed to MOVE’s way of life to emphasize the ‘otherness’ of MOVE members and their children. A common and related narrative depicted MOVE members as terrorists and as holding the city hostage (Wagner-Pacifici, 1994: 36). As City Councilwoman Joan Spector said at a press conference almost a week before the confrontation: ‘It is outrageous that this city is being held hostage by MOVE, but it is even more outrageous that city residents are unwittingly subsidizing those terrorists’ (quoted in Anderson and Hevenor, 1987: 87). The framing of MOVE as terrorists was supported by the emphasis on MOVE’s way of life, and concern that MOVE posed an existential threat to Philadelphia.

A book by Assefa and Wahrhaftig, published 5 years after the event, echoes the view of the police and the city and inadvertently demonstrates why the police response necessitated violence; violence was the basis of how the police approached MOVE from the beginning. As they reflect in the book’s conclusion,

Is it possible to resolve the conflicts with MOVE peacefully? Or is violence the only alternative to deal with this conflict? To a certain extent, the answer to this question depends on one’s assessment of MOVE’s basic nature, the motivation of the members, and whether one perceives MOVE as able to comprehend and respect negotiated processes. (Assefa and Wahrhaftig, 1990: 141)

MOVE’s basic nature, indeed, was what was debated, and determining this nature (as irrational, antithetical to society, terroristic, etc.) was seen as the justification for state violence. As an editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer stated the very next day on 14 May 1985, ‘Under normal conditions it would have been unthinkable to mobilize such massive force to evict occupants from a house, but there is nothing normal about MOVE’ (quoted in Wagner-Pacifici, 1994: 25).

While Wagner-Pacifici (1994: 72) argues that the issues about MOVE were rarely represented as being about race, this is precisely what these framings were about. This construction of threat was a kind of racial nationalism (Singh, 2017: 33). Seeing race war as fundamental to policing, war and liberal governance more broadly, and significantly linking together histories of US war-making, empire and domestic policing, Singh (2017: 34) shows how the project of the state becomes a function of ‘Who is an object of dread and elimination and who is a subject of rights and inclusion?’. This project of the state as race war manifests itself spatially in the city through practices such as incarceration, housing, surveillance and community policing, including broken windows/stop-and-frisk operations as iterations of ‘community’ policing (Browne, 2015; Camp, 2016; Camp and Heatherton, 2016; Shabazz, 2015). In these practices, war and policing are linked through the production of the enemy of the state, also with the effect of identifying a state of permanent war (Kelley, 2016) through practices of liberal governance that range from the uneven distribution of social welfare to police shootings – a connected spectrum from the ‘letting die’ to ‘taking life’ (Mbembe, 2003).

The city’s response to MOVE on 13 May, as well as before and after, is connected to structures of racism and anti-Blackness through the way life is produced and valued. The violence of the police was an enactment of a politics of being, a determination of the category of the human and what it means to be human (Wynter, 2003). In this case, as in all cases, the construction of the human is a violent construction – a necropolitical project (McKittrick, 2013) – and it is this construction that needs to be thought as one and the same with the ontological violence of liberal thought and governance.

Racialized violence of martial politics

The two themes pulled out of the MOVE case in this article – the circulation of war and the production of racialized threat – point to an interconnectedness between the practices of war and policing and the violences and relations of force that underpin them. What the MOVE case speaks to through these themes is less a process of the militarization of policing (although that happens in certain ways as well, such as through technology adoption) than a foundational violence (or foundation of violence) common to both. Liberal violence, as a racist violence, links these two practices, and recognizing it as such not only reframes war-making and foreign interventions, drawing them closer to policing practices at ‘home’ as Schrader (2019) argues, but as a racist violence it demonstrates how through these practices the category of the human is demarcated. Viewing the events of 13 May in this way advances our understanding of liberal violence along three lines that were outlined initially in the ‘Militarization, race and martial politics’ section. I revisit them here for how this changes our understanding of the relationship between war and policing, and of a martial politics more broadly, when we put the racialized construction of the human at its centre.

First, to view the event of the MOVE confrontation as part of a mode of liberal governance that is ‘of war’ is not only to place it within a larger phenomenon of police violence within the United States but also to place it within the frame of US military violence. Drone strikes and police violence each fill an interesting and uncomfortable place in the liberal imaginary. The drone strike that kills civilians and is conducted outside of the legal/geographical traditions of war is, much like the torture at Abu Ghraib (Puar, 2007), seen as an anomaly to the normal boundaries of liberal state violence (Grayson, 2016). Similarly, police shootings, like the one that led to Michael Brown’s death, are in the mainstream viewed as an anomalous tragedy to the state sanctioned use of force needed for police defence. Brown’s death was a tragedy but one that is repeated over and over through the very function of the police. The US government too, under the Obama administration, used the concept of self-defence, drawing parallels with police power, as one of its legal justifications for the programme of drone warfare (Kindervater, 2017), and the demonization of drone pilots and bad cops alike serve to reinforce this violence as anomalous and individualized. What does it mean, therefore, instead then to see these two practices as part of the normal order of liberal war-making and liberal governance and as connected through a mode of governance that is ‘of war’?

As Tyler Wall (2016) suggests, we need to move away from the exceptional framings of drone strikes and police shootings (and the state of exception literature favoured by much of the war on terror literature) to see how the production of ‘ordinary emergencies’ normalize these violences. Doing so also places the MOVE event within literature that is rethinking the relationship between war-making and policing, with the two practices being more intimately connected. Martial politics can name this connection and provide a link between war power and police power. As Neocleous (2014: 82) writes, ‘Liberal government, constituted supposedly for “peace and security,” turns out to be nothing less than a permanent exercise of the war power against these unsocial and lawless elements’.

Second, where this relationship between war and policing needs to develop, however, is in the area of what it produces – and what it produces and reproduces are these ‘unsocial and lawless elements’. Liberal violence therefore is productive – not in a value sense but in what it makes. It is productive of the liberal state particularly through the de(and re)marcation of one of the key objects (and subjects) of that state – the individual/human/Man. The aim here is to understand how these sites of violence, in West Philadelphia for example, or in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in Pakistan (Shaw and Akhter, 2012), are sites where liberalism is made and remade, and this has been historically true as well. This is a violence characterized by a continual division on life (Foucault, 2003: 254–255) (the life of the colonizers vs. the colonized, the slave vs. the master, the militant vs. the civilian, the MOVE member vs. the citizen, etc.) that is essentially an ordering principle serving as the mainstay of liberal order. We can draw transnational parallels here too between racism and anti-Blackness that move us, as Ali and Whitham (2018) argue, away from ‘security’ as a paradigm here to one focused on being. How might we, for example, understand the ‘conceptual Muslim’ and the ‘conceptual MOVE member’ through a common anxiety of the liberal state often made through violence?

Thus, violence as racialized violence and the modes and mechanism of liberal governance must be thought together. Following Howell and Richter-Montpetit’s critique of Foucauldian security studies for failing to engage with these connections, ‘we must trace the ways in which racism is constitutive of biopower and acknowledge that certain racialized lives always already signify openness to not only instrumental but also gratuitous violence such as chattel slavery’ (Howell and Richter-Montpetit, 2019: 14). This speaks to what Denise Ferreira da Silva (2007: xiv) calls the ‘political force of the racial’, which she pushes beyond Foucault to the birth of the subject of enlightened modern scientific thinking.

Finally, these together show how policing as a practice of the liberal state is a technology of power that is inherently racialized – and it is in this sense first and foremost that it is militarized. Order making and order maintaining are functions enacted on populations – functions which are ways of seeing, knowing, sorting and culling. As Simone Browne (2015) has shown, these functions of surveillance and sorting have a long history, from biometrics to lantern laws. But their racialized nature persists. Understanding racialization fundamentally as a way of seeing, Lyndsey Beutin (2017: 12) writes, ‘. . . racialization remains a way of seeing – power’s embedded gaze – even if, and perhaps especially when, liberal institutions no longer “see” race’.

As a way of seeing, racialization in this way is also another link between policing and the ‘drone stare’ – or more broadly between imperial and colonial practices of violence and domestic security practices. For Wall and Monahan (2011: 250), this link is the ‘translation of bodies into “targets” for remote monitoring and destruction’, but it also again speaks to the importance of thinking about space and histories of war and policing on a continuum of violence. Writing about the shooting of Michael Brown, but no less true of Philadelphia’s killing of MOVE members, Robin D. G. Kelley (2016: 18) writes,

. . . Black people are not only devalued in the United States but treated as enemy combatants. It is not simply that our lives don’t matter. We are a threat, an enemy, which largely explains why police employ lethal force as a first resort.

Conclusion

The violence of 13 May 1985 says something about America – this is America, and this is the project of liberal governance more generally. Placing Philadelphia’s encounter with MOVE in a longer historical context of police violence as well as within a larger contemporary assemblage of state violence such as targeted killing reveals the liberal state at work at home and abroad, and back and forth across that border. The liberal state is made (reterritorialized, in another register) through these encounters, which are examples of the martial politics of liberal governance. The relationship between war and policing, in other words, is fundamental – ontologically and epistemologically– to the functioning of the liberal state.

Studying the case of MOVE shows us how martial politics is ‘of war’. The City of Philadelphia viewed itself at war in a literal sense, and the analogies to Vietnam helped to heighten this view. Violence also felt almost ordained, however, with the city’s approach to MOVE. As Wagner-Pacifici (1994: 101) observed, “almost like fate.”

The case of MOVE, however, requires us to think about how martial politics and our formulations of the relationship between war and policing need to better examine the function of violence as racialized violence that demarcates who counts as human/subject/citizen/and so on. The violence enacted by the city went hand in hand with the representation of MOVE as a threat. The form this threat took was of a radical other: a terrorist, a non-citizen, a savage. This is Kelley’s (2016) ‘Thug Nation’, and this process of criminalization and dehumanization is part of what produces the concept of the human as liberal subject and (replete with) therefore all of its contradictions. The event of 13 May is the violence of the liberal state, but it is also importantly the making of this state – it is the active and violent reproduction of the free and white individual that is the subject of this project of governance. Not only should events like the MOVE bombing be more visible in our research programmes in IR and politics, but we also need a better accounting of the ways that racism and racialized violence are at the centre of much of the global structures and practices we study, because that is precisely the basis on which they have been made.