As we explored in the introduction, militarised police forces often stand on the dividing lines between ‘in’ groups and ‘out’ groups, sustaining inequalities and oppressive power relationships. We can expect climate breakdown and endemic economic inequalities to make these divisions starker. Another factor is the increasingly extreme methods of energy extraction in which states and private companies are penetrating new areas, digging deeper, moving fossil fuels over greater distances, and destroying the environments on which many people depend for their survival.
This is clearly playing out in Canada, where indigenous peoples like the Wet’suwet’en in British Colombia have been resisting the occupation and destruction of their lands by companies intent on mining minerals, or using their land as routes for gas pipelines, with the full backing of the state. In the case of the Wet’suwet’en, the RCMP, which was formed in 1873 as the ‘North-West Mounted Police’, just six years after Canada was established as a nation state, have been enforcing an injunction brought by CoastalGaslink Pipeline. The RCMP have repeatedly supported extractivist projects including pipelines and hydroelectric dams, and have been described by indigenous communities as being like ‘an occupying foreign army’. Notes from an RCMP strategy session showed that officers argued for ‘lethal overwatch’ – meaning the deployment of officers prepared to use lethal force – during the operation to clear the Wet’suwet’en’s Gidimt’en roadblock. The raid was conducted by RCMP officers dressed in military fatigues, carrying assault rifles, and 14 people were arrested.
The raids prompted a huge wave of direct action across Canada and more widely, with street protests and activists blocking railway lines.
In Brazil, the police adopt similarly heavily militarised approaches, ostensibly to apprehend members of drug gangs, but often operating in communities that are historically ostracised and marginalised. Writing in 2020, César Muñoz, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, described how ‘police open fire recklessly, without regard for the lives of bystanders’. In the first four months of 2020, the Brazilian police killed over 600 people. Muñoz speculates that the poverty of the communities that experience such brutality explains why police officers in Brazil feel able to operate in this manner.
Militarism struggles with difference and diversity because, at its root, it is defined by conformity and order, so those who don’t conform are soon perceived as a threat, or potential threat, to be eliminated. This mentality drives a perception that communities that don’t conform are inherently hostile territory that require pacification. Militarism takes the logic of the battlefield and transposes it into streets and communities. Large crowds are seen as ‘mobs’, and gatherings become ‘riots’. With this heightened sense of threat, police officers are more likely to make mistakes, misreading situations and rapidly escalating to the use of lethal violence; and it is invariably on lines of deeply embedded discrimination that this happens.
Normalisation
Writing in the New Statesman, the British political journalist Paul Mason described a scene at a train station in a major city:
It was, at first sight, just an ordinary rush hour scene at Birmingham's New Street station. Three cops from the British Transport Police ordering flat whites in a cafe, amid a short break on what must have been a busy shift. One was armed with a pistol and kevlared-up, the others were wearing stab vests and bulky tactical clothing. All were equipped with earpieces, tasers, pepper sprays – and all were tense, scanning the busy street intently as they waited for their drinks. Sadly, this level of kit, this intensity and militarisation of policing now looks so normal that few in the coffee bar gave them a second look.
Of course, the UK is an outlier; in many – if not most – countries, it is simply the norm for police officers to carry firearms. The significant thing here is not the equipment, but the normalisation of militarisation; deeply concerning, because it suggests that the public accepts, and perhaps even condones, these processes when they need to be confronted and questioned. The militarisation of police forces is not a new process – as we saw in the case of the RCMP in Canada, there are examples of police units still active today with roots in colonial history that were specifically set up to oppress and subjugate.
Such processes are ongoing and continue to pervade our lives, as well as political discourses, in different ways. For example, in the UK there were significant protests throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and yet there were ‘no riot cops’ but by the 1980s the riot shield became ‘the ultimate symbolic barrier between the powerful and the powerless’ as a growing ‘presumption towards aggression and offence in riot policing’ took hold globally. Mason identifies a specific event– the breaking up of a trade union protest at a printworks in Warrington, on 30 November 1983, when riot squads were used to break up a picket line – as a ‘turning point’ in how police forces in the UK deal with public order. Mason argues that there was no debate in the 1980s regarding the militarisation of the police in the UK.
Similar processes occurred in the USA as SWAT teams established in the 1960s shifted from responding to terrorist threats and hostage situations, to becoming a routine part of daily policing. In 1980 there was an estimated 3,000 SWAT raids, increasing to 50,000 in 2006 and 80,000 in 2012.
Militarisation in Mexico has happened in an even more extreme manner, and we can identify similar processes of normalisation, as ‘temporary’ deployments of the military in ‘auxiliary’ roles in 2006 became a permanent fixture of life in Mexico, with the armed forces ‘effectively substituting for –rather than merely supporting – the police’. In 2018 the government tried to change the law to allow the military to expand its role when deployed in ‘interior security’ operations. Though the Supreme Court ruled this proposed legislation unconstitutional, the day before the ruling, President López Obrador (commonly known as AMLO) announced a new 40,000-strong, military-controlled National Guard, which began operations in mid-2019. The Guard is a hybrid force made up of the army police, naval police and federal police, which López Obrador said should show ‘military discipline’.
People around the world are experiencing similar militarisation of the police forces, defining what is ‘normal’. As soon as these processes come under scrutiny we see them for what they are: violent, oppressive and discriminatory. These processes often take place behind the scenes, as political leaders demand more power and control in order to keep some parts of their populations ‘safe’; they are inherently difficult to challenge or question, because dissenting voices are often targeted by the very systems they seek to challenge. Of course, this militarisation directly benefits some parts of society – assets are protected and inequalities sustained – while for others they are simply invisible. But nowhere are they inevitable or neutral – they are an active choice by people with power, who will use moments such as the current Covid-19 pandemic to expand militarisation to coerce and control and to enforce lockdowns and curfews. It is of course difficult to say what the long-term impact of this will be, but security forces have rarely given up powers handed to them.
We are all antimilitarists
Our planet is at a junction point – we have stark choices to make as we face complex ecological, social and political challenges now, and in the years ahead. Some power-holders and decision-makers will seek to perpetuate the existing order, which is characterised by rampant economic inequality, racism and other forms of structural discrimination, and a destructive, exploitative consumptive use of the finite natural resources. ‘Solutions’ to these problems will be technical and technological, not transformative, and sustaining this status quo will continue to rely on increasingly militarised and enforced boundaries between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’, the ‘in’ and the ‘out’ groups.
Militarism is the glue that underpins violence being meted out to people around the world at the hands of the police and security forces. It will continue to sustain the violent, abusive, racist, oppressive policing that looks to uphold an oppressive and destructive status quo. It affects every one of us, so it is everyone’s concern. Militarism is therefore, not just an ‘issue’ for the peace movement, as it drives and sustains much of the injustice and violence experienced worldwide today.
We can only fully respond to the ecological and social crises facing humanity and all forms of life, and do so in ways that are radically transformative, by demilitarising the institutions that sustain the status quo. We are only just beginning to understand fully what that might mean, but it is clear that a world transformed will be a world demilitarised.