The article offers a critique of the ‘militarization of the police’ discourse, which has gained substantial attention in both academia and the media. Particularly influential in the United States, proponents of this concept claim that the ‘traditional’ boundaries between war and policing are blurring. However, this concept is both historically and politically problematic. The fact that right-wing libertarians have been at the forefront of calling attention to the militarization of the police highlights that while it is a thesis which critiques state power it fails to provide a critique of capital. As a result, it constantly falls back into a liberal frame of trying to delineate boundaries between military and police, rather than looking at how war and police power overlap and conjoin in everyday pacification.

The term pacification is regularly used in urban scholarship as a euphemism for state violence and social control. However, this term is used loosely and is underexplored as a concept. This paper aims to address this gap by discussing recent critical theory on pacification, which argues that the term captures the combination of war and police power in the replication of capitalist order. This concept will then be applied to a case study of "blitzes", a practice which became central to urban management in Johannesburg from the late 1990s. Originally, the word was used to refer to aggressive raids led by the police in "trouble" spots, but has since been expanded to include inspections on general services. Understood as pacification, blitzes reflect how the state is constantly engaged in a low-intensity war against perceived "disorder", which is intended to control and discipline spaces in South Africa's largest city.

This article presents an analysis of police violence in contemporary South Africa and it is argued that this violence is aimed at upholding an unequal social order. Recent years have seen an alarming rise in the number of deaths and assaults at the hands of the police. Much academic, media and civil society commentary has blamed this on an apparent program of police ‘remilitarization’. Despite its critical tone much of this commentary upholds that the police should be an apolitical force of good in society, but has been led astray by bad policy. In contrast, more radical voices have suggested that the police are a brutal mechanism of state violence, targeted primarily against the black poor. This article will build on this growing critique by discussing recent theory on the links between police institutions, war and capitalist society. It will be argued that state violence and control, of which police brutality is a key force, are not aberrations but in fact are central to the upholding of the post-apartheid liberal order.

The massive security assemblages surrounding major sporting events and political summits embody two layers of spectacle. On the one hand, security operations are central to the governance of entertainment and media imagery. Simultaneously these security measures are profoundly theatrical and calibrated for the maximum visual impact: the spectacle of security itself. Some critical thinkers have described this dual spectacle as indicative of a contemporary state-corporate obsession with image and perception management, an obsession which detracts from ‘valid’ security concerns. By contrast I argue that spectacle and theatricality are in fact highly functional components of the pacification projects of state and capital. With reference to Guy Debord’s conception of ‘spectacle’, this article highlights how mega-events reveal, in highly dramatised form, the logic of pacification. Using the 2010 FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) soccer World Cup as a case study, the article demonstrates how police and military power are mobilised to secure accumulation, to enforce social control and to extend the power and arsenal of the state security apparatus. What is truly spectacular about mega-event security is not just the incorporation of media templates into the working of state forces. Rather, the rhetoric and concept of security itself becomes a form of spectacular power as it serves to both obscure and justify how mega-events are ultimately projects of class power.

Summary The FIFA World Cup and the Summer Olympics are the most prestigious major sporting events in the world, and host governments implement security measures to match this stature. While global concerns about terrorism have led to a dramatic upsurge in the extent of security measures, the perceived threat of urban crime is becoming an increasingly prominent cause for apprehension. This has been of particular importance to South Africa’s recent 2010 World Cup and for the unprecedented sequential hosting of both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics in Brazil. In both contexts, security has been used as a statement of intent: the respective states have instrumentalized mega-events as an international platform to signal their ability to secure urban environments. This article will focus on a comparative study of areas in which the respective security preparations for the World Cup in Brazil have overlapped with the measures deployed in South Africa. Using examples of how Brazilian authorities have sought advice from their South Africa counterparts, it will suggest that both countries have adopted comparable risk aversion strategies.