Before exploring this topic, it is important to outline where this piece is coming from. The authors of this blog, a group of co-founders at Our Generation for Inclusive Peace, write from a place of privilege, being western-centric, mainly middle class, majority white, cisgender, and able-bodied. The privileges that allow us to write this piece are the very reason that we must question and disrupt that privilege. OGIP aims to be a feminist, intersectional and anti-colonial organization which pushes us to question the power structures that enable our voices to be heard. Those power structures that protect us, are the same that kill and silence so many, demonstrated through police brutality against the Black community in both the USA and around the world. We aim to use this space to raise questions rather than exhaust the possible answers; to recognize the voices of those who the mainstream media don’t allow to be heard; to bridge the connections between the use of violence by states and the COVID-19 outbreak, and to think about how active allyship can help to disrupt power structures and imbalances.
Introduction
This piece aims to connect the use of violence by state forces, militarization and traditional notions of state security, demonstrating how this has manifested in recent events surrounding the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the reality of and responses to COVID-19. The piece explores how state violence, COVID-19 and BLM are tangled in this large net of necropolitics - the disposability of certain bodies and the prioritization of some lives over others. COVID-19 has seen states use their power to restrict movement and strengthen surveillance mechanisms, and we have seen brute force used against BLM protesters by the police in recent weeks. Intersectionality plays a key role in the context of police violence and COVID-19 - as age, gender, race, ethnicity, shape interactions under state violence and position certain bodies as those who have worth and those who are disposable, placing value on some lives and not others.
We argue that pivoting away from traditional notions of state security and militarization and towards a framework of human security is essential if we are to see a radical transformation of the power structures that currently privilege certain lives. It is necessary to ensure the communities that are most affected by police brutality and the current pandemic - Black people, people of color, the LGBTQIA+ community - are at the center of any relief and recovery efforts and the architects of any future systems to redress the power imbalances they have historically experienced. In the final section of this piece we reflect on the calls from these communities to demilitarise, defund and dismantle as a means to transform power and understandings of security.
Black Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter (BLM) is an organized movement that originally formed in 2012 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in a shooting that killed the Black teenager, Travyon Martin, in February 2012. The movement started the hashtag “#BlackLivesMatter” in 2013 on social media and in 2014 became nationally recognized after the demonstrations following the murder of two Black men, Michel Brown, in Ferguson, and Eric Garner, in New York. Since the Ferguson protests, participants in the movement have demonstrated against the deaths of numerous other Black people by police brutality and/or while in police custody. The originators of the hashtag and call to action, three Black women - Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi - expanded their project into a national network in the US of over 30 local chapters between 2014 and 2016. The overall BLM movement is a decentralized network and has no formal hierarchy and has been taken up in other countries across the globe.
Following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police there have been demonstrations across the US which have been met with police violence. In Buffalo, two officers were suspended after they were seen shoving an elderly white man to the ground and leaving him to bleed. At another protest, security forces in Washington DC fired pepper balls and smoke bombs to disperse demonstrators outside the White House, allowing President Donald Trump to walk to a nearby church for a photo opportunity.
The movement that started in the US has spread across the world, from South America to Palestine, hundreds of thousands joined the # to show their support and to call attention to police brutality in their own countries. For example, Reports released by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International in 2016 show that the military police in Rio de Janeiro has killed more than 8,000 people in the past decade, including 645 in 2015 only, with the majority of those killed being young Black men.
While in some countries police brutality is the main cause that triggers demonstrations, in others, it is the abusive use of force by the state that comes in different forms, whether it is xenophobia, mass shootings, or detention centers, but with one thing in common, the demonstration of the disposability of Black lives as they are murdered by state forces.
Definitions of Security and the Black Lives Matter Protests
Police brutality is not a new phenomenon - police and state security forces have been using violence against their own citizens for centuries. Traditional notions of security prioritize sovereignty, state values and the security of the “state” above all else. The prioritization of state security has traditionally meant that countries see external militaries as an existential threat, and organize themselves in relation to this threat. This has led to a process of militarization through which the values of the military are revered, and bearing arms, power and dominance over an “other” are held in high esteem. This becomes dominant in society and impacts on all areas of life, including social and cultural.
Nowhere can we see this militarization more clearly than in the images of the police on the streets of the United States in riot gear and armored vehicles, tear-gassing citizens and firing rubber bullets into crowds. Cynthia Enloe notes that this process of militarization, not only in the military but in society as a whole, helps to reinforce gendered and racial hierarchies, privileging masculinity and white bodies.
There is evidence to suggest that the increased militarization of police forces leads to more deaths at the hands of the police, as it sends out a message that external militaries are no longer the largest threat to the state and the enemy is your fellow citizens, who are categorised as ‘other’. When the BLM protestors are treated as a threat to “law and order” and violently dispersed with tear gas by the National Guard at the order of the President in the United States, it is hard to see this as anything other than a declaration of war on Black bodies and those standing in solidarity, fighting for an anti-racist future. These acts are a demonstration that anti-racist values are at odds with the values of the state, something which has been all too obvious to the activists and founders of the BLM movement and the Civil Rights activists that came before.
State violence and police brutality has been defined as a “necropolitical project” - demonstrating the disposability of bodies and the prioritization of certain lives over others. Mbembe, who coined the term, described necropolitics as when “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die”. Mbembe argues that the expression of power and sovereignty are deployed on the population by the state to confer the ”status of the living dead”. “I can’t breathe” - the phrase uttered by George Floyd moments before his murder that has become characteristic of the recent BLM protests - is a powerful manifestation of the power of the state over Black lives, and the institutional structures that define these lives as disposable.
COVID-19 and Black lives
The context of the current BLM demonstrations taking place during a pandemic has led to particularly stark violence from the state in response to protesters, particularly in the US. Curfews have been put in place in the US and other countries under the guise of protection from the spread of the virus but this has further encouraged violence against protesters. Furthermore, when you compare the violent police response to the peaceful BLM protesters and the non-existent police response to armed white anti-lockdown protesters it becomes clear that this police violence is racialized and institutionalized. This type of state violence has not been limited to the US, and across the world COVID-19 has shed light on the abusive use of force by many states in the name of security. In Central America, women human rights defenders were persecuted for breaking curfew. In Nigeria, police forces were brutally used to ensure that the lockdown was being followed by the population, which was ignored by activists who went on the streets to call out the abuse by police forces.
The health crisis of COVID-19 is no different and has had a disproportionate impact on Black lives. In the US where Black workers are more likely to be working in essential services, particularly healthcare where “Black workers are about 50% more likely to work in the healthcare and social assistance industry and 40% more likely to work in hospitals, compared with white workers”. When this is looked at intersectionally taking gender into account, it becomes clear that during COVID-19 the lives of Black women are most at risk, as over 70% of the global healthcare workforce is made up of women and according to analysis by the New York Times “one in three” jobs carried out by women are deemed essential. This is further compounded as many that are designated “key workers” are paid far lower than the average salary and are in a lower socio-economic class to those who are able to work safely from home throughout the pandemic, again impacting Black individuals and communities the most.
Changes to notions of security
As demonstrated, the global approach to peace and security has created and reinforced the notion of state security and militarism, which gives excessive power to state security forces and militarizes them in the name of ‘protection’. This understanding and implementation of security solely benefits the state, rather than tending to the needs of the individual citizens or communities. This has been apparent throughout the pandemic where we have seen shortages of Personal Protective Equipment leaving healthcare professionals and carers vulnerable to the virus, in opposition we have seen police forces and militaries with enough military equipment to fight a full-scale war. When countries and societies are militarized: we are prepared for war but not a pandemic. The outcome is that countries are more prepared to harm its citizens, or those from other states, than protect them from a deadly virus, when a pandemic has been at the top of many countries’ risk registers for decades.
This militarized notion of security creates and reinforces inequality and leads to the direct loss of life in marginalized communities, both through the impact of COVID-19 and through police violence. In the US this can be seen through the historic mistreatment of Black people, in particular Black men, by the police, a state sanctioned tool of security. The BLM movement provides a necessary moment to re-interrogate this notion of security and how it is defined, in particular with the backdrop of the COVID-19 crisis. There is a need to reimagine what security means and looks like so it can shift from being a tool used to subjugate marginalized communities through state violence to a tool for the creation of inclusive and sustainable peace for all.
In the 1990s, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) embarked upon a more expansionist agenda that included thematic issues, such as human security and human rights. Human security was defined by UNDP in 1994 as follows:
Human security challenges the traditional notion of militarized security and instead defines security at the human level, as opposed to the state level. It calls for people-centered security, built upon the notion that certain individuals are more vulnerable and disproportionately affected by disease, conflict and economic shocks than others. This recognition of vulnerabilities also requires a recognition of structural inequality and the need to radically transform structures of power and understandings of peace and security.
To realize a world where human security is prioritized, marginalized voices - including people of color, women and young people - must be centered in peace and security spaces and solutions to peace and security challenges must shaped and driven by the groups most affected. This requires a radical shift and transformation in the way we think of security and where power is dispersed to ensure it is not held in traditional circles but redistributed to those who have for so long been excluded from and neglected in peace and security spaces. This shift includes moving the notion of security away from the state to instead focus on people and communities.
How to show support
After reflecting on our positionality and unpacking the linkages between state-security, BLM and COVID-19, how do we move forward towards active allyship? It is important to actively listen to what the BLM movement is demanding and not erase again the voices of those on the streets. BLM is an organized movement with a simple agenda that brings steps on how to end police brutality: to demilitarize, to defund and to dismantle the police. This agenda is intrinsically linked to notions of security and is necessary in challenging state violence and redefining security from a human perspective.
Demilitarize
Context: In many countries, the police force is embedded within military institutions in their approach to organization, budgeting and training. As explored above, the militarization of the state entails among other things a military approach to public security. As Angela Davis elaborate in her essays “From Ferguson to Palestine”, the Black community, especially Black men, are disproportionately targeted by the industrial prison complex (the growth of the US prison industry through the influence of the state and private corporations). Davis also argues that the “War on Terror'' has militarized the police response when addressing urban violence in the US in the post 9/11 era. In other countries, the linkages between militarization and public security are also evident. In Brazil, the military police is a direct legacy of the country’s colonial period, when Emperor Dom. Pedro II started using the Portuguese royal force as urban police. The military police was again strengthened during the Brazilian dictatorship when the different police forces were unified under the military.
Action: Action needs to be taken to disrupt the militarized mindset that prioritizes state security over human security through:
Taking a human-centered approach to policing through community-oriented police
Demilitarizing police training
Creating partnerships between law enforcement and the communities they work in
Using holistic perspectives and community support mechanisms to reduce crime
Rehabilitating offenders within the community with the ultimate aim of abolishing prisons and establishing alternative systems of care and community well-being (as cited by Critical Resistance and Incite!)
Defund
Context: The investments in state-sanctioned violence against its own people are vast. The US spends about $100 billion annually on policing and an additional $80 billion on incarceration, whereas prior to, and in the midst of, COVID-19 cities across the country have faced substantial health, education and social support budget cuts. Investing in police at the cost of healthcare, education, and social support has a disproportionate impact on Black and Latinx communities, who have the highest poverty rates in the US and are most likely to need to access state services, as well as being disproportionately impacted by over-policing.
Actions: Police should be working to keep people safe, not contributing to a system that profits from stopping, searching, ticketing, arresting and incarcerating people in communities. Defunding the police needs to happen through:
Cutting huge police budgets and investing the funds in social services and other human-centred approaches instead of policing and militarization (as referenced in WILPF’s COVID-19 Campaign: disarm the police rebuild or communities)
Funding government programs and not for profits working in health (mental and physical), education, housing and social services
Dismantle
Context: In order for the power of the police and of the militarized state to be dismantled, both defunding and demilitarization have to be actioned. Recognition of the fact that the structures of the state and the function of the police are designed to reinforce inequality and racism is paramount when challenging this reality. There has to be a direct move to dismantle violent institutions and systems to make way for new systems that prioritize care and support for all citizens to create a truly safe and secure society for all.
Action: Dismantling the unequal power structures in society, including oppressive state apparatus, needs to happen through:
Acknowledging histories of state violence and oppression
Addressing the immediate implications of this violence through material and psychosocial support
Creating meaningful platforms and dialogues about necessary change at the community, national and global level
Centring, listening and learning from Black activists, groups, and organizations, in particular, those led by womxn
Creating evidence-based policies to end the use of force by the police and hold the police to account for the violence they undertake (as referred to by The Campaign Zero)
Conclusion
As elaborated in this piece, the use of state violence, state-centered security approaches versus human-centred approaches, and the impacts of COVID-19 and response measures are all intertwined. Disrupting the necropolitics that keep killing Black bodies and devaluing black lives is necessary to shift the current narrative of security that excludes and harms certain communities. To demilitarize, defund and dismantle the police is to allow ourselves to reimagine how we conceptualize security, in a more inclusive and intersectional way, that prioritizes the lives of those that have been marginalized for centuries and situates them as equal.
OGIP TEAM
Isadora de Moura, 28, is a Brazilian intersectional and decolonial feminist, currently supporting the Outreach and Partnership pillar at OGIP, where she is a co-founder. She currently lives in Amman, Jordan with her fiancée and two perfect dogs. In her spare-time, Isadora likes to dismantle patriarchy and watch trash series on Netflix.
Florence Waller - Carr, 25, is an intersectional feminist activist working on gender equality, youth participation and peace and security. She is a co-founder of OGIP where she works on the research pillar of the organization. She also is also a Policy Advisor on Gender Equality for Plan International and in her spare time is happiest on her bike.
Charlotte Mulhearn, 25, is a co-founder of OGIP working on the research pillar. She is an intersectional feminist researcher, advocate and activist, engaged in the transformation of peace and security policy and practice.
Follow them on Twitter: @isa_tav @FlorenceWallerC @Charmulhearn
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