On the Critique of Paramilitarism

This essay considers the ideological work performed by the term “paramilitary.” Departing from the fury directed at paramilitary policing in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, it argues that despite its use to critique the police, the term “paramilitary” functions to legitimize police violence. The notion “paramilitary” frames the shared use of lethal technology by police and military forces in a way that obscures the constancy of exchange between them: as an insistence on the distinction between military and police, the term anchors the legitimacy of both. In three brief sections offering definitions of key terms, histories of police and military overlap in the US, and state theory in relation to police and violence, this essay argues that the prefix “para” works to distinguish, rhetorically, police force from military violence. This argument urges critics of police and other axes of state violence to work actively against the ideological and affective work enabled by the “para” and instead expose the lethal capacity of state violence inflicted at home and abroad.