Violence Work

“To follow the richly detailed, archivally researched story of Micol Seigel's Violence Work is to access a nuanced and convincing conceptualization of policing as a strategic socialization of the imminent and permanent threat of police violence. Reading Violence Work is a sustained exercise in demystification: any notion that policing is remotely separable from military power is thoroughly disrupted. Seigel's tremendously impactful book will reshape academic and public conversations and will serve as a pillar in the ongoing work of critical carceral studies, critical ethnic studies, and American studies.” - Dylan Rodríguez, author of Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition

“By looking at the short life and extended afterlife of the Office of Public Safety, Micol Seigel identifies how policing has always violated the ‘mythic borders’ that define it—between civilian and military forces, the state and market, and the local and global. Violence Work addresses urgent questions regarding contemporary policing and its supposedly increasing militarization, excessive brutality (with impunity), relation to corporate capital, and spread beyond local and national borders. It is required reading for anyone interested in state violence.” - A. Naomi Paik, author of Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II

"An exceptionally sophisticated exploration of the nature of policing in relation to 'violence work.' . . . Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, and faculty."
  - D. O. Friedrichs, Choice

"[Violence Work] reveals a great deal about what we do and do not know about state-sponsored violence as well as how best to get there. . . . Seigel portrays state repression in a relatively new light, leading to refreshing insights about theory, data sources, and unexamined hypotheses. The book kills fascists because if you follow the logic contained within it, you are led directly to perpetrators of violence, as well as the varying types of institutions in which they are found." - Christian Davenport, Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics

“Violence Work is an eye-opening, detailed and timely book that, for its historical approach, is an unusual appraisal of police legitimacy, which may not only to attract the attention of scholars and students of political science and criminal justice but also of policymakers, especially in this time of discussion of dismantling and defunding the police.”