The militaristic view of foreign threats introduces the state’s quest for total security, legitimizing violence and exploitation of indigenous societies

The analytic of militarism requires first a focus on the United States as produced through settler colonialism (Morgensen 2011; Smith 2012; Hixson 2013; Veracini 2013). A. Bonds and Inwood (2015) explained settler colonialism as a continuously unfolding project of empire that is enabled by and through specific racial configurations that are tied to geographies of white supremacy. In a U.S. context, settler colonialism begins with the removal of first peoples from the land and the creation of racialized and gendered labor systems that make the land productive for the colonizers. This includes the removal of Native peoples and geographies of indentured servitude, slavery, sharecropping, and, more contemporarily, urban abandonment and practices of mass imprisonment. Settler colonialism, therefore, emphasizes the ongoing processes of racialized capital accumulation and displacement necessary to sustain the permanent occupation of a territory. In this sense, it is an enduring structure—an interrelated political, social, and economic process that continuously unfolds—requiring continued reconfigurations and interventions by the state (Wolfe 2006). Because of the constant reworking of social and political economic hierarchies necessary to sustain settler relations, this sociospatial dialectic is central to understanding how particular place-based configurations of race, class, ethnicity, and gender come to predominate in the United States (for a broader discussion see S. Hall 1996; Gilmore 1999; A. Bonds and Inwood 2015). According to Smith (2012), settler colonialism is sustained by three primary logics that enshrine white supremacy. The first of these logics is that of slavery, which is usually premised on the enslavement of black people, the devaluation of black life, and the racialized political economy established through this system. Rather than being located in the past, the logic of slavery mutates and mobilizes across time and space, systematized through various structures of social control that dispossess and retain black bodies as permanent property of the state. This logic connects slavery, sharecropping, welfare programs, and mass imprisonment (Smith 2012). The logic of slavery rationalizes racial exploitation and is the cornerstone for the very notion of private property. As Harris (1993) argued, “The origins of property rights in the United States are rooted in racial domination” (1734) that is connected to slavery and gives rise to a very specific form of U.S.-style political economy built on and through the subordination of persons of color. Thus, slavery introduces into the life of the nation the routine and naturalized “statesanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” that is the heart of U.S.-style racism (Gilmore 2007, 28). The associated practices and systems not only justify death as the “collateral consequences” of U.S. development, but they undergird the social and premature death of structural racism (Gilmore 2007). A second and interconnected logic is genocide, premised on the ongoing disappearance of indigenous peoples in support of the appropriation and privatization of indigenous lands (Smith 2012). Genocide sustains a spatial politics of erasure and exclusion, institutionalized by state practices that justify indigenous removal and settler land claims. The practices of genocide are animated by and through logics of private property that connect geographies of indigenous disappearance with labor systems meant to make the land productive. Finally, a third pillar is orientalism, grounded in the belief of the inferiority and threatening menace of non-Western nations and peoples (Smith 2012).1 This introduces into the United States a state of permanent warfare in which the nation is consistently besieged by enemies (externally and internally); as a consequence, there is a constant need to protect “the well-being of empire” (Smith 2012, 69). The foundational rationales of slavery, genocide, and orientalism contour the white supremacist settler state: The founding moments of US nationalism [meaning the social and cultural identity of the nation] are foundational to both state and culture. The US was conceived in slavery and christened by genocide. These early practices established high expectations of state aggression against enemies of the national purpose and that valorized armed men in uniform as the nation’s true sacrificial subjects. (Gilmore 2002, 20) These logics are reformulated and continue to take shape in an era of ostensible color-blindness predominated by official discourses and government commitments to racial equality. Even as overt racism is eschewed, taken for granted socioeconomic hierarchies, racial exploitation, and the redistribution of wealth reproduce and sustain white supremacy. The U.S. settler state internalizes a “righteous violence” predicated on an expanding “quest for total security” that has come to characterize domestic and foreign policy (Hixson 2013, 198). Although there are myriad ways to explore the interrelations between state-sanctioned violence and militarism, we find the connections between domestic policing and the U.S. military-industrial complex to be particularly illustrative. Kraska and Cubellis (1997) noted that there is a long history of collusion between the military and police departments in the United States and the military paradigm is an important organizing principle within the development of modern policing practices, organization, and tactics (e.g., Bittner 1970; Manning 1977; Enloe 1980; A. Hall and Coyne 2012). These practices took on added significance during the latter half of the twentieth century as U.S. cities faced increased pressure to “get tough on crime” and as local police departments developed specially trained tactical teams, commonly referred to as Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams (Kraska and Cubellis 1997). The interactions between the military and domestic police practices intensified yet again during the “war on drugs” and in a post–11 September 2001 world where domestic terror concerns have fueled the explosive growth of military and police cooperation (A. Hall and Coyne 2012). Although ostensibly unconnected to questions of race and economic inequality, militarism is fundamentally linked to structural violences of poverty and social difference (Loyd 2009, 2014), and the pursuit of total security connects settler state militarism across scales, legitimating the expansion and protection of the nation-state, the policing of its borders and communities, and internal and external monitoring and surveillance in the name of defense. Securing the white supremacist settler state relies on racial, gender, and class hierarchies that enable the coherence of an imagined nation with clearly marked inclusions and exclusions. That is, the targeted and widespread violence that characterizes the U.S. settler state—seen in everything from the genocide directed toward Native peoples to the criminalization of communities of color—depends on and reinforces discursive constructions that demonize those who stand in the way of the settler state and, more often than not, culminates in national campaigns against those beyond the scope of U.S. settler state justice. The indiscriminate killing associated with this kind of violence is easily dismissed as an unfortunate consequence of war (Hixson 2013). U.S. interventionism relies on a “defensive solidarity ... built on the institution of slavery and the racialization of Blackness” that reaffirms white supremacist cultural identity by managing both internal and external threats (Loyd 2009, 406). These practices continue even after the settler state has displaced and “removed” native peoples who had previously occupied the land, creating political landscapes with an aggressive propensity for violence (Veracini 2010). This understanding of the United States as a settler state is significant for theorizing militarism, we argue, because it situates the persistent violences of genocide and slavery as enduring structures shaping social and political economic relations. Rather than being projects of the past, settler practices are central to the continued development and futurity of the United States. A settler colonial perspective disrupts the spatial imaginaries of war by emphasizing the ongoing racialized violence necessary to secure contested, although taken for granted, homelands in settler nations. Moreover, it connects the indiscriminate violence stretching from U.S. settler colonial history to contemporary military engagements (Hixson 2013). As Blackhawk and Apache helicopters swoop and attack and Tomahawk cruise missiles explode, and as U.S. Special Forces head into “Indian country” to search and destroy the enemy, the ramifications and taken for granted sensibilities of settler geographies become all too clear (Hixson 2013, 198). Hixson (2013) further clarified, “American settler colonialism is a winnertakes-all proposition that demanded the removal of indigenous peoples and the destruction of their cultures,” and these geographies have “profound consequences for national identity and subsequent foreign policy” (197). The settler state is premised on permanent war, inscribing militarism and violence into everyday geographies and naturalizing racialized power hierarchies and the dispossession and erasure of racialized bodies.