Police Power,Civil Order,and the Fabrication of Food (In)Security

Civil order is generally conceptualized as constructed by social institutional powers like law, and so it is fitting that civil order has received its most sustained consideration in the general areas of critical social and legal theory. At the same time, social order has emerged as a key concept for critical police studies in order to describe and analyze police power and the violences it produces. This article addresses police power and its long and elemental relationship with food by describing the ways in which civil order is formed and affirmed in the material fabrication of social order, a task that is in turn undertaken by a police power. Noting the absence of both order and police power in fields fundamentally concerned with the fabrication of material space including environmental studies, environmental justice, and green criminology, this article uses food and nutrition—and their role in spatial projects of police and order—as key concepts to describe the ways in which civil and social orders take shape in and as the material environments fabricated by police.