Recentring the coloniality of global policing (original) (raw)
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The Global Making of Policing. Postcolonial Perspectives
This edited volume analyses the global making of security institutions and practices in our postcolonial world. The volume offers readers the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the global making of how security is thought of and practised, from US urban policing, and diaspora politics to policing encounters in Afghanistan, Palestine, Colombia or Haiti. It critically examines and decentres conventional perspectives on security governance and policing. In doing so, the book offers a fresh analytical approach, moving beyond dominant, one-sided perspectives on the transna-tional character of security governance, which suggest a diffusion of models and practices from a 'Western' centre to the rest of the globe. Such perspectives omit much of the experimenting and learning going on in the (post)colony as well as the active agency and participation of seemingly subaltern actors in producing and co-constituting what is conventionally thought of as 'Western' policing practice, knowledge and institutions. This is the first book that studies the truly global making of security institutions and practices from a postcolonial perspective, by bringing together highly innovative, in-depth empirical case studies from across the globe. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars interested in International Relations and Global Studies, (Critical) Security Studies, Criminology and Postcolonial Studies.
Reproducing Colonial Patterns of Policing
Police reform in many developing countries has become one of the most common and contentious elements of security sector reform processes in 'weak' or 'fragile' states. Typically viewed as part of broader SSR that emphasises security, including the military, contemporary police reform exhibits a number of specific characteristics that reproduce the colonial concepts of the police as an instrument of control. In the modern era this has come to have two critical aspects: internal control in terms of expanding state legitimacy and power across a territory; and globally in terms of enhancing the capabilities of local forces to deal with non-traditional security threats. With an emphasis on 'professionalisation' and the expansion of the liberal state in to Africa, there is little consideration of the implications of looking at police forces through the lens of colonial patterns, despite the fact that many of these contemporary reforms reproduce concerns and patterns associated with the maintenance of colonial control and also that some police structures held by contemporary international donors to be 'African models' are in fact colonial institutional structures. This paper examines what this looks like and the implications for policing and power.
(2016) Unpacking ‘the Global’ in THE GLOBAL MAKING OF POLICING: POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES
‘Contemporary policing not only has a global reach…it is also globally made’, note the editors when introducing The Global Making of Policing. In doing so, they contrast two different ways of thinking about the relationship between ‘the global’ and ‘policing’. The first one approaches the relationship between ‘the global’ and ‘policing’ as a unidirectional and top-down flow of goods and ideas from the North to the South. Labelled here as the ‘export’ approach, this way of thinking about the relationship between ‘the global’ and ‘policing’ focuses on the ways in which those policing practices designed to produce social order in Western Europe and North America are exported elsewhere through training (academic and practical). The second approach considers the role of the periphery or the South as a ‘laboratory’, and focuses on how those in the North have developed their theories and practices through seeking to produce order in the South. In this latter approach, the flow of goods and ideas is not unidirectional, but the relationship is nevertheless top-down with limited agency granted to the South. Another difference between the two approaches is that the ‘laboratory’ approach sees the North and the South as coeval, in contrast to the ‘export’ approach, which temporalizes difference and spatializes time by treating the South as belonging to the past, in need of growing up, with a little bit of help from the North. The editors offer the ‘laboratory’ approach to highlight the limitations of the ‘export’ approach, noting that policing gets made globally—through interactions between the North and the South. The following suggests that the volume goes further than what can be seen through the prism of these two approaches. I identify a third, ‘co-constitutive’ approach, which focuses on how both sides interact with and learn from each other, while getting transformed in the process. Whereas the ‘laboratory' approach looks at how ‘we’ develop theories, go test them elsewhere (on our distant ‘others’) and come back home to apply them (on our near ‘others’), the ‘co-constitutive’ approach views the roles played by both sides in the production of goods and ideas, and their mutual transformation through this interaction. In one sense, the ‘co-constitutive’ approach is already a part of the volume’s theoretical framework, as outlined by the editors in the introduction, discussed more explicitly by Laffey & Nadarajah and Tickner & Morales, rather implicitly by Mueller, and illustrated by Graham & Barker. Yet, I will suggest that the significance of watching against conflating the ‘laboratory’ and ‘co-constitutive’ approaches cannot be overemphasized. Before doing so, I will highlight the volume’s contribution to IR by underscoring how policing gets to be globally made. I will then turn to IR’s postcolonial critics to unpack ‘the global’ and, following Himadeep Muppidi (2004), call for integrating a ‘postcolonial understanding of globality’ into the study of the making of policing.
The Coloniality of Post-Colonial Police Violence
In Ferguson, Missouri, a young black man is shot dead in the street by a police officer and his body is left to lie in the sun for four hours. In New York City, a man hustling cigarettes is wrestled to the ground and choked to death. In Baltimore, a young man is brutalized by the police, and the riots that follow result in forty-two deaths. And in McKinney, Texas, a young girl is grabbed by her hair and wrestled to the ground by a white police officer after being verbally abused by two white women. These acts of state violence directed at individuals seem like a recent epidemic, or even like isolated incidents of racism, but this condition of violently policing a border against encroachment by a historically oppressed and exploited other is manifested in the violence of colonialism, described half a century ago by the Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon. Indeed, Fanon contends that a border must always exist between colonizer and colonized, maintained "at the point of the bayonet and under cannon fire" (Fanon 2). In other words, the racialized, ostensibly post-colonial, and post-Civil Rights society of the contemporary era is, at heart, still a colonial society. In analyzing the development of the police force as a tool for the enforcement of colonial formations that has continued into the postcolonial and post-civil rights era, one must also come to understand how the organization of thought and of society in this era is only partially decolonized. The violence that is inherent in colonial domination, without the existence of explicit colonial structures still continues because the discourse created by those colonial structures is woven into the language of Eurocentric modernity that informs all post-colonial narratives. The police as they exist now are violent because of how they have been 1 historically tied to the subjugation and control of people and the promotion of a hegemonic ideology. The pervasiveness of this colonial condition serves to illuminate the incompleteness of decolonization in the post-colonial era. Incidents of police violence like the one that occurred in McKinney, Texas, are thus moments of colonial violence, informed by the need to enforce boundaries between Europeanness and non-Europeanness. This border is an essential ingredient in colonial domination. In order to ensure that the colonized remain colonized, they must constantly want to reach the paradise of the colonists but never be able to arrive there.
Our first task is to contextualise our subject with regard to theories of policing, globalisation, social order and governance. We examine the role of the police within the classic nation-state system and how this has become problematic. We explore the idea of the 'social contract' and how this has been reshaped by an emerging transnational-state-system. The chapter also sets out two typolo-gies of policing that mark the conceptual boundaries of the field. The first explores the distinctions between policing that aims to secure territory and that which aims to maintain surveillance over suspect populations. It distinguishes between high policing (seeking to maintain particular interests of state and social elites) and low policing (seeking to maintain the interests of the social order more generally) and between public and private forms. A second typology suggests four geographical spheres of policing – glocal, national, regional and global. These typologies create the conceptual space within which the various forms of trans-national policing explored in later chapters are theorised and understood. The groundwork covered here provides the basis for making global policing visible as a theoretical object.
Rhizomes, 2022
This article argues that colonial modernity birthed the police as a world-shaping force that came to define both civil society and the world itself. By staging a relationship between plantation Barbados and Kant’s Enlightenment, I suggest that the transformation from European frontier to established world required subjugating violence to be everywhere made pervasive and entrenched. The ascent to humanity under colonial modernity conjoined the construction of whiteness to the subjugation and death of Black people. As such, the supposed absorption of enslavement into legal frameworks became the pre-condition for its continuation as white collective society was strengthened through and as policing Black people. Since the literal blood and sand of the colonised continue to be the grounds of white life, the question of abolition thus requires us to reach far beyond the institution of the police.
Tensions Of Policing in Colonial Situations
in BLANCHARD E., BLOEMBERGEN M. & LAURO A. (eds), Policing in Colonial Empires. Cases, Connections, Boundaries (ca.1850-1970), Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien, PIE-Peter Lang, 2017, p.11-38., 2017
Introduction: Southern and Postcolonial Perspectives on Policing, Security, and Social Order.
2023
Several chapters that make up a large part of this book began life as papers presented at a 'Southern Perspectives' one-day research seminar at the University of Brighton in the early Summer of 2019. The purpose of the day was to draw together several academic/theoretical research and network connections to explore a range of emerging concerns relating to 'Southern Perspectives' in criminology and existing scholarship on colonialism and the decolonisation of the criminological imagination-or, in Agozino's terms-developing a critique of 'imperialist reason' (Agozino, 2003).