In recent years, people across the world have protested the violence of policing and its intrusion into everyday lives, and the close timing of these global movements is no coincidence. As Imperial Entanglements of Policing shows, a central reason for the remarkable similarities of policing around the globe is empire. Across the entire sweep of modern policing, there have been strong, mutual connections among police forces via tactics, training, technology, and ideology. Contributors investigate these imperial entanglements in diverse sites around the world, from cities like New York, Santiago, and Johannesburg to countries like the Philippines, Algeria, Britain, and Iraq. Together, they examine a range of policing practices and tactics, such as the impact of American, German, and United Nations policing consultants being employed across the world and the influence of technology and ideology on these encounters. They highlight the ways imperial power was and continues to be perpetrated through police power, how it has evolved in service of imperial goals, and its connection with sites of imperial control.
Julian Go is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Stuart Schrader is Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University.
"Imperial Entanglements of Policing offers desperately needed new ways of thinking about and studying policing. Through its magnificent framework of imperial entanglements and insistence that policing today is imperial in ancestry and therefore materiality, the collection denatures the police as analytic object, making visible the matrix in which police act and showing how racial capitalism is the imperial system policing commits itself to defend." -Micol Seigel, author of Violence Work "This volume breaks important new ground in our understanding of the global dimensions of policing. These interventions move beyond both decontextualized local case studies and comparative studies that fail to consider the ways that global power arrangements fundamentally shape local policing. In the process, they have set a new bar for best practices in policing research."-Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing "Imperial Entanglements of Policing offers desperately needed new ways of thinking about and studying policing. Through its magnificent framework of imperial entanglements and insistence that policing today is imperial in ancestry and therefore materiality, the collection denatures the police as analytic object, making visible the matrix in which police act and showing how racial capitalism is the imperial system policing commits itself to defend."-Micol Seigel, author of Violence Work
