Department of Political Science

“Militarizing the Police: Empire, Race and Counter-Insurgency”

The militarization of the police is not new. It reaches back to the very founding of modern policing. This presentation explores some of this history, from the nineteenth century through the twentieth century, in both the US and the UK, and shows their intimate connections to empire. It argues that police militarization has involved the appropriation of forms, operations and tactics not just from the “military” but more precisely from “imperial-military” regimes. It further shows that this occurs as domestic social fields appear racially homologous with colonial fields of intervention. Police militarization should be theorized as “colonial counter-insurgenization.”