Police violence and biocolonisation

ABSTRACT

This essay presents a transdisciplinary, reparatory history of police violence in Britain during the nineteen seventies and eighties. I consider how the histories of transcontinental colonial nationalisms and anticolonial internationalisms were intertwined with the development of transcolonial counterinsurgency operations and local modes of policing from the late eighteenth century. I argue that this is essential to an understanding of police violence in Britain that is interwoven with the trajectories of anticolonial, antifascist and antiracist political cultures. I discuss the psychopolitical legacies of police violence which illustrates the beginnings of a broader theory of racialised subjectification that I call biocolonisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Police violence
• internationalism
• racialised subjectification
• biocolonisation
• psychopolitics
• categorization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Internationalist academic cultures which normalise nationalist formations of bourgeois respectability illuminate similar connections and disconnections between nationalist and internationalist communities and philosophies (Mosse 1985). Nationalist and antinationalist ideologies furthermore circulate through cultures such as conscious hip-hop. These political philosophies share some discursive elements and are articulated through similar cultural forms yet they are distinct and opposed.