Police violence and biocolonisation

Abstract

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.