Perceived Threats: Postcolonial Futures of Policing

Why are police equipped and trained to treat citizens like enemies of war? Julian Go (University of Chicago), with William P. Jones (University of Minnesota), complicates our global conversation on the colonial roots of policing and its futures. Discussing what he calls the “imperial boomerang,” Go pinpoints how the mindset of imperial expansion and domination abroad permanently changed how police treat citizens at home. Militarized policing mirrors the tools and technologies of colonial policing abroad—but its logic also mirrors a response to perceived racialized threats from minority and immigrant populations, fear of revolution, and rebellion in the streets. The panelists will explore the imperial connections and deep subconscious assumptions that inform contemporary trends, all with an eye towards what it will take to demilitarize policing.

Image: Minnesota State Patrol stand at E Lake St and 29th Ave S in Minneapolis. Credit Lorie Shaull via Flickr.

The 2024-25 (In)Justice Series on Just Policing presented by the Institute for Advanced Study at the UMN critically examines how policing intersects with broader societal issues across the globe and explores efforts to reform, transform, or abolish policing. Presented in partnership with the Andrew W. Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar on Just Policing.

About the Presenters

Julian Go is professor and interim chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is also affiliate faculty in the Center of Race, Politics, and Culture and the Committee on International Relations. Go’s research delves into the social dynamics, forms, and impacts of empires and colonialism, with a focus on postcolonial/decolonial thought, global historical sociology, and the United States empire. His most recent book, Policing Empires: Militarization and Race in Britain and America, 1829-present (Oxford 2023) explores imperialism’s impact on police militarization in the United States and Britain. He is also working on a project that recovers anticolonial thought as a critical form of social theory. Previous publications include The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives (co-edited with Anne Foster, Duke University Press 2003), Fielding Transnationalism (co-edited with Monika Krause, Wiley & Sons 2016) and Global Historical Sociology, co-edited with George Lawson (Cambridge 2016), and others. His scholarship has won prizes from the American Sociological Association, the Eastern Sociological Society, the American Political Science Association, and the International Studies Association, among other institutions. 

William P. Jones is a professor of history at the University of Minnesota. A historian of the twentieth-century United States, his research centers on race and labor. He is author, most recently, of Police Collective Bargaining and Police Violence: A Policy Report, a joint project of Community Change and the Center for Labor and a Just Economy Labor at Harvard Law School (2023).

Related Links

• Policing Empires: Militarization and Race in Britain and America, 1829-present by Julian Go  
• Professor’s book offers global, historical viewpoint of policing, University of Chicago News 
• Police Collective Bargaining and Police Violence: A Policy Report 
• Sawyer Seminar on Just Policing: Transnational Perspectives on the Definition and Possibility of Justice in Law Enforcement
• IAS Institute for Advanced Study