"The Imperial Origins of American Policing"

The Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs Program on Global and International History presents Julian Go and “Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US.”

The police response to protests erupting on America’s streets in recent years has made the militarization of policing painfully transparent. Yet, properly demilitarizing the police requires a deeper understanding of its historical development, causes, and social logics. This talk offers a postcolonial historical sociology of police militarization in Britain and the United States to aid that effort. It theorizes the racialized imperiality of modern policing, showing that police militarization has occurred since the very founding of modern policing in the nineteenth century into the present, and that it is an effect of the “imperial boomerang.”

Julian Go is professor of sociology and faculty affiliate of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture and the Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago. Julian Go’s research explores the social logics, forms, and impact of empires and colonialism; postcolonial/decolonial thought and related questions of social theory, epistemology, and knowledge; and global historical sociology.