Recentring the coloniality of global policing

Abstract

This article develops a new framework for the analysis of international policing. We argue that attention to the historical dynamics that shape international policing challenges not only commonly held views about it but also how it is studied. Building on insights from global historical sociology as well as decolonial and postcolonial theories, we place co-constitution, processual relationalism and coloniality at the centre of our understanding of policing both domestically and internationally. We foreground the colonial origins of modern policing, which emerged simultaneously in the metropoles and the colonies to police specific, often racialised, populations. This history reveals not only that ‘domestic’ policing has always been globalised, and therefore cannot be analysed within the confines of the nation-state, but also that policing models in the West have been militarised and racialised from the very beginning. Our approach shows why technocratic fixes are unlikely to solve recurring problems that span both the Global North and the Global South – such as using excessive force by police or targeting marginalised, often racialised populations. Our framework pushes forward a new, more critical conversation about how we, as scholars, make sense of international policing and its consequences globally.

Keywords:

• Police
• international policing
• coloniality
• global historical sociology
• decolonialism
• postcolonialism

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback and suggestions on the manuscript. We also thank panelists and colleagues at our panel on Global Policing at the Canadian Political Science Association in 2021.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

Notes

1 For recent work, see Blanchard, Marieke, and Amandine (2017).

2 See the UN website for up-to-date numbers: https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/troop-and-police-contributors

3 On the friend/enemy relation, see also Doucet (2017, 62).

4 As Quijano explains, modern rationality ‘was not only elaborated in the context of, but as part of, a power structure that involved the European colonial domination over the rest of the world’ (Quijano 2007, 174).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture and a SSHRC Explore grant at the University of Saskatchewan.

Notes on contributors

Lou Pingeot

Lou Pingeot is a postdoctoral fellow in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. Her research is situated at the intersection of global historical sociology, postcolonialism and international practice theory. Her current work explores how the international missions of Canadian police forces affect the policing of racialised communities in Canada. Her research has appeared in Small Wars & Insurgencies, International Peacekeeping, European Journal of International Security, and Globalizations.

Colleen Bell

Colleen Bell is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. Her research contributes to theorisations of war and security and explores the contested boundary between military and civilian operations in Western counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and stabilisation missions. She is the author of The Freedom of Security: Governing Canada in the Age of Counterterrorism and co-editor of War, Police and Assemblages of Intervention. Her current research examines police power in global politics, military public diplomacy, and the politics of Canada’s feminist foreign policy. She is the editor of Critical Studies on Security.