Racial warfare and the biopolitics of policing

ABSTRACT

In the years since the landmark Macpherson Report (1999) recognised London’s Metropolitan Police as ‘institutionally racist’, senior police officers and politicians in Britain have regularly reduced racism in policing to a problem of the past. This article examines police as a state institution where the politics of racism not only persist but do so coterminous with those of war. In doing so, I argue that policing is a biopolitical institution, that deploys racism as a formal strategy of war in vigorous defence of Euro-modernity. I show how the legacy of the Macpherson Report speaks to post-racial logic, which interacts with liberal myths about policing as non-martial to obscure the police’s racialised and militarised makeup. Challenging this hegemonic framing, I analyse how anti-black and anti-Muslim racisms share common ground, by producing racially coded populations as enemies of revered Euro-modern hallmarks like law and order and national security. I contend that this deeply embedded othering of race as anti-modern rationalises the police’s martial credentials, thus making militarised policing a racialised endeavour. As such, I illustrate how police regulates race through biopolitical strategies of securitisation, pre-emption and disposability, to reveal racial police warfare as foundational to everyday socio-political life in Britain.

KEYWORDS:

• Biopolitics
• militarisation
• policing
• post-race
• racism
• warfare

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Sanjay Sharma and Monica Degen for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 I introduce this notion of a race-war-police nexus by building on the work of Neocleous (2014), who examines how various techniques of police power operate in conjunction with war power, exemplifying what he terms a ‘war-police nexus.’

2 Foucault (1977) echoes this point about politics as a modality of war in a wider discussion on how disciplinary power targets, controls and produces the body. In Discipline and Punish, he writes that ‘it must not be forgotten that ‘politics’ has been conceived as a continuation, if not exactly or directly of war, at least of the military model as a fundamental means of preventing civil disorder’ (p. 168). He also discusses the relationship between various modes of political power and war in Power/Knowledge (Foucault, 1980, p. 90).

3 Here, I draw influence from Foucault’s insight into the symbiotic relationship between the politics of knowledge and the performance of power. In Power/Knowledge, Foucault states that ‘[t]he exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power’ (1980, p. 52). This suggests that war-like strategies of policing are as much determinants of racial discourse as they are determined by it.

4 Valluvan mentions that explanations of racism have always had to grapple with the role of Euro-modernity in constituting and circulating racist logics. As such, he argues that ‘[a] theory of racism is of course a theory of modernity’ (2016, p. 2244).

5 On this point, I take inspiration from influential thinkers who note the non-singular character of racism. Stuart Hall (1992, p. 13), for instance, writes about learning ‘not to speak of racism in the singular, but of racisms in the plural.’ Echoing Hall, Goldberg (1997, p. 12) states that ‘[t]here is no singular problem of race or racism,’ since racisms are ‘wide-ranging, dynamic, multiple, and numerous’.

6 For a broader account of biopolitical disposability, see the work of Henry A. Giroux (2008), who examines it as a neoliberal mode of population management, that materialises through the prison system, health sector, employment policies, and general public and private infrastructure of the US.