Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

The militarization of the police is not new. It reaches back to the very founding of modern policing. This presentation explores some of this history, from the nineteenth century through the twentieth century, in both the US and the UK, and shows their intimate connections to empire. It argues that police militarization has involved the appropriation of forms, operations and tactics not just from the “military” but more precisely from “imperial-military” regimes. It further shows that this occurs as domestic social fields appear racially homologous with colonial fields of intervention. Police militarization should be theorized as “colonial counter-insurgenization.”

Julian Go is Professor of Sociology at Boston University. Previously he was an Academy Scholar at the Academy for International and Area Studies of Harvard University. At BU, he is also a Faculty Affiliate in Asian Studies and the American Studies/New England Studies program. He has been a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Lucerne University in Switzerland, and the Third World Studies Center at the University of the Philippines. He been elected council member and Chair of the Comparative-Historical Sociology Section and the Global & Transnational Sociology Sections of the American Sociological Association. Beyond serving on various editorial boards of scholarly journals he is the editor of Political Power and Social Theory. He received his B.A. in Sociology & Political Science from the University of Michigan (1992), his M.A. in sociology from the University of Chicago (1995) and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago (2000)