From citizen to subject: police militarisation and the imperial boomerang

Militarised policing is one of the preconditions for fascist rule, but how and why would police in liberal democracies militarise?

This lecture explores police militarisation in Britain and the US from the beginnings of modern police through the present. It shows that militarisation is not the product of right-leaning regimes only but rather an effect of the imperial boomerang. Militarisation reflects the tactics and tools of empire brought home to manage perceived racialised threats.

Meet our speakers and chair

Julian Go is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago where he is also a Faculty Affiliate in the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture and The Committee on International Relation. He is also a Fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory and former President of the Social Science History Association.

Mahvish Ahmad is an Assistant Professor in Human Rights and Politics. Before joining LSE, she was an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Cambridge. Earlier, Mahvish was a journalist covering military and insurgent violence in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region, and co-founded the bilingual Urdu/English magazine Tanqeed with Madiha Tahir.

Aaron Reeves is Professor of Sociology at LSE. His work studies the causes and consequences of social inequality, with a focus on the political economy of health, welfare reform, and processes of elite formation. His research has been published in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, The Lancet, British Medical Journal, and Socio-Economic Review.

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