Imperial boomerang

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The imperial boomerang or Foucault's boomerang is the thesis that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens. The concept was advanced by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism and Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism, in both cases to explain the origins of European fascism in the first half of the 20th century.[1][2][3][4] Michel Foucault similarly spoke of a "boomerang effect" on European colonial powers in his 1976 lecture Society Must Be Defended.[5] Foucault's boomerang has been invoked to explain the ongoing militarization of police and their domestic deployment in response to political protest in urban centers.[6][7] Such deployment has also proliferated worldwide,[8][9] considering that the globalization of militarized policing continues to be a crucial aspect of contemporary foreign policy of former Western colonial powers such as the United States, whose early experiments with developing comprehensive coercive state apparatuses and counterinsurgency techniques began during the US colonization of the Philippines.[4][10][11]

See also[]

References[]

  1. ^ King, Richard H.; Stone, Dan (September 2008). Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide. ISBN 9781845455897.
  2. ^ Owens, Patricia (30 August 2007). Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt. ISBN 9780199299362.
  3. ^ Rothberg, Michael (15 June 2009). Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. ISBN 9780804762175.
  4. ^ a b Woodman, Connor (2020). "The Imperial Boomerang: How colonial methods of repression migrate back to the metropolis". Versobooks.com.
  5. ^ Graham, Stephen (2013). "Foucault's boomerang: the new military urbanism". openDemocracy.
  6. ^ Graham, Stephen (2011). Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism.
  7. ^ Go, Julian (July 16, 2020). "The Racist Origins of U.S. Policing". Foreign Affairs.
  8. ^ Morefield, Jeanne (2020). "Beyond Boomerang". International Politics Reviews.
  9. ^ Schrader, Stuart (2020). "Defund the Global Policeman". n+1.
  10. ^ McCoy, Alfred W. (2009). "Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State". University of Wisconsin Press.
  11. ^ Makalintal, Joshua M. (2021). "Dismantling the Imperial Boomerang: A Reckoning with Globalised Police Power". Transnational Institute.


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