When: Friday,13 October, 1:00pm-2:00pm (UTC+3).
Where: Room 247, Unioninkatu 33 Building. You can also join us via the Zoom link below:
https://helsinki.zoom.us/j/67846101797?pwd=WWloYzVQRm93RHg2OExJODhxaDVj…
Meeting ID: 678 4610 1797
Passcode: 905848
Abstract:
Racial regimes of policing across space and time
When we think about ‘police’ and ‘policing’, we most commonly imagine a quintessentially domestic institution with a local remit. However, a growing body of scholarship has contested this origin story and conception of modern police and policing as we know it by drawing attention to its transnational imperial and colonial origins. While claims about the imperial and colonial origins and natures of police power been articulated for some time, they have remained marginal. In recent years, however, such claims have returned with renewed vigour and sophistication, challenging orthodox histories, ontologies and theorizations of police power and showing them to be little more than self-serving mythologies of the state. This literature is increasingly showing that police and policing emerged simultaneously in European the metropoles and its far-flung colonies to police specific, typically racialised, populations and pacify mass insurrection. In this talk, Dr. Rhys Machold sketches some of these broader debates and how they help us think about policing as a racial regime of social ordering today. His remarks will draw on vignettes from his forthcoming book Fabricating Homeland Security: Policing entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel (under contract with Stanford University Press) based on over a decade of ethnographic research across India, Palestine/India and the United Kingdom.
Rhys Machold is Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. Through engagements with International Relations, political geography and urban studies, his research has focused on exploring regimes of power, violence and empire from a transnational perspective. He is author of the forthcoming book Fabricating Homeland Security: India, Israel and the Politics of Securitized Encounters, which will be published by Stanford University Press. His work has also appeared across a range of leading international scholarly journals including International Political Sociology, Political Geography, Security Dialogue and Environment and Planning A as well as popular outlets like Jacobin. He is currently an Associate Editor of Critical Studies on Security and a board member of the editorial board of International Studies Review.
This seminar is part of the EuroStorie Research Seminar Series "Racism and anti-racism in Europe and beyond". In our autumn research seminar, we trace and debate racism and anti-racism in Europe and beyond, discussing the intersection of race, citizenship, and policing. Bordering regimes play a pervasive role in daily life, extending beyond political boundaries and official encounters. This seminar series examines how border dynamics, along with policing, deportations, and communal resistance efforts intersect at the governmental and personal levels, bridging conceptual and physical realms.