On 25 April 2024, the Research Centre for Criminology was honoured to welcome Professor Julian Go of the University of Chicago to Maynooth University. Professor Go delivered a keynote lecture about his newest book, Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US.
Criminologists have considered how the terminology of the ‘War on Drugs/Crime/Terror’ has become an important discursive frame for understanding the ways in which the police operate. Professor Go’s Policing Empires demonstrates that this is nothing new and looks at how and why police brought the war home, situating this in relation to imperial feedback loops, the ‘imperial boomerang’. It’s also the case that critical scholars have noted that criminology has neglected to study ‘war’. The focus has been what occurs within national borders within peace-time. Professor Go challenged criminologists to consider that policing, whether they knew it or not, was always about war – it was just a war in a different guise, being waged against different, domestic enemies.
Centre for Criminology members Dr. Lynsey Black and Dr. Cian Ó Concubhair served as discussants and offered fascinating links between Professor Go’s analysis and their own research.
Reflecting on Professor Go’s talk, Dr. Black writes, ‘As someone who works with a colonial/postcolonial lens trained on issues of gender and punishment, my own research investigates Ireland’s postcolonial positioning by deployment of restrictive gender norms which curtailed the role of women. These forces impacted on the punishment regimes women experienced also and the ways in which they were policed. However, in thinking about empire as a two-way street, as Go urges us, it occurs to me that I have not considered how delegating power to religious bodies for the control of a difficult population in the 19th century, may have impacted what happened back in England.’
Likewise, Dr. Ó Concubhair reflects, ‘Professor Go’s insights are essential to understanding how policing evolved in the post-colonial era here, and help us to see the powerful legacies of militarization and counter-insurgency practices in Irish policing.’
