After years of academic neglect, colonial policing has recently attracted increasing attention. New historical insights on colonial security strategies and on their postcolonial vestiges (in the global South as well as in the former metropoles) testify to the dynamism of this field of research. The 2-day international conference Policing Empires: Social Control, Political Transition, (Post-)Colonial Legacies, to be held in Brussels in December 2013, is the last in a series of events convened by the GERN Working Group on (Post-)Colonial Policing. Preceding workshops have focused on policing in the British, French, Belgian and Dutch, and finally Portuguese Empires and have addressed various aspects of policing, surveillance and security experiences. Building on these explorations, the aim of this final conference is to spur new reflection and discussion on connectivity, continuity and change across the (former) European Empires and to promote a multi-sited and comparative approach to colonial policing practices and their legacies in the postcolonial world. It intends to bring together researchers and research evidence from different areas of the world and of specialization, and to foster cross-disciplinary and cross-empire debates through innovative case-studies related to the broad themes of the conference.
In order to open new perspectives, we invite papers that transcend traditional definitions and paradigms of policing in 19th and 20th century colonial contexts. This entails debates not limited to police services but embracing other actors, strategies and techniques which were also part of the colonial law and order apparatus, as well as analysis going beyond institutional approaches and state boundaries. In both cases, we would like to discuss formal and informal interactions of colonial security norms and projects with the social and spatial realities of the policed.
The conference will be organized along three major themes: social control, political transition and (post-)colonial legacies. These will provide a flexible framework allowing to explore a wide range of topics, including but not limited to:
Social Control
- Class, race, ethnicity, gender and policing
- Informal and semi-informal mechanisms of control
- Policing, consent and control
- Criminality, delinquency and urban order
Political Transition
- Policing and pacification
- Intelligence and surveillance
- Colonial and counter-colonial networks
- Negotiating a 'new' order: violence, resistance, agency
(Post-)Colonial Legacies
- Colonial (dis)continuities in policing the (newly) independent state
- Police work and the internationalization/regionalization of security politics
- Memories of policing, police violence and repression
- Policing the former colonized in the metropole
For paper proposals, please submit a title, a 250-word abstract and a short biography in English by May 1st, 2013 to policingempires.conference2013@gmail.com. Authors will be sent notifications of acceptance or rejection by email before June 1st, 2013 and complete papers will be due on November 1st, 2013. Selected proceedings of the conference will be published.
A limited budget to help with travel and/or accommodation expenses may be made available (with preference given to junior and low-income scholars). Please note that these funds are very limited: participants are therefore encouraged to find their own sources of financial support.
For more information, please contact policingempires.conference2013@gmail.com
Organizing Committee :
Emmanuel Blanchard (CESDIP/Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin, France)
Marieke Bloembergen (KITLV, the Netherlands)
Margo De Koster (Université Catholique de Louvain/Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)
Amandine Lauro (FNRS/Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)
Scientific Committee :
Miguel Bandeiro Jeronimo (Universidade de Lisboa)
Robert Bickers (University of Bristol)
Emmanuel Blanchard (CESDIP/Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin)
Marieke Bloembergen (KITLV)
Marcos Luiz Bretas (UFRJ Rio de Janeiro)
Cyrille Fijnaut (Universiteit Tilburg)
Laurent Fourchard (LAM, FNSP-Sciences Po Bordeaux)
Richard Hill (Victoria University of Wellington)
Prashant Kidambi (University of Leicester)
Amandine Lauro (FNRS/Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Conor O’Reilly (Durham University)
Georgina Sinclair (The Open University)
Martin Thomas (University of Exeter)