Countermapping the Carceral Security State: Beyond the Imperial Boomerang

Abstract

As part of a burgeoning interest in analyses of the colonial roots of contemporary state practices, scholars in the field of International Relations have sought to “decolonize” the study of security. To do so, they have examined how the methods of control and repression that were first developed in the colonies were brought back to the metropole to lay the foundation for the carceral security state. However, by framing the analysis around the concept of the colonial boomerang, they have largely undertheorized how racial and colonial violence historically also played out across the centers of the European metropole. Drawing on Cedric Robinson's work on racial capitalism, this article works towards a spatial imagination that views core and periphery as entwined racial-colonial geographies. By countermapping the history of three technologies of state violence—policing, incarceration, and migration control—we trace how these security techniques were refined and sharpened as they were put into use to facilitate conquest, exploitation, appropriation, and exclusion across both colony and metropole. Ultimately, this reveals the carceral security state, not as a product of the boomerang, but as an enduring feature of the racial capitalist world-system.