The Racial Politics of Police Warfare - (Racism, Resistance and Social Change) by Jasbinder S Nijjar (Hardcover)

About the Book

The racial politics of police warfare shatters prevailing myths about British police as an impartial public service. Taking contemporary anti-gang and counter-terrorism policies and practices as its point of departure, the book examines how modern policing is ultimately fashioned by a complex relationship between the politics of racism and war.

Book Synopsis

Amid renewed anti-racist resistance to violent policing, The racial politics of police warfare unpacks the racisms that rationalise militarised policing in contemporary Britain. Jasbinder S. Nijjar shatters prevailing myths about British police as an impartial public service, by revealing it as an institution where racism and war reinforce one another. In examining flagship anti-gang and counter-terrorism policies and practices, the book offers a unique analysis of the relationship between anti-black and anti-Muslim racisms, to demonstrate how racialised populations are institutionalised as common enemies of modernity. Combining perspectives from sociology, history, criminology and social policy, Nijjar illustrates how British policing defends law and order and national security from the perceived threat of race through hyper-intrusive, pre-emptive and deathly measures. Accordingly, he gives a fresh take on resisting racial police warfare, calling for strategies that are at once political, collective, anti-militaristic and abolitionist.

From the Back Cover

Movements like Black Lives Matter and ongoing police racism are routinely dismissed in Britain, despite undeniable evidence to the contrary. Macpherson's landmark recognition of London's Metropolitan Police as 'institutionally racist' is heralded as having restored modern policing's apparent modus operandi of impartial public service provision.

In this examination of present-day police power, Jasbinder S. Nijjar reveals that racism continues to shape police infrastructure coterminous with militarisation. He foregrounds the overlooked intersection between post-race logic and a liberal conception of war, which has reinvented racism as an indistinct strategy of everyday police warfare in post-Macpherson neoliberal Britain. In critiquing the 'total policing' of 'gangs' and 'terrorism' together, the book presents a cutting-edge analysis of today's relationship between anti-black and anti-Muslim racisms. It illustrates how anti-gang and counter-terrorism policies avoid references to race while associating black and Muslim populations with collective criminality and national insecurity, making them common enemies of modernity in the police imagination.

A captivating book that documents a contemporary renewal of modern police's real original function: the systematic regulation of race through war power spanning daily methods of securitisation, pre-emption and disposability.

'A forensic critique of policing through interlocking lenses of institutional racism, war and state control. Unflinching in its analysis, the book reveals British policing as a biopolitical system engineered to curate and rationalise the militaristic regulation and dehumanisation of racial subjects. A must-read for anyone seeking to confront the violent realities of state racism and imagine anti-racist, humane alternatives.' - Sarita Malik, Brunel University of London

About the Author

Jasbinder S. Nijjar is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Social and Political Sciences Department at Brunel University of London.