As imperial political authority was increasingly challenged, sometimes with violence, locally recruited police forces became the front-line guardians of alien law and order. This book presents a study that looks at the problems facing the imperial police forces during the acute political dislocations following decolonization in the British Empire. It examines the role and functions of the colonial police forces during the process of British decolonisation and the transfer of powers in eight colonial territories. The book emphasises that the British adopted a 'colonial' solution to their problems in policing insurgency in Ireland. The book illustrates how the recruitment of Turkish Cypriot policemen to maintain public order against Greek Cypriot insurgents worsened the political situation confronting the British and ultimately compromised the constitutional settlement for the transfer powers. In Cyprus and Malaya, the origins and ethnic backgrounds of serving policemen determined the effectiveness which enabled them to carry out their duties. In 1914, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) of Ireland was the instrument of a government committed to 'Home Rule' or national autonomy for Ireland. As an agency of state coercion and intelligence-gathering, the police were vital to Britain's attempts to hold on to power in India, especially against the Indian National Congress during the agitational movements of the 1920s and 1930s. In April 1926, the Palestine police force was formally established. The shape of a rapidly rising rate of urban crime laid the major challenge confronting the Kenya Police.

As imperial political authority was increasingly challenged, sometimes with violence, locally recruited police forces became the front-line guardians of alien law and order. This book presents a study that looks at the problems facing the imperial police forces during the acute political dislocations following decolonization in the British Empire. It examines the role and functions of the colonial police forces during the process of British decolonisation and the transfer of powers in eight colonial territories. The book emphasises that the British adopted a 'colonial' solution to their problems in policing insurgency in Ireland. The book illustrates how the recruitment of Turkish Cypriot policemen to maintain public order against Greek Cypriot insurgents worsened the political situation confronting the British and ultimately compromised the constitutional settlement for the transfer powers. In Cyprus and Malaya, the origins and ethnic backgrounds of serving policemen determined the effectiveness which enabled them to carry out their duties. In 1914, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) of Ireland was the instrument of a government committed to 'Home Rule' or national autonomy for Ireland. As an agency of state coercion and intelligence-gathering, the police were vital to Britain's attempts to hold on to power in India, especially against the Indian National Congress during the agitational movements of the 1920s and 1930s. In April 1926, the Palestine police force was formally established. The shape of a rapidly rising rate of urban crime laid the major challenge confronting the Kenya Police.

A striking new interpretation of colonial policing and political violence in three empires between the two world wars.

This study looks at the problems facing the imperial police forces during the acute political dislocations following decolonization in the British Empire, from Ireland to India and in the Asian and African colonies. This book examines the changing roles and experiences of the police forces involved.

Colonial Policing and the Imperial Endgame is the first comprehensive study of the colonial police and their complex role within Britain's long and turbulent process of decolonisation, a time characterised by political upheaval and colonial conflict.

This book undertakes an exploratory exercise in decolonizing criminology through engaging postcolonial and postdisciplinary perspectives and methodologies. Through its historical and political analysis and place-based case studies, it challenges criminological inquiry by installing colonial structures of power at the centre of the contemporary criminological debate. This work unseats the Western nation-state as the singular point of departure for comparative criminological and socio-legal research. Decolonising Criminology argues that postcolonial and postdisciplinary critique can open up new pathways for criminological investigation. It builds on recent debates in criminology from outside of the Anglosphere. The authors deploy a number of heuristic devices, perspectives and theories generally ignored by criminologists of the Global North and engage perspectives concerned with articulating new decolonised epistemologies of the Global South. This book disputes the view that colonisation is a thing of the past and provides lessons for the Global North.

Crime, Aboriginality and the Decolonisation of Justice explores contemporary strategies which might reduce the extraordinary levels of imprisonment and victimisation suffered by Aboriginal people in Australia. These are problems that continue to rise despite numerous inquiries and reports. Harry Blagg disputes the relevance of the western, urban, criminological paradigm to the Aboriginal domain, and questions the application of both contemporary innovations such as restorative justice and mainstream models of policing. He also refutes allegations that Aboriginal customary laws condone violence against women and children, pointing to the wealth of research to the contrary, and suggests these laws contain considerable potential for renewal and healing. This book maintains that unresolved questions of colonisation, decolonisation and sovereignty lie at the heart of debates about criminal justice in post-colonial Australia. It explores the potential for 'hybrid' initiatives in the complex 'liminal' space between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal domains, for example, Aboriginal community/night patrols, community justice groups, healing centres and Aboriginal courts. This new edition covers emerging issues such as Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD) and reports on the consequences of the Commonwealth Government's contentious 'intervention' in remote Northern Territory communities in 2007.

From the Victorian period to the present, images of the policeman have played a prominent role in the literature of empire, shaping popular perceptions of colonial policing. This book covers and compares the different ways and means that were employed in policing policies from 1830 to 1940. Countries covered range from Ireland, Australia, Africa and India to New Zealand and the Caribbean. As patterns of authority, of accountability and of consent, control and coercion evolved in each colony the general trend was towards a greater concentration of police time upon crime. The most important aspect of imperial linkage in colonial policing was the movement of personnel from one colony to another. To evaluate the precise role of the 'Irish model' in colonial police forces is at present probably beyond the powers of any one scholar. Policing in Queensland played a vital role in the construction of the colonial social order. In 1886 the constabulary was split by legislation into the New Zealand Police Force and the standing army or Permanent Militia. The nature of the British influence in the Klondike gold rush may be seen both in the policy of the government and in the actions of the men sent to enforce it. The book also overviews the role of policing in guarding the Gold Coast, police support in 1954 Sudan, Orange River Colony, Colonial Mombasa and Kenya, as well as and nineteenth-century rural India.

This book brings together Indigenous, Third World and Settler perspectives on the theory and practice of decolonizing law. Colonialism, imperialism, and settler colonialism continue to affect the lives of racialized communities and Indigenous Peoples around the world. Law, in its many iterations, has played an active role in the dispossession and disenfranchisement of colonized peoples. Law and its various institutions are the means by which colonial, imperial, and settler colonial programs and policies continue to be reinforced and sustained. There are, however, recent and historical examples in which law has played a significant role in dismantling colonial and imperial structures set up during the process of colonization. This book combines usually distinct Indigenous, Third World and Settler perspectives in order to take up the effort of decolonizing law: both in practice and in the concern to distance and to liberate the foundational theories of legal knowledge and academic engagement from the manifestations of colonialism, imperialism and settler colonialism. Including work by scholars from the Global South and North, this book will be of interest to academics, students and others interested in the legacy of colonial and settler law, and its overcoming.

The police force is one of the most distrusted institutions in Pakistan, notorious for its corruption and brutality. In both colonial and postcolonial contexts, directives to confront security threats have empowered law enforcement agents, while the lack of adequate reform has upheld institutional weaknesses. This exploration of policing in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city and financial capital, reveals many colonial continuities. Both civilian and military regimes continue to ensure the suppression of the policed via this institution, itself established to militarily subjugate and exploit in the interests of the ruling class. However, contemporary policing practice is not a simple product of its colonial heritage: it has also evolved to confront new challenges and political realities. Based on extensive fieldwork and almost 150 interviews, this ethnographic study reveals a distinctly "postcolonial condition of policing." Mutually reinforcing phenomena of militarisation and informality have been exacerbated by an insecure state that routinely conflates combatting crime, maintaining public order and ensuring national security. This is evident not only in spectacular displays of violence and malpractice, but also in police officers' routine work. Caught in the middle of the country's armed conflicts, their encounters with both state and society are a story of insecurity and uncertainty.