1. Ringleaders, Mobs, and Enemies: Defining 'Minimum Force' in Colonial Protest Policing after 1914.
- Author
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Thomas, Martin
- Subjects
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POLITICAL reform , *SOVEREIGNTY , *POLITICAL scientists , *POLITICAL persecution , *IMPERIALISM , *COLONIES - Abstract
The twentieth-century disintegration of the European colonial empires has led political scientists and historians to analyse internal colonial protest primarily in terms of its impact, firstly on the process of political reform, secondly, in terms of contested sovereignty; and thirdly, in relation to the development of organised nationalist groups. Insofar as political scientists have studied colonial violence, they have tended to pursue one of two approaches. Some use micro-histories of past colonial repression to explain patterns of collective violence in conditions of acute asymmetry between the rights and powers of rulers and ruled. Others, inspired by democratic peace theory, have tried to account for the contradiction between the greater capacity of democratic states to avoid conflict between one another and the prosecution of colonial wars by Western Europe's imperial nations. Insightful work by Susan Pederson, Eric Weitz, and Mark Mazower highlights the conjuncture of a post-1919 international system that trumpeted the rights of minorities and ethnic groups alongside the codification of treaties and other instruments of international law that legitimized state violence such as enforced partition and population transfers in new ways. This paper draws upon these themes in its focus on changing concepts of British colonial protest policing after 1914. Containing demonstrations and workplace dissent became the central preoccupation in colonial policing thereafter. The central issue for us here is to establish how far Christian Davenport's propositions about the relationship between domestic threats and state repression applied in colonial situations2; in other words, in empires in which the colonial state was both an occupying, alien power and an autonomous state actor capable of taking local decisions about political repression of indigenous political, economic, or cultural opposition to colonial rule. Colonial police forces found themselves at the sharp end of this dilemma. They were servants of colonial authority, whether governmental or commercial, that imposed external values, demands, and punishments on a subject population to whom the supposed benefits of such impositions - among them, the normative standards of western government and legal codes, a capitalist wage economy, labour discipline and European-style property rights - seemed remote at best. Addressing the collapsing divide in police approaches between civilian protestor and enemy combatant, the paper considers how the policing of colonial protest and the violence associated with it were normalized and justified as colonial collapse loomed larger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2011