Postcolonial Surveillance

Postcolonial Surveillance investigates the long history of the European border regime, focusing on the colonial forerunners of today’s border technologies. The book takes a longue durée perspective to uncover how Europe’s colonial history continues to shape the high-tech political present and has morphed into EU border migration policies, border security, and surveillance apparatuses. It exposes the racial hierarchies and power relations that form these systems and highlights key moments when the past and present interact and collide, such as in panoptic surveillance, biopolitical registers, biometric sorting, and deterrent media infrastructure. The technological genealogies assembled in this book reveal the unacknowledged histories that had to be rejected for the seemingly clean, unbiased, and neutral technologies to emerge as such.

Based on the premise that the project of Western Modernity is a structuring element of our societies, Racism and Racial Surveillance explores in detail its legacies of coloniality and racialization that interfere in a subtle and perverse way in the current social, cultural and political systems. Guided by an interdisciplinary methodology, the various contributions privilege historical contexts of colonial formation and offer a thorough and intersectional analysis on the specters of coloniality in the upsurge of racism, surveillance, and criminalization, as well as the presence of the phantom of the race in spaces of knowledge production such as that of artistic field, forensic genetics and criminal identification. Drawing on multi case studies the book then proffers key concepts and historical background that will be of interest to researchers, students and professionals in a broad range of areas of social sciences and humanities research, including fields such as criminology and policing, science and technology studies, arts studies, literary studies, race and ethnic studies and, finally, memory studies. Chapters 8, 9 and 10 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book studies the making of the postcolonial security relationships between Britain and Nigeria, and France and Côte d'Ivoire. It not only assesses the Cold War in West Africa, also Britain's military withdrawal from Africa, and France's continuously strong military footprint in the region

This book examines the development of Timor-Leste’s foreign policy since achieving political independence in 2002. It considers the influence of Timor-Leste’s historical experiences with foreign intervention on how the small, new state has pursued security. The book argues that efforts to secure the Timorese state have been motivated by a desire to reduce foreign intervention and dependence upon other actors within the international community. Timor-Leste’s desire for ‘real’ independence — characterized by the absence of foreign interference — permeates all spheres of its international political, cultural and economic relations and foreign policy discourse. Securing the state entails projecting a legitimate identity in the international community to protect and guarantee political recognition of sovereign status, an imperative that gives rise to Timor-Leste’s aspirational foreign policy. The book examines Timor-Leste’s key bilateral and multilateral diplomatic relations, its engagement with the global normative order, and its place within the changing Asia-Pacific region.

In light of the discrepancy between Britain's and France's postcolonial security roles in Africa, which seemed already determined half a decade after independence, this book studies the making of the postcolonial security relationship during the transfer of power and the early years of independence (1958-1966). It focuses on West Africa, and more specificially the newly independent states of Nigeria and Côte d'Ivoire, which rapidly evolved into key players in the postcolonial struggle for Africa. Based on research in fourteen archives in Africa, Europe, and the United States, Postcolonial Security comparatively investigates the establishment of formal defence relations, the disintegration of the Anglo-Nigerian 'special relationship' and the Franco-Ivorian 'neo-colonial collusion', the provision of British and French military assistance to their former colonies and the competition they faced from West Germany and Israel respectively, and the Anglo-American partnership in Nigeria and the Franco-American rivalry in Côte d'Ivoire. It demonstrates that whereas Britain was rapidly and increasingly pushed out of and replaced in the Nigerian security sector by western competitors, France succeeded in retaining its military foothold and pre-eminence in Côte d'Ivoire. Informed by postcolonial approaches, Postcolonial Security argues that while London's Cold War blinkers and Paris's neo-imperial agenda were part of the equation, the postcolonial security relationship was ultimately determined by the Nigerian and Ivorian elites, which in turn responded to their local and regional circumstances against the background of the Cold War in Africa.

Published between 1985 and 1998, the five volumes in this set explore a wide range of themes and topics relating to postcolonial security studies. Offering both broader overviews of political and military regimes across the world, and more focused examinations of specific areas and conflicts, such as Africa, Cuba, and the Falklands War, they provide a wealth of information that will appeal to those with an interest in military and strategic studies, political and military history, political and military theory, and international relations.

This edited volume analyses the global making of security institutions and practices in our postcolonial world. The volume will offer readers the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the global making of how security is thought of and practiced, from US urban policing, diaspora politics and transnational security professionals to policing encounters in Afghanistan, Palestine, Colombia or Haiti. It critically examines and decentres conventional perspectives on security governance and policing. In doing so, the book offers a fresh analytical approach, moving beyond dominant, one-sided perspectives on the transnational character of security governance, which suggest a diffusion of models and practices from a ‘Western’ centre to the rest of the globe. Such perspectives omit much of the experimenting and learning going on in the (post)colony as well as the active agency and participation of seemingly subaltern actors in producing and co-constituting what is conventionally thought of as ‘Western’ policing practice, knowledge and institutions. This is the first book that studies the truly global making of security institutions and practices from a postcolonial perspective, by bringing together highly innovative, in-depth empirical cases studies from across the globe. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars interested in International Relations and Global Studies, (critical) Security Studies, Criminology and Postcolonial Studies.

African Political Activism in Postcolonial France engages with several areas of scholarly inquiry, ranging from the study of immigrants to the investigation of surveillance and the legacy of colonialism. Within migration studies, many important analyses have focused on integration, yielding critical contributions to our understanding of immigration and identity. This work moves in a different direction. Factoring in the dynamics of colonialism, decolonization, and their effect on immigrant political activism and state policy in the postcolonial, Cold War era reveals that immigrants from francophone Sub-Saharan Africa were key players who shaped the development of public policy toward immigrants. Through this approach, we can understand how republicanism, colonial ideology, immigration policy, and immigrant political activism intersected in the post-colonial era, shaping the reception of African workers and affecting their lives and experiences in France.