International relations

Policing Racial Capitalism

Module code: 020IRAID
Level 6
30 credits in autumn semester
Teaching method: Lecture
Assessment modes: Not yet finalised

What role do prisons play in our everyday economy? Do borders resemble a global form of apartheid? Should the police be abolished? Taking the 2020 George Floyd uprisings as a starting point, in this module we examine the relationship between racial capitalism and different forms of state violence. Drawing on the black radical tradition, anticolonial theory, feminism, and critical disability studies, together we explore the racial, sexual, ableist, and colonial histories of borders, prisons, police, psychiatric institutions, and family surveillance. By moving from the local to the global and back again, we probe what an abolitionist world without prisons, police, and other forms of state violence might look like.