Dr. Julian Go, professor and director of Graduate Studies and faculty affiliate in the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture at the University of Chicago, will be giving a public talk on his new book, Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the U.S., 1829-present, as the Robert G. Bone Distinguished Lecturer for 2024 on March 28, at 6 p.m. at the Bone Student Center, Old Main Room. The event is free and open to the public.
This talk, based on the book Policing Empires, offers postcolonial historical sociology of militarized policing in Britain and the U.S. Go reveals that police militarization has occurred since the very founding of modern policing in the 19th century to the present and that it is an effect of the “imperial boomerang.” Police have brought home the tools and tactics of imperialism overseas to militarize themselves in response to perceived racialized threats from minority and immigrant populations.
This is based on his new book of the same title, Policing Empires.
Go’s research explores the social logic, forms, and impact of empires and colonialism; postcolonial/decolonial thought and related questions of social theory, epistemology, and knowledge; and global historical sociology.
Much of Go’s work has focused on the U.S. empire, resulting in articles and books such as The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives (co-edited with Anne Foster, Duke University Press, 2003), American Empire and the Politics of Meaning (Duke University Press, 2008), and Patterns of Empire: the British and American Empires, 1688 to Present (Cambridge University Press, 2011). His other work is on postcolonial thought and social theory, culminating in his book Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory, Oxford, 2016; and global historical sociology and transnational field theory: Fielding Transnationalism (co-edited with Monika Krause, Wiley & Sons, 2016); and Global Historical Sociology, co-edited with George Lawson (Cambridge, 2016).
His most recent book, Policing Empires: Militarization and Race in Britain and America, 1829-present (Oxford, forthcoming) explores imperialism’s impact on police militarization in the U.S. and Britain. He is also working on a project that recovers anticolonial thought as a critical form of social theory.
His scholarship has won prizes from the American Sociological Association, the Eastern Sociological Society, the American Political Science Association, and the International Studies Association, among other institutions. He is the winner of the Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting in Sociology given by the American Sociological Association. In 2021-2022, Julian served as the president of the Social Science History Association. https://sociology.uchicago.edu/directory/Julian-Go
For additional information, or for those who need special accommodations to attend this event, call (309) 438-8668.
The Robert G. Bone Distinguished Lecture Series was established by the late Illinois State University President Robert G. Bone. Shared by the departments of History, Politics and Government, and Sociology and Anthropology, it brings distinguished scholars to Illinois State University to deliver a series of public lectures and to meet with faculty and students. This year’s lecture is sponsored by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.
