Violence and the Law in Post Colonies:

Criminal obsessions after Foucault: post colonialism, police surveillance and the metaphysics of disorder

“In recent years, depictions of postcolonial nations have congealed into a terrifying epic of lawlessness and violence, adding a brutal edge to older European archetypes of underdevelopment, abjection, and ethnic strife. But the similarities between the post colony and the world beyond it are unmistakable. And growing. The global north is evolving toward Africa. Everywhere, criminal violence has become an imaginative vehicle, a hieroglyph, for thinking about the nightmares that threaten the nation.” This short book contains two essays: each first explores an aspect of the global preoccupation, expressed most volubly in postcolonies, with criminal violence – and the complex, ambivalent ways in which police play into that preoccupation, feeding it in order to claim a sovereign right to violence in enforcing the law.”