How institutional and interpersonal policing have been central to worldmaking

Policing is constitutive of colonial modernity: normalizing, internalizing, and legalizing anti-Black violence as the ongoing condition for white life and freedom. The result, Tia Trafford argues here, is a situation where we cannot practically experience or even imagine worlds free from policing. From the plantation to the prison, global apartheid, and pandemic control, this book examines why and how policing has become the most ingrained, commonsense—and insidious—way of managing our world.

Tia Trafford is reader in philosophy and design at University for the Creative Arts in London. They are author of The Empire at Home: Internal Colonies and the End of Britain and coeditor of Alien Vectors: Accelerationism, Xenofeminism, Inhumanism and Speculative Aesthetics.