We live within institutional arrangements which influence our ways of thinking and responding to the world around us. Those institutions often seem part of the natural order of things – necessary and immovable, defining particular social artefacts as problems and predefining the range of possible responses, reforms, and solutions. The institution of policing is no exception, and its historical weight carries us along well-trodden paths. Instrumental arguments by policymakers, politicians, and police administrators reconfirm the necessity of the police to control crime and to uphold the law, even as a wealth of evidence throws into question the basic claims of these assertions. Indeed, the problems of police violence, ineffectiveness and corruption are as old as the institution of policing itself. And there is a sense of déjà vu every time another official inquiry reports on some particularly egregious atrocity that has risen above the normal levels of police violence and mismanagement. The script is time-honoured – it usually begins with the need for upgraded training and improved accountability, followed by more resources, and perhaps something on the requirement for better community engagement and strategies to rally social legitimacy.

What is often ignored is the recognition of policing as a socio-historical process that maintains itself for reasons other than controlling crime. One is reminded of Foucault’s discussion of the failure of the prison in Discipline and Punish. This failure is recognised in the early 1820s and is constantly re-articulated to the present day – including its failure to rehabilitate and to reduce crime. Yet the institution appears resistant to change and continually re-invents itself to the point where, 200 years later, we are talking about the problem of hyper-incarceration. Foucault poses the questions: What does the prison produce? What interests are served by the prison? I want to shift those questions back to the police. What does the history of policing tell us about the control and maintenance of social divisions including class, race, gender, disability, and their intersections; or about the economic exploitation of labour and political control? What does it tell us of the use of power, both at the local level and more broadly through macro socio-historical movements of colonialism and imperialism? And finally, why is an understanding of this history so important to contemporary calls to defund the police?

Widespread outrage at police violence, fatal shootings, and deaths in police custody created the current international protest movements and calls to defund the police. However, as shown in previous chapters, there is a long history to protests against police violence, and there are multiple movements to change policing globally which draw on localised contexts. Police violence is experienced at a local level, however, it has global reach and is pervasive to the institution. It directly costs the lives of tens of thousands of people annually – and many more if we include the numbers of forced disappearances – and leaves incalculable numbers of people with permanent injuries and disabilities. The victims are overwhelmingly from the most marginalised communities whether defined by race, religion, class, Indigeneity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, citizenship or immigration status, and their various and compounding intersections.

One of the main causes of death, disability, and injury for people deprived of their liberty are the acts of violence and use of force by police and other state agents. This chapter sets out what we know about the nature and context of police violence, shootings, and deaths in police custody – including overt violence and the violence of neglect – and it attempts to do so with reference to contexts of both the global north and south. It considers some of the wider drivers which are international but impact on domestic policing such as expanded militarisation, the impact of the war on drugs and the intersection of policing with security forces, border control, and other law enforcement bodies.

Police killings and deaths in police custody

A defining feature of policing is state-sanctioned legitimacy for the use of force and violence, including lethal violence, against citizens. The importance of police discretion was discussed previously in Chapter 3. Police discretion extends to the use and intensity of violence. Notwithstanding the fundamental importance of a state-sanctioned decision to end someone’s life or seriously maim them, it is difficult to get a handle on the overall size of the problem of police violence, killings, or police custodial deaths.

Over the last 50 years, there have been numerous high-profile judicial inquiries, presidential commissions, royal commissions, and national reports into one policing crisis after another across a spectrum of countries. While these reports have varied in terms of scope and specific content, there are many commonalities in the broad focus of recommendations, particularly in the need to change police through a suite of internal police reform mechanisms and improved measures for accountability. The key police reform priorities which are often identified (and endlessly repeated from one inquiry to the next) include enhancing community policing, introducing diversity quotas and recruitment initiatives, technical solutions such as body cameras, a greater reliance on evidence-based policing (EBP), and various measures to improve citizen complaints systems and accountability mechanisms. Added to this catalogue is recommended investment in an the almost never-ending list of training courses: in de-escalation techniques, in cross-cultural awareness, anti-racism and unconscious bias, in the use of force and physical restraints, to identify signs and symptoms of mental illness, in community policing and community-based crime reduction programmes, in responding to domestic violence and sexual assault, and so on.

This chapter turns to the failure of reform and the problem of police reformism. The discussion focuses on the limitations of programmes of reform in affecting meaningful change. Given the number of inquiries and recommendations and the failure of empirical evidence, research, or practice to show significant improvements, it appears to be a case of not learning from continual failure and instead doing more of the same over again. However, in a deeper sense, and from a perspective of the impact on police as an institution, reformism reinvigorates and reinforces the centrality of the institution of policing rather than challenging it. Indeed, police are able to command even greater resources through reforms, and police power is enhanced rather than contested. What we do not see on the reform lists is a recommendation for the retraction of policing. In contrast, the Defund the Police demand has been for divestment of resources from police and investment in community structures.

Decolonisation within disciplines must be driven by its much wider utility to the flourishing of life in all its dynamism, thus Márquez and Roy ask us to lay siege and respond to colonial conditions with everything we are. So, I want to conclude this book by briefly reflecting on the context of the overarching structures within which law schools find themselves – the university and the world. I reiterate here my earlier suggestion that it may be impossible to effectively ‘decolonise our teaching/research’, if this ambition fails to acknowledge how colonial logics have ordered the university sector and the world in which we live. Understanding the limitations of the structures within which we work allows us to be simultaneously intentional and honest about our endeavours. So, we must ask ourselves from within the law school, what outcomes we want our actions in decolonisation to produce, not just in our schools, but in the university and the world beyond. What does it mean to work in a university and live in a world where colonial logics are ceased?

Decolonisation for law schools, as I have argued in the previous chapters, is a means to produce a jurisprudence for a different future, a different university, and a different world, that breaks from the logics of the past. Consequently, it should be noted that this future cannot be attained without addressing and repairing the wider harms introduced by the intellectual misuse of bodies, life, and space–time. In other words, actualising decolonisation as the complete cessation of the operation of colonial logics, envisions other meanings of justice, which would include, for example, reparative justice. ‘Reparative justice’ in this sense, entails the repair of the colonial conditions of the past 500 years – including the devaluing of life, the commodification of everything and the destruction of the planet.

Introduction

As Césaire notes, any engagement with theories of decolonisation requires an appreciation of the spatial–temporal contexts in which the colonisation/decolonisation co-constitutive relationship has evolved. In addition to this, Starhawk points us towards a desirable direction for decolonisation. Therefore, it must be understood, that without a longitudinal and planetary study of different context-based evolutions of decolonisation’s theories, action that purports to engage with it will be superficial, unable to grasp the contingencies, exigencies, purposes, and limitations of their analyses. Therefore, this chapter focuses on a detailed examination of the colonisation/decolonisation interrelation, especially theorisations that conceptualise the normativity of the colonial in constructing theoretical and practical opposition to it. This examination proceeds through the different contexts in which this colonisation/decolonisation relationship manifests itself: settler states, post-colonial states, as well as within colonising states, such as the UK. Special attention is paid to the spatial–temporal continuities and overlaps within these structures and their refusals … noting that the long survival of the logics and praxes of ongoing colonialism is due, in part, to its ability to co-opt the other, adapt itself, and evolve when necessary. Therefore, context-based refusals have always also had to adapt and evolve, especially to the contexts in which they find themselves and the tools to which they have access. Thus, Baldwin noting these continuities in structure and refusal, invites us to imagine and accept that the civil rights movement in the US was just another in a long line of slave rebellions (1979). In the same vein, prison and police abolitionists narrate the end of formalised racialised slavery, not as a break, but a point of continuing evolution of new forms of racialised capitalist exploitation (Leroy 2021: 8).

Law: the state of play in a field of promise and disappointment

As Yanagihara and Foucault note, law is a powerful and sometimes discomfiting feature of planetary life. These characteristics, especially law’s globalising display of power, can be related to the pervasive effect of the colonial project and its exports around the world. One of the oft-cited benefits of colonialism, is the dubious gift to the colonised world of the ‘rule of law’. With this ‘Law’ comes the ‘Law School’ as an intellectual vanguard. Scattered across the world, these schools are often centres for incubation of new legal minds, but also crucibles of research, revolving around new strands of legal knowledge and thought. This introduction places law schools in a global context, reflecting on the current state of the law school in the UK. This includes a picture of the diversity (a word with fungible and varied meanings) within law schools in the UK, as well as the experiences of marginalised students and staff.

Across my time learning, practising, researching, and teaching law, I have witnessed and experienced the disorientation that comes with the field – punctured illusions and dashed expectations. Our students often arrive at university, full of ideas of what the world is, and the great things they would like to do within it … and yet the teaching of law can sometimes crush their spirits. We claim to teach them about the world, but sometimes we have no idea of what their world is. For some, their reality says: ‘[l]aw is not fair, it does not treat people equally, and its violence is lethal and routine’ (Akbar 2015: 355). Without acknowledging the truth of these experiences, the knowledge we transmit about the world proceeds from within the limited and a selective perspective of a discipline implicated in producing unequal social realities.

I wrote this book because the ideas in it would not let me rest. They would wake me up at night, interrupt my work, and disorder my reflections. I got into the habit of writing these ideas in short notes on random pieces of paper and on my phone, just to get away from them. As academia in the Global North began to be more interested in ‘decolonisation’ as a term of art, I wrote about these ideas in my blog, in book chapters, and academic articles. None of these formats seemed to properly encompass the broad scope of how I wanted to explore the ways in which decolonisation relates to academic knowledge in law. And even here in this book, there is still more that I want to say.

I came to decolonisation, as a topic of study, before and within my study of law. As a cosmopolitan child of the ‘80s, I witnessed the global anti-apartheid movement. I read books written by writer–scholar–politicians who were pillars of the anticolonial and decolonisation movements across Africa from the ‘50s to the ‘80s. Some who trained as lawyers. So, from quite early on, the study and practice of law pointed me to its liberatory potential for ending continuing colonial logics as well as other global harms and injustices. So, I, like many others before and after me, came to the law school, because I heard freedom and justice and peace in its name. However, in time we all learn, though often not so explicitly, that the coloniser’s justice is not justice for the colonised. We learn that ‘the claim of the universal translatability of the English word “justice” … is an extraordinarily presumptive one’ (Gordon 2013: 70). We all learn that peace is not equally distributed. We all learn, eventually, that freedom for those racialised below the abyssal line is not the same for those racialised above it. We could suggest that legal education opens students’ eyes to the true nature of the law, especially when the focus of legal education is on black letter or doctrinal law.

Introduction

This chapter starts with the premise taken up in the previous chapters – that decolonisation is a specific anti-colonial political project of justice (as per da Silva), instituted by colonised peoples, including, peoples in what is designated the Global South, racialised peoples, and indigenous peoples. So, decolonisation is the stubborn and enduring refusal of conditions of life imposed by the logics and praxes of colonial domination, through, inter alia, Euro-modern legal concepts and meanings of the human and space–time. Therefore, as legal academics attempting to think of legal knowledge through the prisms of decolonisation and anticolonialism, we need to understand what it means, theoretically and practically, to use the phrases ‘decolonise the law curriculum/law school’. Here, I must reiterate the point that decolonisation begins as and remains a political project. The phrase ‘decolonise the law curriculum’ and its (mis)use in that sense are somewhat and increasingly mismatched. This is especially so when we detach our work in Global North higher education from the political history and present of ongoing refusal of the capitalist-colonial-enslavement ever-present. Detached from its radical roots, to claim that we are ‘decolonising the law curriculum’ becomes akin to suggesting that we are ‘measuring the yellow’ or ‘climbing the fragrance’.

To avoid misuse of radical language we must consider the ways in which learning, teaching, research, practice, and other related activity, in law can adopt a position of refusal of colonial logics and praxes. This includes understanding, as Chapter 2 explored, how much colonial code is embedded and reproduced in legal knowledge. So, I suggest that care be taken with the phrase ‘decolonising the curriculum,’ as it may not be the right phraseology to describe what the marriage of these spheres of knowledge entails within higher education in the Global North, lest we dilute the political nature of the longstanding project of decolonisation.

Introduction

An appreciation of what the law is, what it has been and the possible directions it could take humanity, requires, as Holmes and Obama note, a deep excavation of its history and ontology. In other words, to understand how the conditions of life introduced and globalised by colonialism have become normalised and woven into the structures that reproduce the current world, it is important to understand the role of Euro-modern law in shaping global structures as well as human behaviour and standards. Without a detailed examination of this, decolonisation will fail to properly engage with the power and possibility produced by Euro-modern legal knowledge. In thinking through decolonisation and legal knowledge, Sara Ahmed’s writings on ‘use’ are very instructive here. She writes that ‘use’ can sometimes become a subversion of ‘function’. The way a thing is used can subvert or even obliterate its supposed function. ‘The more a path is used, the more a path is used’ (Ahmed 2019: 41). ‘Use’ is how the past lives on in the present. Use is how lawful becomes normal, becomes natural, becomes just the way things are. Therefore, this chapter examines the nature of Euro-modern law and how this nature enabled/enables legal knowledge’s (re)production and maintenance of colonial logics and praxes.

Introduction

A fundamental prerequisite to the emergence a world in need of decolonisation, is the, (as James and Lorde note) misusing of difference and the creation of monsters and subhuman humans in epistemologically damaging ways. Thus, the entanglement of Euro-modern law with the design and spirit of colonialism – focused as it is on accumulation through dispossession – is characterised and operationalised by hierarchisation, dehumanisation, as well as control and disciplining along the abyssal line. In other words, through logics of enclosure and valuation, a teleological co-optation of life and nature was instituted and is reproduced by Euro-modern epistemologies. Hierarchisation, in particular, results from marking and creating human groupings through manufactured categorisations and making them accordingly increasingly vulnerable to ‘group-differentiated death’. Consequently, this chapter, and the two that follow, focus on three modes through which Euro-modern jurisprudence (re)produces a knowledge system of epistemic dispossession contingent on accumulation. Primarily this happens by adopting definitions of ‘human’, ‘space’ (as well as ‘place’ and ‘property’) and ‘time’ in law, which function in close alliance with the purposes of capital appropriation, fragmentation, constriction, and commodification. Unsettling these definitions situates body–space–time within a larger conceptual and structural system that constitutes reality, especially Euro-modern law’s worldmaking through ideology and coercion. Though these three frames are overlapping and co-constitutive, it is instructive to identify and define some of the ways in which each frame individually thus constructs reality … even as they collapse together as they fold themselves into our reality. This enfoldment makes itself known in many places, but very few are as poignant as the ‘Door of no Return’ – the last place and time in Africa where captured African bodies were still at home.

Introduction

Fanon, Cabral, and Coates illustrate how the reproduction of the colonial ever-present is undergirded by colonialism’s manoeuvring in time. Thus, time and temporality are essential to understanding the interplay between legal knowledge and colonialism and how colonial logics are carried into the future. Temporality (materially constructed by memory practices, but also with non-human agents) denotes a subjective movement through moments, while time (socially constructed and cognitive) represents the objective attempt to quantify, measure, and mark that movement (see generally Bluedorn 2002: 14; Hoy 2012: 92; Birth 2012: 102; Grabham 2016: 16, 34–5; Abazi and Doja 2018: 240). In other words, temporality can be described as ‘the experience and perception of time’ (Lundström and Sartoretto 2021: 2). Times and temporalities, therefore, connect the earth and all its inhabitants – human, non-human, and inanimate – across space–time (Grabham 2016: 30). The introduction of the clock as a record of time is intimately linked with the acceleration of modes of accumulation and dispossession, which intensified during the colonial–enslavement project and increasingly thereafter under the auspices of globalised accretion of capital. Euro-modern legal knowledge, especially within the common law, is heavily reliant on time and temporality to make its meanings.