Speaker: Professor Julian Go (University of Chicago)

Chair: Professor Marsha Henry (QUB)

In the US and Britain, the lines between the military and domestic policing have become blurred.  In this Lecture, based upon his recent award-winning book Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US (Oxford University Press, 2023), Professor Julian Go offers a historical sociology of police militarization, revealing how, when and why it has occurred.

Go shows that what we call 'police militarization' has been happening since the very founding of modern policing in the nineteenth century and that it is an effect of the 'imperial boomerang': police officials import the mindsets, means and methods of coercion in imperial peripheries to regulate and repress racialized populations at home.

Biography

Julian Go is Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of Chicago, where he is also a Faculty Affiliate of the Committee on International Relations and the Center for the Study of Race, Culture and Politics.

He has published widely on issues regarding the US and British empires, overseas colonialism, anticolonial/postcolonial theory, theory and methods in global historical sociology and social theory more broadly.

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 organizations.  He is the winner of Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting in Sociology given by the American Sociological Association.

His many professional roles include recently serving as the President of the Social Science History Association.