Police Power, Plantation Principles: Post-Slavery Policing and Reiterating Racialized Expendability

Bio 

Morgan DaCosta is a doctoral candidate in international relations at the University of Oxford. Her DPhil research draws on archival resources to produce a genealogy of policing from the end of British slavery in 1838 until the early 21st century in Jamaica and Trinidad. She conceptualises police power as a form of reiterative violence used to reproduce slavery-era and colonial social order in postcolonial former slave societies. Previously, she worked for Human Rights Watch researching abuses by security forces and human trafficking in the Sahel, and was a Fulbright scholar in Senegal examining urban women’s political activism. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an MPhil from the University of Oxford Department of Politics and International Relations.

Abstract

This paper interrogates the historical and contemporary nexus between the logics of racialized policing and global security regimes, tracing their origins to the design and defense of slave societies and the system of chattel slavery. Drawing on postcolonial theories of international relations and Black Studies scholarship, the paper examines how 17th century slave codes and post-slavery colonial policing structures were designed to secure the social, economic and political relations undergirding chattel slavery by positioning Black bodies as criminally deviant and expendable. The paper highlights how racialized policing not only secured the system of chattel slavery, but also informed the development of global securitization norms long after abolition. Through historical focus on the Anglophone Caribbean from abolition through to contemporary US-driven policing interventions in the region, the paper reveals how transnational and domestic policing and security initiatives perpetuate slavery’s legacy by criminalizing racialized populations to uphold capitalist and imperial interests. By situating policing as a fundamental component of slavery’s afterlife, the paper underscores its historic role as a critical instrument of world ordering and regional hegemony, with enduring implications for sovereignty, justice, and the global valuation of Black life.