Description
International perspectives on policing and criminalisation, both contemporary and historical, still lack in representation from the global South, particularly postcolonial environments wherein colonial logics, laws, and institutions thrive. This paper considers the convergences between colonial “lawfare”, (post)colonial counterinsurgency techniques, and routine, domestic policing to explore how such convergence facilitates the criminalization and punishment of dissent and political activism within contemporary undemocratic or authoritarian settings. Using colonial-era legislations found in the case of Pakistan (e.g., the ‘law of sedition’ or 124-A in the Penal Code and Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code), I explore how such frameworks are deployed as part of a postcolonial state’s overarching counterinsurgency warfare and state violence against citizens, particularly dissidents and critics.
I draw upon Brown’s “postcolonial penality” (2017) and Baxi’s “postcolonial legality” to show how such colonial institutions are used to legitimise and weaponize the state’s militarised lawfare against its own people and to frame socio-political activism and mundane resistance as conspiracies amounting to national security threats. Such securitized narrative-framing, coupled with the deployment of colonial-era techniques of control (including law enforcement agencies), ensures an ongoing conflation of “police power” and “war power”, hindering efforts towards democratic transition, reform and change. Exploring this conflation allows us to see how contemporary convergences between colonial and postcolonial legality, as well as policing and warfare, enable the ongoing criminalization and state “terrorization” of legitimate dissent. Analysing this provides a critical contribution to emerging critical perspectives on policing, security, and criminal justice – phenomena that remain entrenched in globally traveling ideas of colonialism and counterinsurgency, affecting law and society worldwide.
