Violence as Usual: Everyday Police Work and the Colonial State in German Southwest Africa

Abstract

This chapter puts practices of everyday violence at the center of its analysis of colonial order. It examines the micro-mechanisms and manifold forms of threatening and hurting people. While a quotidian part of colonial life, such practices – accepted and normal within the colonial moral economy – are not normally seen as state actions. However, they reveal the workings of a powerful state: one that was built in an improvised fashion by low-level state representatives.

Based on an analysis of everyday police work in German Southwest Africa, this chapter offers a theoretical reframing of the colonial state that aims to provincialize the modern European state. It shifts the perspective away from the legal and institutional aspirations and structures of the state, instead turning attention to less rationalized processes: the idiosyncratic, makeshift, affective procedures of low-ranking officials. On this plane, everyday violence played a key role in generating a new social order. Ultimately, it had constructive effects which were a fundamental and inherent part of the colonial state’s power.

Citation

Muschalek, M. (2017), "Violence as Usual: Everyday Police Work and the Colonial State in German Southwest Africa", Rethinking the Colonial State (Political Power and Social Theory, Vol. 33), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 129-150. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0198-871920170000033007