Book review: Conor O’Reilly (ed.), Colonial Policing and the Transnational Legacy: The Global Dynamics of Policing across the Lusophone Community
| Author | Jarrett Blaustein |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480619878892 |
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 135
Conor O’Reilly (ed.), Colonial Policing and the Transnational Legacy: The Global Dynamics of
Policing across the Lusophone Community, Routledge: Abingdon, 2018; 268 pp.: 9781409465300,
£115 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Jarrett Blaustein, Monash University, Australia
Since the 1990s, an interdisciplinary body of scholarship on global and transnational polic-
ing has flourished. Among the most influential contributions to this literature have been
Andreas and Nadelmann’s (2006) Policing the Globe, which combined different strands of
international relations theory to account for the formation and transnational enforcement of
‘global prohibition regimes’, and Global Policing (2012) by Bowling and Sheptycki which
theorizes and problematizes the transnational assemblages that collectively constitute this
emergent phenomenon. Along with various other works that have advanced our under-
standing of the complex relationship between globalization and policing, these pivotal con-
tributions are primarily centred on an Anglophone policing tradition and its transhistorical
legacy. While it is undeniable that countries like the United States and Britain have played
instrumental roles in shaping the complex landscape of transnational policing as it exists
today, we must remember that transnational policing is a global phenomenon that lacks a
geographical centre. For this reason, Colonial Policing and the Transnational Legacy rep-
resents a welcomed contribution to the literature by advancing a more nuanced historical
understanding of the complex power dynamics underpinning this assemblage.
The aim of Colonial Policing and the Transnational Legacy is thus to ‘disentangle the
global policing web’ (p. 1) by bringing the Lusophone experience into focus. The
Lusophone community ‘refers to that transnational assemblage of nations and peoples
linked by a shared legacy of Portuguese colonialism’ (pp. 1–2). Portugal has historically
served as its ‘metropole’ while its periphery consists of various former colonies, includ-
ing Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Macau and Mozambique. At the heart of
this volume lies an important and compelling argument which suggests that these nations
share an enduring, collective policing experience that exists today as a vestige of the
Lusophone community’s colonial past. As Conor O’Reilly argues in the introductory
chapter to this volume, the boundaries of the Lusophone policing community are trans-
cendent of both historical periods and sovereign borders. This claim establishes the
rationale for the genealogical organization of the volume which focuses on three distin-
guishable, albeit interconnected, periods of Lusophone policing history: colonialism;
late colonialism; and post colonialism. The scholarship in the chapters that follow is
highly original, rigorous, theoretically informed and, in most cases, thought-provoking.
Part I examines the nature and function of colonial policing. The section consists of
three chapters and an additional commentary. In Chapter 1, Goncalo Rocha Goncalves
and Rita Avila Cachado begin by emphasizing that colonial policing has been largely
neglected by Portuguese scholars of historiography. Accordingly, they set out to ‘identify
the emergence and contours of colonial policing as a government issue in Portugal’ (p.
18) and note that applying the very concept of ‘colonial policing’ is problematic in the
Lusophone context given that the Portuguese empire lacked ‘a coherent system’ of colo-
nial administration. Chapter 2 proceeds to draw on the work of Michel Foucault and
colonial policing scholar Mike Brodgen to provide a fascinating account of the military’s
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