The public-provate partnership of settler violence: Jonathan Obert, ‘State-Building, Settler Colonialism, and Policing the Nineteenth-Century American West’, in James Campbell, Vivien Miller (eds), The Routledge History of Crime in America, Routledge, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

The public-provate partnership of settler violence: Jonathan Obert, ‘State-Building, Settler Colonialism, and Policing the Nineteenth-Century American West’, in James Campbell, Vivien Miller (eds), The Routledge History of Crime in America, Routledge, 2024

06Dec24

Abstract: This chapter traces how two policing logics – centralized state-building militarism and settler colonial violence – intersected with and shaped one another on the nineteenth-century American western frontier and borderlands. Because settlement meant both direct federal administrative control over new lands and the opportunity for settlers to wield some flexibility in creating their own communal political institutions (not to mention the existence of already vibrant legal traditions among Native groups and Mexican and other residents of lands acquired from foreign empires), policing in the west was a complex patchwork. Militarized forms of legal coercion coexisted alongside (and occasionally competed with) highly participatory forms of local social control. Policing the American west thus reflected a particularly violent form of legal pluralism, in which policing individuals easily bled over into contests among collective enemies and in which state-building helped reinforce private violence and vice versa.

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