Stop, Search and Violate: “The Anti-Blackness of Stop and Search Policing in Contemporary Europe”

Abstract

This research demonstrates the undeniable link between the anti-Black sentiments - once justifying the colonial expansion, extraction, and violence - and the racially discriminatory stop and search policing powers in contemporary Europe. The anti-Black sentiments deriving from coloniality are at the core of securitisation, surveillance and policing which influences how the highly discretionary stop and search policing powers are implemented throughout Global North. Borrowing from the Anglophonic approach to race, this thesis challenges the European race/colour-blindness by introducing a postcolonial and Critical Race Theory reading of legal and policy documents, as well as the contemporary public and political debates surrounding the racially motivated over-policing of Black and brown bodies in the post-George Floyd Europe. By tracing the anti-Blackness of surveillance and policing, along with the Anglophonic history of stop and search policing the research creates a comparison point for three case studies looking at racially discriminatory stop and search policing in contemporary France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. As the historical and theoretical analysis shows, the core of surveillance and policing is the fact of Blackness, and as such this thesis aims to show how the narrative of race/colour-blind Europe is in fact a destructive fallacy. At best this narrative denies the experiences of Black and brown bodies of discriminatory over-policing, and at worst this denial is creating bare-life conditions in which Black and brown bodies are subjected to necropolitical policing power. The critical and postcolonial lenses used in this research recognise that stop and search policing does not happen in a vacuum, but that the colonial anti-Black history of surveillance and policing enables this necropolitical policing power. Focusing on case studies in Europe, this thesis challenges the narrative of the European race/colour-blind narrative, calling for more critical engagement with Europe’s shared colonial history.