Racial Justice Lecture: Policing Race
How and why have the police in Britain and the United States become so heavily militarized? As this lecture will show, the answer lies in imperialism past and present, and associated dynamics of racialization and colonial fascism.
University of Glasgow Racial Justice Lecture Series
Date: Wednesday 21 January 2026 - Friday 21 November 2025
Time: 19:00 - 20:00
Venue: James McCune Smith Building Room 438
Category: Public lectures
Speaker: Professor Julian Go
The second Racial Justice lecture will be hosted by University of Glasgow Principal and Vice-Chancellor Professor Andy Schofield. We welcome Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago Professor Julian Go, as our speaker for this lecture.
This is the second event in a series which has been established through the University’s Understanding Racism, Transforming University Cultures (URTUC) programme. URTUC aims to address structural racial inequalities faced by our community and publicly states our commitment to being an anti-racist institution.
Policing Race: Militarization and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the United States.
Today the police in the United States and Britain are heavily militarized forces wielding the same weaponry, operations and tactics as armies. But this is not supposed to be. When the modern police were first created, they were meant to be a non-militarized “civil” police. How and why have the police in liberal democracies become militarized? As this lecture will show, the answer lies in imperialism past and present, and associated dynamics of racialization and colonial fascism.
About the speaker
Julian Go is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago where he is also a Faculty Affiliate in the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture and The Committee on International Relations. He is also a Fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory and former President of the Social Science History Association.