Conversation with Dr Morgan DaCosta:
Police Power, Plantation Principles: Racialized Expendability and Regional Policing in the Post-Slavery Caribbean Basin
Friday 20 February 2026, 1pm - 2pm
Seminar Room 63, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities
All Welcome
This paper interrogates the historical and contemporary nexus between the logics of racialized policing and global security regimes, tracing their origins to the design and defense of slave societies and the system of chattel slavery. Drawing on postcolonial theories of international relations and Black Studies scholarship, the paper examines how 17th century slave codes and post-slavery colonial policing structures were designed to secure the social, economic and political relations undergirding chattel slavery by positioning Black bodies as criminally deviant and expendable. The paper highlights how racialized policing not only secured the system of chattel slavery, but also informed the development of global securitization norms long after abolition.
Through historical focus on the Anglophone Caribbean from abolition through to contemporary US-driven policing interventions in the region, the paper reveals how transnational and domestic policing and security initiatives perpetuate slavery’s legacy by criminalizing racialized populations to uphold capitalist and imperial interests. By situating policing as a fundamental component of slavery’s afterlife, the paper underscores its historic role as a critical instrument of world ordering and regional hegemony, with enduring implications for sovereignty, justice, and the global valuation of Black life.
Biography:
Morgan DaCosta is a Junior Research Fellow at New College examining the implications of post-slavery domestic and transnational policing for the perpetuation of slave society logics of racialized deviance and expendability. Through archival study of policing in Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago (1838-2015), she conceptualizes post-slavery police power as reiterative violence which reproduces forms of racialized subjugation in service of international hierarchy, regional hegemony, and state power. Previously, she was a fellow in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and senior research and advocacy associate at Human Rights Watch. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a DPhil from the University of Oxford Department of Politics and International Relations.
