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Podcast: New Books in Law
Episode: Marie Muschalek, "Violence as Usual: Policing and the Colonial State in German Southwest Africa" (Cornell UP, 2019)
Description: Slaps in the face, kicks, beatings, and other forms of run-of-the-mill violence were a quotidian part of life in German Southwest Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century. Unearthing this culture of normalized violence in a settler colony, Violence as Usual: Policing and the Colonial State in German Southwest Africa (Cornell UP, 2019) uncovers the workings of a powerful state that was built in an improvised fashion by low-level state representatives.Marie A. Muschalek's fascinating portrayal of the daily deeds of African and German men enrolled in the colonial police force called the Landespolizei is a historical anthropology of police pr...