I spoke to @juliango.bsky.social about the imperial boomerang and how US war tactics abroad are being employed at home by ICE "America’s cities are treated as colonial zones of conquest and imperial borderlands because that’s all ICE knows. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"

In today's La Presse (Montreal)

Brilliant talk by @juliango.bsky.social To sum, those atrocities committed in faraway lands always come back home. www.gla.ac.uk/hunterian/vi...

I'm looking forward to returning to Glasgow to deliver the 2nd Annual Racial Justice Lecture following Patricia Hill Collins inaugural lecture last year. It’s great that @glasgow.ac.uk is open to discussions of racial justice when in the US it has become a taboo topic.

From 2014. Longstanding tactic. www.thenation.com/article/arch...

No doubt about it: Trump's new imperialism re Venezuela & its unabashed discourse of aggression is exactly what desperate empires do as they fall, and it is exactly what has led to revived imperialism and world war in the past. It's all so predictable & and also so dangerous 1/7

One of the pathetic things about Trump's new imperialism is that it isn't even original. When Reagan invaded Grenada in 83 the admin boasted it meant America was back & had gotten over its "Vietnam syndrome." But this was an expression of weakness not strength 1/6 x.com/TrumpWarRoom...

Do those folks critical of dems and say Dems are the same as Trump actually believe that Harris would have also sent in the US military to Venezuela to capture Maduro? She might have used other means but this blatant empire-ing is surely more of a Trump/Repub thing.

Falling empires do not behave well. #trump

“For Fanon, anticolonial violence was never a celebration of bloodshed…It was a diagnostic category, a way of naming the fact that colonial domination had already made violence the organising principle of everyday life.” hate that we have to keep clarifying this to dolts roape.net/2025/12/21/f...

Wrote a thing on racial capitalism in the French journal Marronnages. Some commentators - Malcolm Ferdinand, Diamond Ashiagbor - commented. Then I wrote a comment on their comment. marronnages.org/index.php/re...

Reminder that 12/16 is the deadline to submit to @sasemeeting.bsky.social in Bordeaux 2026. Be sure to submit to our Network on Postcolonialism and Legacies of Empire: sase.org/networks/u-p...

In Social Science History 49(1), “Vision and method in global historical sociology” by Julian Go and George Lawson has received significant attention. Check out the article: shorturl.at/ztego #history #sociology #Haiti #France #transboundary

Sign up below to hear @juliango.bsky.social giving the next Racial Justice lecture on January 21st, 2026. Prof. Go will be asking 'How and why have the police in liberal democracies become militarized?'. The answer, he will argue, is to be found in imperialism past and present.

Why are today’s police forces so militarized, and what does empire have to do with it? Sociologist @juliango.bsky.social (University of Chicago) explored this in his AISSR Lecture on policing, imperialism & racialization 🎥 Full lecture & aftertalk with Rivke Jaffe ⬇️ www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXtO...

Puff Daddy, the 1798 United Irishmen rebellion, knowledge hierarchies and the militarisation of policing... I am over the moon to see this essay published. Thank you so much to the Dublin Review of Books and to @juliango.bsky.social for writing such a thought-provoking book. drb.ie/articles/its...

How and why did police in liberal democracies become militarized? Drawing on colonial history, our video of the week shows how methods honed during empire were imported into domestic policing through an “imperial boomerang.” Feat. @juliango.bsky.social at @aissr.bsky.social buff.ly/pFAv0pr

Please consider submitting papers to our Network on “Postcolonialism and the Legacies of Empire” for the Annual Meeting of @sasemeeting.bsky.social, to be held in Bourdeaux, France, in July 2026. Deadline: December 12. sase.org/events/2026-.... Specify you are submitting to our Network

Amsterdam this Friday. On colonial fascism coming home. aissr.uva.nl/content/even...

I will say this ICE is asking for retaliation The ppl of Chicago will not sit back in silence A civil war is what #45 wants To declare martial law To stop future elections so we can't vote their asses out I hope the ppl see this for what it is

Powerful speech that everyone should give a few moments towards listening.

Excited to see this in print with Cambridge University Press. A fantastic new volume on Anticolonialism and Social thought (Ed’s): Julian Go and Anaheed Al-Hardan. My contribution includes an intellectual history of Zweledinga Pallo Jordan drawing from archival work and an oral history interview.

🚨 AISSR Lecture Series kick-off! 𝟭𝟳 𝗢𝗰𝘁 | 𝟭𝟰:𝟯𝟬-𝟭𝟲:𝟬𝟬 With @juliango.bsky.social on how imperialism & colonialism shaped today’s militarized policing in the US & UK. Aftertalk with Rivke Jaffe (Urban Geograhpy) Open to students, researchers & the public Register here: aissr.uva.nl/content/even...

More boomerang effect: Trump brings colonial fascism home, creating a new "specialized unit" in the NG: a national level SWAT unit under his direct command. Such units originate in America's early 20th century colonial wars & counterinsurgency campaigns www.npr.org/2025/08/26/n...

Illinois Gov. Pritzker vows to pursue Trump officials who participate in an illegal National Guard deployment to Chicago: "If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me - not time or political circumstance - from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law."

And Chicago isn’t even in the top us cities in terms of violent crime rates. And even if it were, such a deployment would still be an abuse of power.

ICE used your taxpayer dollars to trick out a bunch of trucks in new livery, all painted black with "ICE" and a logo printed in gold on the side (and Trump's name in gold on the back window), then shoot a rap video in DC to post on social media. I am not making this up.

Don’t forget: “crime” by black and brown folks has long been the pretext for bringing the boomerang home, militarizing our streets, & deploying the tactics of colonial control on citizens.

AI is not inevitable. everyone is talking about it only cuz big tech invested billions and need to monetize it. It’s also why big tech turned on the dems and went for Trump: they hated Biden’s attempt to regulate it. Follow the $. And policy.

Just read this paper discussed in @chronicle.com reported by @EmmaJanePettit. It purports to show ideology in the classroom but is itself ideology masquerading as objective 1/11 www.chronicle.com/article/thes...

Of course Kirk doesn’t want sociology majors. He just wants laborers who he can hire to do labor for him and his rich friends and boss them around, not people trained to understand and call out wealth inequality or systems of control.

1/6 When these finance-tech oligarchs whine about universities’ ‘leftist’ indoctrination, they are not really whining about lack of political diversity in universities. They are simply speaking from their own narrow provincial self-interest. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Far from ending US imperialism, Trump reenacts it, using US financial power to bully democratic regimes & install right wing dictators. Typical us imperialism

Excited to read this brand new book on colonial surveillance in France by the impressive Vincent Bollenot! @vincentbollenot.bsky.social

Short article in the French newspaper, Le Monde, about the special issue on racial capitalism in Marronages (founded by @silyanelarcher.bsky.social and others) featuring my article and other wonderful contributions.

I'll be presenting some of my latest thinking on racial capitalism Monday.

we organized this conference to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of 3CT, keynote by Judith Butler. Also includes my colleagues and friends at 3CT & UC like Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gabe Winant, Adom Getachew and Jodi Byrd. If you’re in Chicago do come over. ccct.uchicago.edu/events/theor...

Immanuel Wallerstein 3rd Open Lecture Race, Capital, Critique: For a Theory of Racial Capitalism Julian Go @juliango.bsky.social (University of Chicago) 28th April, 3:30pm BST The event will be streamed on the following YouTube channel: youtube.com/c/facultadde... #SocialTheory #Sociology

This is what happens when empires are in decline: they get desperate and rely on the only thing they have - the means of violence - to land grab and expropriate to try to reassert their dominance. It is what happened in the late 19th century, and it prefaced the World Wars. Beware.

Great to see that @juliango.bsky.social will be speaking at @qubelfastofficial.bsky.social on April 14th on 'Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US', based on his 2023 book. I hope to make it. Check it out below 👇 www.qub.ac.uk/events/whats...

The root that tears apart your foundation begins as a seed of distrust, hate, and blame. The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

Thank goodness for the American Medical Association. Here is their YouTube page. Please share far and wide. Right now bird flu is spreading throughout our country and most people have no clue. Please stay updated and bookmark this page for your health and well-being. www.youtube.com/@americanmed...

Loads of fun discussing the imperial boomerang in these troubled times with Pranay on the "Return To Bandung" podcast. open.spotify.com/episode/1Elk...

Delighted to have contributed an essay for and co-edited this volume on postcolonial sociologies for German audiences with @manuelaboatca.bsky.social and Tobias Werron. With essays from @ricardahammer.bsky.social among others. www.hamburger-edition.de/zeitschrift-...

This is the way

A reminder of how close Democrats were in 2024, thanks to Kamala Harris, vs. in 1984. And this was before all this craziness from Trump the past two weeks.

One small thing we can do for now, to help set up an infrastructure for organizing: join the @aaup.bsky.social. They have officially declared they will be more aggressive in defending academic rights

To “critique woke from the left” is a failed project not because class isn’t important but because it concedes the idea that “woke” is an actually existing social force outside the MAGA misrepresentation of it. Its not. What needs to be critiqued then is its misrepresentation

Funny how Republicans used to be the party of individual responsibility (think Reagan scolding unemployed people). Now if they fail to achieve the success they feel entitled to, they blame DEI, the Deep State or immigrants.