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Paper short abstract

This essay argues that Britain’s criminal legal system, shaped by colonial lawfare and reinforced in the neo‑colonial metropole, continues to reproduce racialised inequities through legislation, policing, and institutional logics rooted in empire.

Paper long abstract

This essay examines Britain’s criminal legal system through a decolonial lens and argues that its contemporary structures cannot be understood without recognising their entanglement with imperial domination, racialisation, and the violent logics of colonial lawfare. Tracing the genealogy of British jurisprudence from the era of British slavery and Empire to the present, it shows how practices of legal codification, racialisation, and disciplinary control were first tested in colonial “laboratories” across Africa and South East Asia, then imported back into the neo-colonial metropole. Situated in London and shaped by the authority of metropolitan elites, these legal instruments were redeployed to regulate and punish populations constructed as threatening and inherently criminal through myths of racial and cultural inferiority.

Drawing on anthropological scholarship, historical cases and lived experience, the essay offers a decolonial critique of contemporary populist narratives of “lawlessness” and crisis centred on immigration. It demonstrates how such rhetoric legitimises renewed forms of racialised governance that rely on coercive and punitive force. The argument advances the claim that British law continues to function as a bureaucratic system of social stratification, with policing practices that sustain a two-tiered system of justice grounded in a long-standing belief in white supremacy. Ultimately, the paper contends that Britain’s legal order remains a framework of coloniality that regulates racialised subjects not as equal citizens but as perpetual outsiders within the metropole. It calls for a reassessment of the presumed neutrality of law and a clearer recognition of its role in maintaining the ongoing production of racialised injustice.