Introduction

The 2020 murder of George Floyd put the question of racialised violence at the forefront of thinking about contemporary politics.In recent years, international politics has begun the task of acknowledging the colonial legacies that underpin global politics as well as the urgent work of decolonising its own thinking, knowledge production, and research agendas. 1 Decolonial research has delineated the exploitation, inequality, and discrimination that are the legacy of colonialism.It has traced the way oppression is not simply political or economic, but also epistemological. 2 Despite this important work, decoloniality has often been pitched in a cultural, economic, or epistemological register.This has left the question of the racialisation of political violence -killing, torture, and other acts of cruelty -under-represented.It is clear however that killing and cruelty are a constitutive aspect of the racial dynamics of genocide, war, policing, and (counter-)insurgency. 3 Recognising the importance of such violence goes hand in hand with work that recognises the constitutive -as opposed to merely epiphenomenal -role of violence. 4We cannot understand police killing as simply the product of racism; rather -as has been demonstrated in relation to the racial dynamics of genocide -it is constitutive of racial hierarchies and their brutal consequences. 5

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