The horrific events in Minneapolis–the killing of civilians amid militarised operations, armed raids in residential neighbourhoods, and the conversion of an American city into a spectacle of state violence–are not an anomaly but a stark manifestation of a pattern long identified by political scientists and historians. This pattern reveals a fundamental truth: the violence intrinsic to empire knows no topography. Minnesota shows how it seeps back into the foundations of the imperial state itself, transforming domestic policing, social control, and the very conception of citizenship.
For centuries, we have been taught a geography of power: the West acts, the rest suffers. We are told that imperialism is an external project, a theatre of conquest confined to distant shores where armies clash to seize resources. The colonial subject, the foreign ‘other’, is understood as the sole bearer of its brutal legacy. This framing allows the imperial core to imagine itself as separate, insulated, and morally distinct; its domestic tranquillity is seen as unconnected to its foreign brutality. It is a narrative of clean hands. While this is comforting, it is also dangerous.
Imperial Boomerang
The concept of the imperial boomerang posits that the technologies of control, the ideologies of racial hierarchy, and the architectures of violence normalised and perfected at the edges of empire eventually return to the metropolitan centre. Practices first justified in those ‘exceptional’ spaces–the colonies, the border zones, the black sites, the distant wars–cannot be contained. They build their own pathway back through bureaucracy, through institutional memory, through a mindset that starts seeing certain people as ‘deplorables’ in times of systemic crisis. Over time, these tools get a software update and are redeployed in the heart of the once ‘liberal centre’. The target gets relabelled: from the ‘savage’ abroad to the ‘enemy within’.
This dynamic was articulated with prophetic clarity by Aimé Césaire in his seminal 1950 work, Discourse on Colonialism. He dismantled the European conceit that the West had both grown itself through its colonies and ‘civilised’ itself in the process. On the contrary, Césaire argued, while colonialism materially enriched the imperial powers, it simultaneously brutalised them morally, politically, and socially. It required and cultivated a mindset of absolute racial superiority, administrative arbitrariness, and dehumanisation of the ‘other’ to function. For Césaire, European fascism–specifically Nazism–was not a historical aberration but a ‘boomerang effect’. It was the point at which the colonial model of violence, ‘racialised, massified, bureaucratic, and impersonal’, was applied on European soil to European (including white) bodies. This is what led political theorist Hannah Arendt to coin the term ‘imperial boomerang’.
‘They tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them,’ Césaire wrote; ‘they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimised it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.’ The horror of the Holocaust, in this reading, was the shock of Europe confronting a mirrored, intensified version of its own colonial logic.
The historical evidence for this reflux of imperial techniques is extensive. Consider the British Empire. The concentration camp was not invented by the Nazis but was systematically used by the British during the Second Boer War (1899—1902) to detain Afrikaner civilians and Black Africans. Methods of population control, surveillance, and collective punishment honed in Ireland, India, and Kenya–such as curfews, identity passes, and ‘strategic hamlets’–informed later policing and counter-terror strategies in the UK itself, particularly in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and in the monitoring of immigrant communities post-9/11.
For the United States, this process is deeply embedded in its national narrative. The frontier and the plantation were the nation’s first internal colonies, where ideologies of racial extermination and subjugation were forged. The logic of counter-insurgency practised against Native American populations–attacking civilian encampments, forced removals–prefigured twentieth-century warfare. It also influenced the professionalisation of a more violent, expeditionary-minded U.S. military and fed into the brutal repression of labour movements, such as the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, where the Colorado National Guard attacked striking miners and their families with tactics reminiscent of colonial warfare.
Old Methods, New Enemies
The War on Terror of the twenty-first century has accelerated and digitised this boomerang effect. The post-9/11 paradigm created a global, permanent, and legally exceptional battlefield. Practices authorised in Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and CIA black sites–indefinite detention without trial, enhanced interrogation (torture), mass surveillance, and signature strikes based on metadata–did not stay abroad. They fundamentally altered the domestic landscape.
The 1033 programme funnelled billions of dollars’ worth of surplus military equipment–from armoured vehicles (MRAPs) and helicopters to night-vision goggles and assault rifles–to local police departments. The police response in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, resembling an occupying army confronting an insurgent population, was a direct visual and tactical manifestation of this flow. And now ICE, an agency whose $30 billion annual budget matches the military budgets of Italy, Israel, and Brazil.
The ‘enemy within’: the ideological construct of a boundless, borderless war against terrorism legitimised the targeting of domestic groups, particularly Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities, with entrapment strategies, no-fly lists, door-knocking, abductions of parents and five-year-olds, and more.
What is happening in Minneapolis is the institutionalised fruit of a carceral state built on a foundation of racialised control, enabled by the U.S. government. The empire has come home.
Stelios Foteinopoulos is policy analyst specializing in European public policy and strategy, and a former EU adviser.