La penalità coloniale e i margini urbani

The article examines the central role of punishment in colonial state formation, arguing that coercive practices were not peripheral but foundational to imperial rule. Demonstrates how the police-court-prison triad, reinforced by exceptional legal regimes such as the indigénat, enabled territorial pacification, institutionalized racial hierarchy and secured the extraction of labor. Colonial penality thus operated simultaneously as an economic instrument and a symbolic technology of domination. The article further proposes that attenuated echoes of these logics persist in contemporary urban “badlands” of advanced societies, where punitive governance disproportionately targets racialized and marginalized populations. While firmly rejecting the conflation of colony and metropolis, identifies structural homologies in the state’s treatment of populations viewed as unruly or civically deficient. Punishment functions as a key mechanism through which modern states manage marginality, reproduce inequality and regulate bodies deemed out of place.