It is not just the politics of the present that is being judicialized. The past, too, is increasingly caught up in the dialectic of law and disorder: hence the mobilization of legalities to fight anti-imperialist battles anew, which has compelled the British government to answer under oath for having committed acts of unspeakable atrocity in its African “possessions”, for having killed local leaders at whim, and for having unlawfully alienated territory from one African people to another. By these means is colonialism, tout court, rendered criminal. Hauled before a judge, history is made to break its silences, to speak in tongues hitherto unheard and untranslated, to submit itself to the scales of justice at the behest of those who suffered it, of its most abject subjects— and to be reduced to a cash equivalent, payable as the official tender of damage, dispossession, loss, trauma. In the process, too, it becomes clear that what imperialism is being indicted for, above all, is its commission of lawfare: its use of its own rules—of its duly enacted penal codes, its administrative law, its states of emergency, its charters and mandates and warrants, its norms of engagement—to impose a sense of order upon its subordinates by means of violence rendered legible, legal, and legitimate by its own sovereign word. And also to commit its own ever-socivilized, patronizing, high-minded forms of kleptocracy.
— John & Jean Comaroff, Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (Chivago 2006) [via]
