The powers used to protect and enforce empire are increasingly being turned inwards and used against nations' own populations. Historian of political thought, Peter Thomas, argues that techniques refined at the frontier of imperial rule have migrated into domestic policy: politics recast as security, emergencies normalized in statute, and surveillance folded into everyday policing. Drawing on recent cases in the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Israel, India, and Hungary, Thomas maps this spread and sets out practical guardrails in law, institutions, and civic life to resist it.

What we once treated as a foreign pathology now looks like domestic routine. Practices refined at imperial frontiers, emergency policing, race coded security, and impunity, have migrated into the heart of liberal democracies. The result is not a cinematic rupture but a slow redesign of everyday rule.

As states lose leverage abroad, they import the tools of domination at home, recoding political disagreement as security risk and turning law into the vehicle of permanent exception. Césaire’s boomerang, Arendt’s concern for truth in politics, Foucault’s governmentality, and Mbembe’s necropolitics supply the frame. Recent cases from the United States and Brazil to the United Kingdom, Israel, India, and Hungary supply the evidence.

SUGGESTED READING The politics of fear is in full effect By Nicolai Gellwitzki We can proceed in four moves. First, a diagnosis of how the foreign becomes intimate. Second, securitization as a governing technique rather than an accident. Third, the toolkit that fuses data extraction with coercive force. Fourth, legality as the weapon of choice. We then see the global pattern, question the inevitable objection about the word fascism, and look to the future for concrete guardrails, constitutional, civic, and epistemic, that can still hold the line.

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What we once treated as a foreign pathology now looks like domestic routine.

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The diagnosis: from “over there” to “right here”

To grasp the global rise of authoritarian politics, we must begin with the recognition that what was once imagined as distant and alien has become intimate and domestic.

Aimé Césaire warned that the brutalities of empire “boomerang” home, decivilizing the metropole. That insight frames the present: emergency policing, race-coded security logics, and impunity that once defined distant peripheries now structure domestic rule. The chicken has come home to roost.

Two emblematic ruptures anchor the argument. In Washington, the January 6th attack revealed a coalition of movement extremists and institutional actors willing to disrupt the transfer of power; congressional and Senate reports document the coordination failures and the broader attempt to overturn the election. In Brasília on January 8th, 2023, a parallel sacking of the Supreme Court, Congress, and Planalto showed the same repertoire of mobilization and denial. These are not outliers but signals of a governance style that normalizes exceptional measures. 

The conceptual vocabulary to name this is now well-developed: Jason Stanley catalogs the rhetorical marks of fascist politics; Roger Griffin’s classic definition stresses a mythic national rebirth; and Kim Lane Scheppele’s “autocratic legalism” can show us how leaders use law itself to dismantle constitutionalism. Together, they describe a shift from fringe extremism to routine statecraft. 

Securitization as technique, not accident