The modern nation-state emerged as among the foremost agents of violence in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century worlds. Across historical accounts of colonial conquest, religious conflict, class unrest, and environmental ravage, the state's military and police apparatus are seen to play a key role in enacting and mediating violence. Moreover, since the modern state—whether colonial or independent, authoritarian or democratic—inevitably frames its violence as legal, a study of modern violence leads us to interrogating legal narratives. Indeed, an important endeavour in global legal studies scholarship has been to uncover the violence that legal interpretation unleashes—on individuals deemed guilty in a judicial court, on segments of the population deemed lesser citizens, or on entire territories deemed spaces of exception. A history of physical violence, then, also calls for a history of epistemic violence.

A critical component of the modern state's monopoly over legitimate violence was the formation of professionalized police forces that replaced less formal policing bodies earlier drawn from local communities—an extended process that occurred in Europe and its colonies from the eighteenth century onwards. Tasked with the mandate of maintaining social and economic order, policing relied on state knowledge that classified populations based on race, class, gender, and community to choose the objects of its coercive surveillance.