ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the types of public order knowledge that began to emerge in the British Colonies before and after the Second World War. Colonial public order required a constant police operation precisely because the affective structure of the colonial society (its violence, racial dynamics, hierarchical organisation and overseas subjection) was unsustainable without it. The step-change in the police’s public order analysis in Hong Kong came from the identification of the psycho-affective life of the crowd as the object–target of intervention. Le Bon provided police theorists and trainers with an easy way to grasp the psycho-affective dynamics of ‘the crowd’ as a trans-historical and trans-cultural actor. Instead, the police began to think about intervening in the psycho-affective dynamics of the crowd. The new model of public order management is therefore a crucial in explicitly introducing and intensifying the focus on the psycho-affective dynamics of protest, and indeed on the broader populace.
