Racialisation in a postcolony: rethinking race, capital, and violence from Balochistan

Scholarship on racialisation and racial capitalism shows how racial logics organise capital accumulation and sovereign power. Yet applying these analytics to postcolonial contexts – where social difference goes by other names, and states and majorities carry their own histories of racial domination – reveals their limits. This article rethinks both concepts through a study of sovereign violence against Baloch populations in Pakistan. Racialisation and racial capitalism unsettle dominant accounts that frame this violence as ethnic conflict, security failure, geopolitics, or human rights violations. Instead, they situate these practices within historically produced racialised hierarchies tied to global accumulation, exposing how Euro-American assumptions obscure race-making outside the metropole. Postcolonial states are not only racialised; they also enact violent hierarchies. This double racialisation must be theorised conjuncturally, not separately. An incomplete, externally disciplined sovereignty positions the postcolony as a mediator of global capital in sites of unrealised accumulation, unleashing state violence. This demands an account of multi-scalar racial regimes that include racialised sovereigns and the forms of domination they enable – a rethinking crucial for antiracist internationalism.