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The idea that repressive techniques of control developed abroad are eventually used against a government’s own citizens:
Colonization… had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power used. A whole series of colonial models were brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself.
Sometimes called “Foucault’s boomerang,” the idea originates in philosopher Michel Foucault‘s lecture Society Must Be Defended, in which he described a “boomerang effect”. Later, Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism and Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism developed the idea to explain Europe’s fall into fascism in the first half of the 20th century.