In 2020, Nigerian youths took to the streets to demand the disbanding of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a unit of the Nigerian Police with a long history of extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, extortion, torture, and other atrocities. The Nigerian government created the division in 1992 following the killing of an army colonel, under the pretense of fighting a crime wave which was sweeping the country. In the “societies of enmity” (Achille Mbembe, “The Society of Enmity” [Radical Philosophy Vol. 200, No. 1], 23–25) we live in today, the growing militarization of law enforcement in the context of the “war on crime” has put even solid democracies in grave danger and continues to justify authoritarianism and military regimes worldwide. The expansion of state powers through the violent exploitation of its growing “margins,” (V. Das and D. Poole, eds., Anthropology at the Margins of the State [School of American Research Press, 2004]) tarnished with the signs of danger, illegality, and precariousness, has shown that bureaucratic power and state violence walk hand in hand in instituting highly unequal but economically viable social orders in postcolonial Africa and elsewhere. Those movements configure an emergent threat coming from a tactical level of political action and show that contemporary political power can indeed emerge from the tip of a machine gun, proving Walter Benjamin’s critique of Hannah Arendt’s famous image (“Critique of Violence” in Deconstruction, a Reader [Routledge, 2017], 62–70).

2020年，尼日利亚年轻人走上街头，要求解散特别反抢劫小队（SARS），该小队是尼日利亚警察部队的一个单位，长期存在法外处决、强迫失踪、勒索、酷刑和其他暴行。 1992年，一名陆军上校被杀后，尼日利亚政府以打击席卷全国的犯罪浪潮为借口，成立了该部门。在我们今天生活的“敌对社会”（Achille Mbembe，“敌对社会”[激进哲学第 200 卷，第 1 期]，23-25）中，在“打击犯罪的战争”甚至将牢固的民主国家置于严重危险之中，并继续为全世界的独裁主义和军事政权辩护。通过暴力剥削不断增长的“边缘”来扩张国家权力（V. Das 和 D. Poole，编辑， 《国家边缘的人类学》 [美国研究出版社学院，2004 年]），危险、非法性和不稳定，表明官僚权力和国家暴力携手并进，在后殖民非洲和其他地方建立了高度不平等但经济上可行的社会秩序。这些运动构成了来自政治行动战术层面的紧急威胁，并表明当代政治权力确实可以从机关枪的尖端出现，证明了沃尔特·本雅明对汉娜·阿伦特著名形象的批判（ 《解构主义》中的“暴力批判”，读者[劳特利奇，2017]，62-70）。