Imperial boomerang

The imperial boomerang, or the colonial boomerang, is the theory that governments that develop repressive techniques to enforce imperialism or control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens. This concept originates with Aimé Césaire in his 1950 work Discourse on Colonialism, where Césaire analyzed the origins of European fascism. Hannah Arendt agreed with this usage, calling it the boomerang effect in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). It is sometimes called Foucault's boomerang as Michel Foucault also described the phenomenon in the 1970s.

According to this theory, the methods employed by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany were not historically unique when viewed from a global perspective. Rather, the violence was an extension of the logic of European colonialism, which had resulted in the deaths of millions across the Global South for centuries. As such, the Holocaust and Nazi atrocities were only categorized as "exceptional" because they were applied to Europeans within Europe, rather than to colonized populations in Africa, Asia, or the Americas. This framework posits that the techniques of mass surveillance, forced labor, and genocide, previously perfected in colonial territories, were "boomeranged" back to Europe.