Functional differentiation in operation: latent violence and colonial labor governance

Abstract

Background This article develops a Luhmannian historical-sociological approach to functional differentiation by examining colonial labor governance in German South West Africa after the Herero and Nama War. It asks how the possibility of physical coercion was reconnected to everyday governance through labor regulation, police supervision, and vocabularies of protection and proper treatment. Methods The article uses a historical-sociological and conceptual method. It reconstructs Luhmann's theory of power, functional differentiation, and the potentialization of violence, and relates this theoretical perspective to a historical analysis of colonial labor governance. The analysis draws on colonial ordinances, contemporary administrative debates, and secondary historical scholarship on labor, policing, violence, and population governance. Results The analysis shows that physical coercion made manifest through war and camps was reconnected to everyday governance through a regime of registration and labor control. This regime made African workers observable as laboring subjects whose mobility, employment, treatment, and punishability could be regulated. Legal, contractual, protective, and police vocabularies became relevant through the problems they made visible and the forms of processing they enabled. Conclusion The article argues that functional differentiation can be approached as an operationally grounded historical sociology. Rather than treating functional differentiation as a completed structure of modern society, it examines how concrete operations of communication made problems observable as matters of law, labor, policing, protection, and education. The case of German South West Africa offers a historical-sociological point of departure for rethinking the potentialization of violence within the global formation of modernity.