{"p"=>"This paper traces the genealogy of preventive detention in Bangladesh from its colonial origins to its contemporary manifestation, highlighting the persistent use of prevention detention as a tool for repression of political dissent and enforcing social control. Using Foucault’s discipline and punish thesis as a critical entry point, we examine how colonial penal practices are characterized with contradictions and inconsistencies that resist homogenization into distinct categories of disciplinary or retributive penality, particularly in the case of preventive detention. We highlight how preventive detention historically emerged as a mechanism for repression of political dissidents and legitimization of states of emergency through legal exceptionalism. These repressive legal practices, however, continue to be sustained in postcolonial societies, even in ‘normal times’, thereby underscoring the enduring influence of colonial penality in Global South countries like Bangladesh. Finally, we argue that studies of contemporary penal practices, especially those in the Global South, remain incomplete without a critical examination of its colonial roots and postcolonial continuities shaping punitive governance and social control."}