Policing and the Politics of Order-Making

Peter Albrecht, Helene Maria Kyed

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317802457
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

This anthology explores the political nature of making order through policing activities in densely populated spaces across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Based on ethnographic research, the chapters analyze this complex with respect to marginalized young men in Haiti, community policing members and national politicians in Swaziland as well as other individual and collective actors engaged in policing and politics in Indonesia, Swaziland, Ghana, South Africa, Mexico, Bolivia, Haiti and Sierra Leone. What these contexts have in common is a plurality of order-making practices. Not one institution monopolizes the means of violence or a de facto sovereign position to do so. A number of interests are played out simultaneously, entailing re-negotiations over the very definition of what 'order' is. How and by whom a particular order is enforced is contested, at times violently so, and is therefore inherently political. In the existing literature on weak states, legal pluralism and policing in the Global South it is seldom made explicit that making order is a route to power and positions of political decision-making. It is this gap in the literature that this anthology fills, as it analyses the politics at stake in processes of order-making.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Policing and the politics of order-making on the urban margins

Helene Maria Kyed and Peter Albrecht

DOI: 10.4324/9781315813745-1

Today, more than half the world’s population live in cities. Urban centres are expected to absorb almost all population growth in the coming decades (UN-Habitat 2012; Saatterthwaite and Mitlin 2014). In the process, urban spaces are emerging as sites of intensified insecurity and violence. This is particularly the case in the margins and in the slums of cities in the Global South, which today host more than 800 million people (UN-Habitat 2012). From the peripheries of megacities such as Mexico City and Metro Manila to densely populated neighbourhoods in Swaziland, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Haiti, Ghana, Indonesia and Bolivia, this book explores how urban spaces are policed when the public police is seen as inadequate and insecurity is a mainstay of daily life. How is order enacted in these urban spaces and who de facto engages in policing? How do the people living there respond to situations of insecurity? And how does everyday policing relate to wider political dynamics in the urban space?

These questions are explored empirically in the following ten chapters of this book. A common characteristic across the case study areas is a plurality of order-making practices, norms and actors that remain contested and volatile. State police officers coexist with various ‘civilian policing groups’, who often dominate everyday order-making. These are groups of ordinary citizens who engage in policing their own areas of residency. In this book such groups range from community policing members, student movements, youth groups, and neighbourhood guards and judges, to militias and secret societies. They draw on a variety of both violent and non-violent repertoires of order-making and are animated by a mix of cultural, religious and state-based norms. Some also exhibit a specific style of sporadic ‘direct action’ that is cultivated by the particular condition of urban uncertainty. A key characteristic of this urban condition is the prevalence of both collaboration and competition among policing actors and their supporters.

How and by whom a particular order is enacted in urban spaces is contested, and at times violently so. Not one set of actors monopolizes the authority or sovereign position to enact order, entailing renegotiations over the very definition of what the order is. This emphasizes order-making as a deeply political matter. Policing is also political in more explicit ways. In the chapters of this book policing actors are co-opted to further the political agenda and power position of other influential actors, including party politicians, public officials, traditional leaders and drug lords. Participating in police work can also be a route to power, resources and clients. Indeed, policing can itself be productive of new political spaces and subjectivities.

Exploring the political underpinning of order-making constitutes this book’s key contribution. It adds a more profound political dimension to the growing body of literature on plural policing and security governance that informs most of its chapters (Loader 2000; Bayley and Shearing 2001; Jones and Newburn 2006; Wood and Shearing 2007; Baker 2008; Abrahamsen and Williams 2011). This literature has made a significant contribution to research on policing by moving beyond definitions that centre on the monopoly of the state and its institutions. Rather, policing is defined as a set of practices that can be exercised, and governed, by various state, private and communal actors (Jones and Newburn 2006: 3–4). Moreover, emphasis is on the need for a relational approach to policing. This means that instead of constituting isolated institutions, present day policing actors form part of complex networks or assemblages: they collaborate, compete and enrol each other to make a particular order and to constitute authority (Wood and Shearing 2007; Abrahamsen and Williams 2009). This relational approach opens up to an exploration of order-making ‘beyond’ the state police, but without substituting a focus on the state with that of the ‘non-state’ or ‘private’.

An omission in much of the literature on plural policing and security governance is a deeper understanding of the links between policing and politics. Politics and power structures are often approached as external to policing practices, as providing the national and global context for how security is governed. The empirical case studies in this book compel us to explore policing practices and actors as embedded not only in ‘police networks’, but also in the specific social and political relations of the urban space. Political brokerage, patronage and electoral strategies, along with communal, family and ethnic ties shape how policing is organized and performed. Policing actors get involved in and are often productive of local politics. In turn, we suggest that politics is reflective of multiple efforts to concentrate power and enact sovereignty within inherently plural contexts.

While the power to make and define order is indeed dispersed and networked, conflicts among actors that seek to consolidate this power around specific institutions, groups and individual positions are equally omnipresent. These articulations of politics are exemplified by different forms of symbolic and physical ‘boundary work’. Such boundary work permeates not only how policing is performed, but also how policing actors relate to each other within different networks or assemblages. The result is a ‘plurality of power centers’ (Bierschenk and de Sardan 2014: 16) and ‘partial sovereignties’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006: 35) that are continuously formed and reformed. It is in this respect that the book adds a more political perspective to the debate about plural policing. In doing so, it draws on a number of recent political anthropological studies that engage in critically rethinking the concepts of authority and sovereignty (Hansen and Stepputat 2005; Lund 2006; Comaroff and Comaroff 2006).

In the remainder of this introductory chapter we first outline the main academic debates within which this book is situated. These debates also lay the foundation for conceptualizing the specific urban contexts that the chapters deal with. We introduce these in the second section. While the ten countries covered in this book have their own specific histories of policing and political cultures, they share a number of features characteristic of ‘urban margins’ and other high density neighbourhoods that have been affected by a pluralization of governance and neoliberal globalization. In the third section we introduce the main policing actors covered in this book: civilian policing groups. We point to their ambiguous nature and contested relationship with the state, and argue that these characteristics emerge from the urban condition of insecurity. Before concluding with an outline of the chapter contributions, we provide a definition of the key concepts of the book – policing, order-making and politics.

The debates: plural policing, twilight authority and partial sovereignty

Until recently, state-centric theories of policing, sovereignty and authority dominated understandings of alternative order-making actors such as vigilante groups, militias and customary chiefs. They were seen as signs of ‘state failure’ or simply as filling the void left by an ‘inadequate state’ (Zartman 1995; Rotberg 2002). In contrast, this book is positioned within a growing body of cross-disciplinary literature that challenges the idea that the state and its institutions hold or ought to hold a monopoly on order enforcement. Sovereignty, authority and policing are approached from an empirical perspective, as a particular set of practices and claims, not as the prerogative of a specific political entity – i.e. the modern state. This reflects an empirically grounded and actor-oriented perspective on how and by whom order is made and remade. It allows the analysis of order-making to include a broad-based set of actors, norms and claims to authority.

To understand the politics of order-making in the urban contexts under scrutiny, the book’s approach combines three different bodies of literature that share a critique of state-centric theories. We take our point of departure in the ‘plural policing’ and ‘security governance’ literature, which emphasizes networks, assemblages and hybrid governance, but without much consideration of the political contestations and efforts to concentrate power that are defining features of everyday policing. To capture the political dimension of policing, we draw on the one hand on Lund’s (2006) work on public authority and local politics, and on the other hand on a number of political anthropological studies of sovereignty and vigilantism (Hansen and Stepputat 2005; Comaroff and Comaroff 2006; Pratten and Sen 2007; Kirsch and Grätz 2010). This latter body of literature allows us to capture the role that violence and moral ambiguity play in the politics of order-making.

Plural policing and hybrid governance

The literature on ‘plural policing’ (Loader 2000; Bayley and Shearing 2001; Buur and Jensen 2004; Jones and Newburn 2006; Wood and Shearing 2007; Baker 2008) and ‘security beyond the state’ (Abrahamsen and Williams 2011) challenges previous criminological studies of policing as being equal to the study of the (state) police. This shift is based on a general acceptance that ‘“policing” is now both authorized and delivered by diverse networks of commercial bodies, voluntary and community groups, individual citizens, national and local governmental regulatory agencies, as well as the public police’ (Jones and Newburn 2006: 1). While the emphasis on plurality resonates with earlier socio-legal studies of legal pluralism (Ehrlich 1936; Merry 1988),¹ the shift is not only seen as a theoretical one. It is also a reflection of wider global changes: neoliberal policies of privatization and state deregulation since the 1980s have supported a proliferation of security providers and a fragmentation of security governance away from the state (Abrahamsen and Williams 2011).

A significant contribution of the plural policing literature is the use of a relational approach to policing. Instead of studying one specific institution or discrete system in isolation, the focus is on exploring how a variety of policing providers and auspices relate to, oppose and enrol each other. Concepts such as networks, nodes and assemblages are applied to describe these relationships and the interplay of different practices and rationalities (Wood and Shearing 2007; Abrahamsen and Williams 2009, 2011). This approach is inspired by Bruno Latour’s emphasis on knowledge and truth as produced in the encounter between and among people, things and discourse, rather than as pre-existing entities (Latour 1999, 2007). In this perspective, the dichotomies we use to categorize the world – such as public/private, state/non-state – set up false distinctions and separate what are essentially networked or assembled.²

A key argument in the literature is that security governance is dispersed among a multitude of actors, and the effect of different intertwined rationalities that cut across the public–private divide. The result is ‘hybrid structures’ (Abrahamsen and Williams 2009: 8) or polycentric governance arrangements (Berg and Shearing, this volume). Within these structures there are no ‘clear-cut hierarchical or vertical relationships’ where authority runs in only one direction or from a clearly defined centre (Abrahamsen and Williams 2009: 8, 2011; see also Taussig 1991; Emirbayer 1997: 285; Abrams 2006 [1988], Mitchell 2006 [1999]). This resonates with a Foucauldian understanding of power and governmentality (Foucault 1991), as it challenges a zero-sum conception of power and the notion that power is concentrated in particular institutions or positions.

This rationale is equally captured by the concept of hybridity, which describes the absence of any clear, discrete entities, orders and systems such as state, local and customary.³ In the urban neighbourhoods analysed in this book, this can be seen in how state police and civilian policing groups draw on each other, and mix a variety of practices, to enact order, even when they have emerged in apparent opposition to each other and at times compete. Indeed, not one particular policing actor assumes the exclusive authority to define and enact order and their operations are in any case dependent on a range of relationships with other significant actors.

In sum, the literature on plural policing helps to explain the diffusion of power away from the state and the emergence of hybrid and assembled relations within the field of security provision. However, little attention is given to the politics at play within these relations at the level of everyday practice. In this book, the different contributions show how policing actors are equally preoccupied with efforts to concentrate power and consolidate particular power positions. For instance, this is evident in how they are enrolled in the political projects of powerful others. To insert politics into the sphere of plural policing we draw on two other bodies of literature.

Local politics and twilight institutions

Christian Lund’s (2006) study of public authority and local politics opens ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: policing and the politics of order-making on the urban margins
• 2 Policing Bagong Silang: intimacy and politics in the Philippines
• 3 Policing and the politics of protection on Lombok, Indonesia
• 4 Rival forms of policing and politics in urban Swaziland
• 5 Community policing in Accra: the complexities of local notions of (in)security and (in)justice
• 6 New authorities: relating state and non-state security auspices in South African Improvement Districts
• 7 Security assemblages at the urban margins of Mexico City
• 8 Closure of bars, cantinas and brothels: practices of civil in/security, state formation and citizenship in urban Bolivia
• 9 Security governance in Hout Bay: a study of three local communities’ capacity to engage in policing
• 10 Young but not alone: youth organizations and the local politics of security provision
• 11 Secret societies and order-making in Freetown
• Index