Police/Worlds: Studies in Security, Crime, and Governance
Bracketed Belonging addresses how nations and their governance of security determine social constellations and shape socio-political and legal assertions of belonging and allegiance. Kelvin E. Y. Low examines the contours and limits of belonging that underlie the complex social contract between mobile migrants and nations in the context of a global military-security market. He explores these core themes through the case of Nepali Gurkhas and their families as military and paramilitary migrants. Recruited to serve in the military or police force, Gurkhas are trained in jungle warfare skills that other police groups do not possess. There is thus the professional link to military training and the formation of a unique paramilitary police force with the backdrop of colonialism. In these contexts, this book offers fresh perspectives on studying global security, migration and diasporic lives. It sets a new agenda by analytically bridging empire, military and security maneuvers, and migratory pathways and options. In doing so, Bracketed Belonging serves as a novel contribution to current scholarship on migration and transnationalism, and on police and security studies.
Criminalizing the Casbahs explores how French police officers in Marseille and Algiers associated the spaces they saw as North African—the "Casbahs"—with a particular form of criminality, one they insisted was inherently North African. Through local but connected histories of policing in these two cities, Danielle Beaujon traces how police practices mapped the racialization of North African colonial subjects onto urban space.
By demarcating and racializing space, the French police created repressive methods for controlling North African bodies while proclaiming to uphold republican ideals of colorblind justice. The invasive, often violent, policing of North Africans in the French Mediterranean blurred the political and the personal, broadening the spectrum of police power with lasting consequences for post-colonial policing. Criminalizing the Casbahs shows how patterns of discrimination created in the daily interactions between police officers and North Africans continue to resonate in debates about police accountability in France today.
The Sensation of Security explores how private security guards are a permanent, conspicuous fixture of everyday life in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with security laborers, managers, company owners, and elite global consultants, Erika Robb Larkins examines the provision of security in Rio from the perspective of security personnel, providing an analysis of the racialized logics that underpin the ongoing work of securing the city. Larkins shows how guards communicate a sensação de segurança (a sensation of security) to clients and customers who have the capital to pay for it. Cultivated through performances by security laborers, the sensation of security is a set of culturally shaped racialized and gendered impressions related to safety, order, well-being, and cleanliness. While the sensação de segurança indexes an outward-facing task of allaying fears of crime and maintaining order in elite spaces, it also refers to the emotional labor and embodied worlds that security workers navigate.
Unmaking Migrants engages critical questions about preventing trafficking by preventing migration through a study of a shelter for trafficking victims in Lagos, Nigeria.
Over the past fifteen years, antitrafficking personnel have stopped thousands of women from traveling out of Nigeria and instead sent them to the federal counter-trafficking agency for investigation, protection, and rehabilitation. Government officials defend this form of intervention as preemptive, having intercepted the women before any abuses take place. Yet many of the women protest their detention, insist they were not being trafficked, and demand to be released.
As Stacey Vanderhurst argues, migration can be a freely made choice. Unmaking Migrants shows the moments leading up to the migration choice, and it shows how well-intentioned efforts to help women considering these paths often don't address their real needs at all.
In Police, Provocation, Politics, Deniz Yonucu presents a counterintuitive analysis of contemporary policing practices, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence, perpetual conflict, and ethnosectarian discord by the state security apparatus. Situating Turkish policing within a global context and combining archival work and oral history narratives with ethnographic research, Yonucu demonstrates how counterinsurgency strategies from the Cold War and decolonial eras continue to inform contemporary urban policing in Istanbul. Shedding light on counterinsurgency's affect-and-emotion-generating divisive techniques and urban dimensions, Yonucu shows how counterinsurgent policing strategies work to intervene in the organization of political dissent in a way that both counters existing alignments among dissident populations and prevents emergent ones.
Yonucu suggests that in the places where racialized and dissident populations live, provocations of counterviolence and conflict by state security agents as well as their containment of both cannot be considered disruptions of social order. Instead, they can only be conceptualized as forms of governance and policing designed to manage actual or potential rebellious populations.
Black Lives and Spatial Matters is a call to reconsider the epistemic violence that is committed when scholars, policymakers, and the general public continue to frame Black precarity as just another racial, cultural, or ethnic conflict that can be solved solely through legal, political, or economic means. Jodi Rios argues that the historical and material production of blackness-as-risk is foundational to the historical and material construction of our society and certainly foundational to the construction and experience of metropolitan space. She also considers how an ethics of lived blackness—living fully and visibly in the face of forces intended to dehumanize and erase—can create a powerful counter point to blackness-as-risk.
Using a transdisciplinary methodology, Black Lives and Spatial Matters studies cultural, institutional, and spatial politics of race in North St. Louis County, Missouri, as a set of practices that are intimately connected to each other and to global histories of race and race-making. As such, the book adds important insight into the racialization of metropolitan space and people in the United States. The arguments presented in this book draw from fifteen years of engaged research in North St. Louis County and rely on multiple disciplinary perspectives and local knowledge in order to study relationships between interconnected practices and phenomena.
From Family to Police Force illuminates the production and contestation of social, familial, and national order on a South Asian borderland. In the borderland that divides Kutch, a district in the western Indian state of Gujarat, from Sindh, a southern province in Pakistan, there are many forces at work: civil and border police, the air wing of the armed forces, paramilitary forces, and various intelligence agencies that depute officers to the region. These groups are the major actors in the field of security and policing. Farhana Ibrahim offers a bird's-eye view of these groups, drawing on long-standing anthropological engagement with the region. She observes policing on multiple levels, showing in detail that the nation-state is only one of the scales at which policing is enacted at a borderland.
Ibrahim draws on multiple sources and forms of policing structure to illuminate everyday interaction on the personal scale, bringing families and individuals into the broader picture. From Family to Police Force looks beyond the obvious sites, sources, and modes of policing to show the distinctions between the act of policing and the institution of the police.
In Policing the Frontier, the second book in the Police/Worlds series Mirco Göpfert explores what it means to be a gendarme investigating cases, writing reports, and settling disputes in rural Niger. At the same time, he looks at the larger bureaucracy and the irresolvable tension between bureaucratic structures and procedures and peoples' lives. The world of facts and files exists on one side, and the chaotic and messy human world exists on the other.
Throughout Policing the Frontier, Göpfert contends that bureaucracy and police work emerge in a sphere of constant and ambivalent connection and separation. Göpfert's frontier in Niger (and beyond) is seen through ideas of space, condition, and project, packed with constraints and possibilities, riddled with ambiguities, and brutally destructive yet profoundly empowering. As he demonstrates, the tragedy of the frontier becomes as palpable as the true impossibility of police work and bureaucracy.
What if the job of police was to cultivate the political will of a community to live with itself (rather than enforce law, keep order, or fight crime)? In Sentiment, Reason, and Law, Jeffrey T. Martin describes a world where that is the case.
The Republic of China on Taiwan spent nearly four decades as a single-party state under dictatorial rule (1949–1987) before transitioning to liberal democracy. Here, Martin describes the social life of a neighborhood police station during the first rotation in executive power following the democratic transition. He shows an apparent paradox of how a strong democratic order was built on a foundation of weak police powers, and demonstrates how that was made possible by the continuity of an illiberal idea of policing. His conclusion from this paradox is that the purpose of the police was to cultivate the political will of the community rather than enforce laws and keep order.
As Sentiment, Reason, and Law shows, the police force in Taiwan exists as an "anthropological fact," bringing an order of reality that is always, simultaneously and inseparably, meaningful and material. Martin unveils the power of this fact, demonstrating how the politics of sentiment that took shape under autocratic rule continued to operate in everyday policing in the early phase of the democratic transformation, even as a more democratic mode of public reason and the ultimate power of legal right were becoming more significant.
