Brief Description
"In the urban spaces that the book explores, a plurality of order-making practise, norms and actors co-exist in an often contested and transient environment. State police and various civilian policing groups are constituted in relation to each other through a mixture of competition, collaboration and interdependence. Collectively, 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. This compels us to analytically approach policing practices and actors as embedded not only in police networks, but also in the broader social and political relations and networks of urban space. This is the key contribution of Policing and the Politics of Order-making: To explore the political underpinning of local order-making in contexts of plural policing"--
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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.
Review Quotes
1.
'Policing and the Politics of Order-making is a smart and engaging examination of urban insecurity and policing, across a broad range of geographical locations. Scholars from a variety of disciplines will be interested in these essays explorations of order what it means, how it is made, by whom, and the ways in which it is contested by a range of social actors. A much-needed contribution to our understanding of order-making in contemporary cities around the world.'
Daniel M. Goldstein, Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University"
2.
'Policing and the Politics of Order-Making is a smart and engaging examination of urban insecurity and policing, across a broad range of geographical locations. Scholars from a variety of disciplines will be interested in these essays explorations of order what it means, how it is made, by whom, and the ways in which it is contested by a range of social actors. A much-needed contribution to our understanding of order-making in contemporary cities around the world.'
Daniel M. Goldstein, Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University
This volume interrogates the policing of the world s megacities. Combining innovative theory and empirically rich case studies, it explains how urban protection across the Americas, Africa and Asia comprises plural, overlapping policing actors of both state and citizens. The collection investigates the ways that people on the urban margins improvise their own protection amidst high crime rates, and how community policing emerges not simply as a reflex of neoliberal reforms but with its own history and politics. The case studies shed new light on youth-led civilian policing groups, how they operate in the twilight between official sanction and covert racket, and how they are shaped by and produce their own political trajectories. This volume further complicates our understandings of global policing in a neoliberal age and is highly recommended.
David Pratten, Oxford University
This is a timely and very welcome contribution to the ongoing exploration of the politics and practices of plural policing in the urban margins. The well written chapters convincingly show how hard-to-categorize policing actors in cities such as Manila, Cape Town, Accra, Port-o-Prince and Mexico City, engage in everyday order-making as well as overt politics, ambiguously manoeuvring the fine lines between legitimate and illegitimate use of violence.
Finn Stepputat, Danish Institute of International Studies"
