Policing and the Politics of Order-Making

Description

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. Cover Half Title 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