Policing The Global South

Policing the Global South provides scholarship which further transnationalises and democratises ideas about policing practices and philosophies, highlighting renovations in approaches to policing studies, and injecting innovative perspectives into the study of policing from scholars positioned on the ‘periphery’. Criminological knowledge depolarisation underscores a conscious effort by scholars from the Global South to increase intellectual knowledge focused on developing context-specific responses to issues not aligned to Northern ideological positions and specific to the non-Northern context. Such shifts draw attention to the expanse of spaces beyond Northern centres rife with challenges unlike any specific to those experienced or conceptualised by scholars from the Global North with an applied Northern criminological lens. Applying a postcolonial lens to empirical knowledge from country-specific cases in former colonies in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Latin America, this book examines how policing issues not aligned to Northern ideological positions and specific to non-Northern contexts are addressed. The primary purpose is to share innovations in the field of policing – service provision, threats to security, crime responses, justice and international trends – developed in postcolonial developing-country contexts. Given the aim of the book and the contributors’ own research on issues of policing across the globe, it discusses themes including but not limited to the colonial legacies and their impact on policing; how plural regulatory systems and partnerships are navigated by the police; the linkages between access to justice, community perceptions, and police legitimacy; innovations and challenges in organisational reform, crime prevention, and community partnerships; and the expanding roles of police organisations in the Global South. While each chapter presents a policing issue in a country within a specific part of the Global South, the book highlights how important it is to frame responses based on contextual realities informed by an awareness of the past and present, with a goal of informing the future. Delivering a much-needed introduction to those specialising in policing in developing countries, this book is invaluable reading for academics and students of criminology, criminal justice, governance, policy, and IR, as well as professionals in policing organizations across the globe.

This book examines communication between police and residents of a designated crime ‘hotspot’ community in the Global South. It looks at communicative realities within a marginalised community in the twin island republic of Trinidad and Tobago and explores how police and the individuals that they police purposefully assign categories to each other before, during and after interactions. It also examines the relations between the police and the community and how power is manifested through authored or assigned labels, stigmas and stereotypes. Overall, it suggests alternative strategies to address problematic police and community relations and provides another standpoint from which communicative redress between police and residents of marginalized communities in the Global South can be approached.

The SAGE Handbook of Global Policing examines and critically retraces the field of policing studies by posing and exploring a series of fundamental questions to do with the concept and institutions of policing and their relation to social and political life in today′s globalized world. The volume is structured in the following four parts: Part One: Lenses Part Two: Social and Political Order Part Three: Legacies Part Four: Problems and Problematics. By bringing new lines of vision and new voices to the social analysis of policing, and by clearly demonstrating why policing matters, the Handbook will be an essential tool for anyone in the field.

Postcolonial legacies continue to impact upon the Global South and this edited collection examines their influence on systems of policing, security management and social ordering. Expanding the Southern Criminology agenda, the book critically examines social harms, violence and war crimes, human rights abuses, environmental degradation and the criminalization of protest. The book asks how current states of policing came about, their consequences and whose interests they continue to serve through vivid international case studies, including prison struggles in Latin America and the misuse of military force. Challenging current criminological thinking on the Global South, the book considers how police and state overreach can undermine security and perpetuate racism and social conflict.

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.

This compilation represents the first study to examine the historical evolution and shifting global dynamics of policing across the Lusophone community. With contributions from a multi-disciplinary range of experts, it traces the role of policing within and across settings that are connected by the shared legacy of Portuguese colonialism. Previously neglected within studies of the globalisation of policing, the Lusophone experience brings novel insights to established analyses of colonial, post-colonial and transnational policing. This compilation draws research attention to the policing peculiarities of the Lusophone community. It proposes new cultural settings within which to test dominant theories of policing research. It uncovers an important piece of the jigsaw that is policing across the globe. Key research questions that it addresses include: • What were the patterns of policing, and policing transfers, across Portuguese colonial settings? • How did Portugal’s dual status as both fascist regime and imperial power shape its late colonial policing? • What have been the different experiences of post-colonial and transitional policing across the former Portuguese colonies? • In what ways are Lusophone nations contributing to, and indeed shaping, patterns of transnational policing? • What comparative lessons can be drawn from the Lusophone policing experience?

This edited volume analyses the global making of security institutions and practices in our postcolonial world. The volume will offer readers the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the global making of how security is thought of and practiced, from US urban policing, diaspora politics and transnational security professionals to policing encounters in Afghanistan, Palestine, Colombia or Haiti. It critically examines and decentres conventional perspectives on security governance and policing. In doing so, the book offers a fresh analytical approach, moving beyond dominant, one-sided perspectives on the transnational character of security governance, which suggest a diffusion of models and practices from a ‘Western’ centre to the rest of the globe. Such perspectives omit much of the experimenting and learning going on in the (post)colony as well as the active agency and participation of seemingly subaltern actors in producing and co-constituting what is conventionally thought of as ‘Western’ policing practice, knowledge and institutions. This is the first book that studies the truly global making of security institutions and practices from a postcolonial perspective, by bringing together highly innovative, in-depth empirical cases studies from across the globe. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars interested in International Relations and Global Studies, (critical) Security Studies, Criminology and Postcolonial Studies.

The 22nd Annual Meeting of the International Police Executive Symposium was held in August 2012 at the United Nations Plaza in New York. Chaired by Dr. Garth den Heyer, the symposium focused on the links between economic development, armed violence, and public safety. Drawn from these proceedings, Economic Development, Crime, and Policing: Global P