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- Convenors:
-
Peter Alexander Albrecht
(Danish Institute for International Studies)
Helene Maria Kyed (Danish Institute for International Studies)
Maya Mynster Christensen (Royal Danish Defence College)
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- Stream:
- Social Anthropology
- Location:
- Appleton Tower, Seminar Room 2.04
- Sessions:
- Thursday 13 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the mutually productive and ever-evolving relationship of the police and the city in urban Africa. It focuses on how spatial, temporal, economic and political particularities of cities facilitate and hinder police practices, organization and interaction with the public.
Long Abstract:
African cities are expanding, creating new possibilities for growth and development, but also social ruptures and new forms of insecurity. This panel explores policing in urban Africa, zooming in on how the city is reshaping police work, and in turn how police work is part of producing the city. Approaching urban policing as a practice of ordering, understood as a spatial and relational practice that is informed by material, imaginary and affective manifestations, we invite papers that investigate the mutually productive relationship of policing and the city. From state to street level, police forces in African cities engage in multiple processes and practices of urban ordering, which shape the circulations of people and goods in the city. At the same time, the particularities of cities (spatial, temporal, economic and political) facilitate and hinder police practices, organization and interaction with the public. In turn, the police via its order-making practices attempts to shape circulations of people and goods in the city space, sometimes driven by fear for their own lives, and often conditioned by limits on available resources, e.g., for transportation, salaries and logistics/infrastructures. These limitations often require collaboration with a wide range of actors, including traditional leaders and youth groups. How do police actors perceive of and negotiate their role in processes of urban ordering? How do defining features of the city inform order-making attempts by the police? And how do practices of policing structure and produce urban dis/orders? Papers that engage such questions theoretically, conceptually and methodologically are encouraged.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 13 June, 2019, -Paul Grassin (Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University/CESSP)
Paper short abstract:
This communication analyses policing and order making practices in urban Malawi where police officers work and reside in the same densely populated townships. It reflects on the practical consequences of this confusion between the identity of police officer and that of township's resident.
Paper long abstract:
With more than 160 officers for less than 30 police houses at Zimbawe police station, the vast majority of police officers, especially among the rank-and-file who cannot afford to live in other parts of the city, has to find accommodation within the densely populated township where also they work as police officers. Apart from doing their job, they interact on a daily basis with their public, as landlords or tenants, employers, consumers, friends and foes and sometimes as business partners. As this communication will argue, policing and the politics of order making then mainly result from the imperatives of cohabitation between police officers and the habitants of the township; the multiple, and often conflicting, identities police officers develop as well as their perceptions and strategies as regards to their position within the social structure of the township and within the society at large. The meagre social and economic incentives officers get from the institution and the loose control the hierarchy has over their daily working practices gives more space for permanent moral adjustments between their interests as police officers and as habitants of the township. Bearing in mind that, in a context of plural policing, police officers regularly have to negotiate their right to police with other competing policing actors, I explore the practical consequence of this situation in the regulation of black market and the ruling over family disputes. The communication is based on the 'symmetric ethnography' of police daily work and police-people interactions conducted between 2015 and 2018.
Maya Mynster Christensen (Royal Danish Defence College)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how Ghanaian police officers engage in practices of bordering, as they seek to prevent and preempt threats linked to radicalization and violent extremism, and how counter-terror policing is productive of urban security governance in Accra.
Paper long abstract:
Policing and the control of borders, previously concentrated at territorial edges of states, are currently disaggregated and delocalized away from national borders. Most significantly in this regard, national borders increasingly expand into and take effect in the city. Urgent insider threats associated with organized crime and terrorism have turned the city into the key location for interventions targeting populations who are 'at risk' of being mobilized into violent or extremist networks. The apparently diffuse, hybrid and complex nature of these threats has activated fear and anxiety linked to specific populations and places perceived to threaten urban orders and given rise to changing forms of urban security governance. This paper suggests that urban policing is principally a practice of spatial and relational bordering. Based on fieldwork among police officers in Accra, the paper illuminates how these practices of bordering are articulated in the translation and implementation of the national action plan for counter-terrorism. Focusing on how police officers' tacit knowledge informs policing of urban spaces when they, for instance, interpret suspicious signs and warning signals and collect intelligence on the flow of arms and ammunition, the paper analyzes the ways in which the prevention and preemption of violent extremism is productive of aspired urban orders.
Patrick Mlinga (University of Leipzig)
Paper short abstract:
African cities have recently gained scholarly attention on how they are organized, produced and used. This paper intends to interrogate the tensions produced when urban police-traffic officers inspect urban transportation services provided by taxis and town buses to city dwellers in urban Zanzibar.
Paper long abstract:
African cities have recently gained scholarly attention on how they are organized, produced and used. The most notable features have been mobility and flexibility of people and objects. Socio-spatial practices and public life across urban Africa, are noted with persistent tensions as to what is possible within the city as well as what are the appropriate forms of social connections through which possibilities can be pursued. This paper intends to interrogate the tensions produced when urban police-traffic officers inspect urban transportation services provided by taxis and town buses to city dwellers in urban Zanzibar. The guiding question of this article is "how do urbanites search for and create coherence when urban police-traffics conduct random inspections of taxis and town buses in urban Zanzibar"? Different academic registers have noted that most urban regulatory frameworks or guidelines are top-down rules which miss significant inputs from practices on ground and therefore produce tensions between urban transportation service providers and beneficiaries. An ethnographic strategy on everyday practices of urbanites, taxi and town buses drivers in navigating 'people' and 'urban space' was conducted during the fieldwork of September 2018 to January 2019 in urban Zanzibar. The Findings indicate that urban transport in Zanzibar like in most African countries is exclusively a private business with a handy of government in the name of regulations and guidelines. Urbanites know how to cope up with tensions thus are in a good position to produce coherence for their everyday practices, therefore know how to do their city.
Peter Alexander Albrecht (Danish Institute for International Studies) Maya Mynster Christensen (Royal Danish Defence College)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how the police after war in Sierra Leone ended (2002), and subsequent policing strategies, are continuous attempts to claim and reclaim control of Freetown. It uses the notions of borders/bordering to center the analysis, and challenges concepts of hybrid, twilight and plural.
Paper long abstract:
When war ended in Sierra Leone in 2002, the main objective of the government, with international support, was to strengthen the legitimacy and effectiveness of the Sierra Leonean state. One of the primary ways of doing so was 'to introduce effective visible policing', and 'for the police to resume primacy in maintaining law and order'. This paper explores how the Sierra Leone Police (SLP) attempted to reconquer and maintain control of Freetown. On the one hand, this took a material form. Police stations were built and furnished, police officers were equipped and given uniforms, and an armed wing of the SLP was reestablished. On the other hand, doing so was deeply relational, and depended on an ability to co-opt, collaborate, and at times confront an undergrowth of differentiated as well as overlapping security actors, including secret societies, ex-combatants, gangs, and community policing groups. To capture the dynamics of order-making from the perspective of the police, the point of departure of the paper is that urban policing is a border practice. The approach interrogates scholarship of the past decade that emphasizes policing as blurred, hybrid, twilight and plural, because these concepts tend to omit a nuanced understanding of the police officer as a figure of the state that is mandated by law and policies to enforce a particular order. Policing as border work reflects a continuous governmental desire, and attempt via the police, to secure and safeguard by regulating circulations and transgressions of people, things and discourse.
Maxime Ricard (Université du Québec à Montréal) Félix Kouamé Grodji (Université Alassane Ouattara de Bouaké, Côte d’Ivoire)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores practices of ordering in the poorest area of Abidjan, Abobo, during the post-conflict era. Shifting interrelations among policing actors produced a collective response to a "security crisis", highlighting negotiations between the state, local police, and vigilante groups.
Paper long abstract:
Abidjan symbolizes a contrast of non-inclusive economic growth, with a fragmented security sector inherited from the war. A "security crisis" which became a moral panic seized Abidjan in 2012: youth gangs nicknamed "microbes" were developing, especially in the socially and spatially relegated part of the city, Abobo.
As Abobo was the bedrock of the revolt against Laurent Gbagbo in the city during the post-electoral crisis of 2011, the local population perceived the police very negatively after the conflict. The government, criticized for its inaction against crime, responded by regularly launching "lightening raids" from the top to make the headlines.
However, a collective response was being organized: a new urban policing configuration. This paper is based on a seven-month ethnographic study with local policemen, vigilante groups, and local leaders. It engages relationally with shifting interrelations among policing actors, to reshape practices of ordering in an urban margin. Created by local community leaders and youth, about 20 vigilante groups were developed, sometimes using symmetrical violence against youth gangs.
This configuration is a product of a process of negotiation. The police formally denies the legality of these groups, but in practice, at the local level, tolerate them and most of the time collaborate with them or even participate in their organization. This specific configuration between delegation and discharge - without a prior assumption of a strengthening or weakening of the state - highlights how these groups have undeniably participated in the redeployment of the police, and the establishment of a coercive moral community.
Dany Franck Anselme Tiwa (University of Hamburg)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation explores the moral and practical dilemmas surrounding police intervention in instances of mob vigilantism in Lagos, Nigeria, and their multiple effects.
Paper long abstract:
According to a local popular say, «fear of Nigeria police is the beginning of wisdom». Yet, for a suspected criminal in the hands of a mob, police are often the only hope to escape an atrocious death. Based on dozens of semi-structured interviews with apologists of vigilantism and with eleven police officers who intervened to disrupt incidents of lynching in various places in the city of Lagos in 2017, this presentation will argue that police intervention during mob incidents generates moral and practical dilemmas for both police officers and vigilantes. Simultaneously rooted in and reproducing the distrust that characterizes people/police relationships in the country, those dilemmas the presentation shall show, tend to worsen rather than attenuate the outcomes of incidents of mob vigilantism in Nigeria.
Richard Asante (University of Ghana) Peter Alexander Albrecht (Danish Institute for International Studies)
Paper short abstract:
Political vigilantism and associated violence is one of Ghana’s most pressing post-election challenges, and particularly pressing in urban settings. Yet, there appear to be few scholarly studies that systematically examine factors that facilitate or constrain the capacity of the police to eradicate this phenomenon.
Paper long abstract:
The phenomenon of political party vigilantism, particularly in urban settings, has been a challenge to Ghana’s image as a stable democracy in the turbulent West African sub-region. Historically, vigilantism started as young men (‘boys’), who were loyal to influential political figures, and often from poor and illiterate backgrounds. Over time, being a member of these groups has become relatively more lucrative and formalized, and has been given recognition by the political parties to provide security. During party events such as yearly congresses, press conferences and demonstrations, these vigilante groups collaborate with the police to provide security. However, since 2000, the level of violence that has characterized the activities of party vigilante groups, has increased and become a decidedly politically charged issue. Countless pledges by the police to eradicate the phenomenon of vigilantism in light of the danger it poses to the country’s security, electoral politics and democratic development have failed to materialize. How do we explain the rise in the activities of vigilante groups in urban setting? What factors including spatial, temporal, economic and political particularities of urban settings facilitate and hinder police to deal with political vigilantism? The urban setting as a center of political activism is intensified by growing unemployment among youth. Activities of such groups during elections, and difficulties in contemporary policing in terms of resourcing and general legitimacy among the public, account for the complex relationships and interaction between the Ghana Police Service and vigilante groups.
Adegbola Ojo (University of Lincoln)
Paper short abstract:
The paper aims to showcase how rapid but highly disjointed growth affects power relations in the urban centres which in turn charts a new social and economic pathway and eventuates into activating crime and conflict for the residents of urban settlements in Nigeria.
Paper long abstract:
Urban population growth in Africa, in both absolute and relative terms has been supplemented by a range of opportunities and challenges for urban dwellers. Like some African cities, Nigerian cities have functioned as the engines of economic growth in the last decade. However, unprecedented physical growth, frequently unplanned, combined with tenure insecurity and the proliferation of urban poverty have given rise to complex linkages between spatial expansion and urban risk and crime. The paper is a bold attempt to illustrate the nexus among urbanisation, crime and the criminal justice system in a fast growing African democracy. The three-fold objectives of this paper starts by discussing the features of the transformative role of urbanisation together with its accompanying challenges. The trend and pace of urbanisation are linked to Nigeria's contemporary crime challenge. Nigeria presently lacks a comprehensive, coherent, and up-to-date infrastructure to monitor urban crime patterns and trends, and to relay the resulting insights to law enforcement stakeholders and the public. Using recently collected data, this paper further presents the geo-temporal structure of crime in urban Nigeria using a series of reliable crime metrics. This followed by a triangulation of the roles of key players in the criminal justice system and a robust explanation of the factors that continue to weaken law enforcement institutions in the country together with the implications of these challenges for public safety within urban centres.
Salifou Ndam (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and University of Lausanne)
Paper short abstract:
À Yaoundé ou à Douala, étrangers ou citadins attentifs au Code de la route ont de la peine à se repérer dans la rue parce que les signalétiques urbaines sont noyées dans le désordre ou quasi-inexistantes à cause des commerçants de rue.
Paper long abstract:
Le Cameroun est un pays où plus de la moitié de sa population vit dans les villes. Douala, la capitale économique du pays, accueille la grosse partie de la population urbaine, soit 25 %. Vu l'expansion du chômage et le sous-emploi, certains individus qui y arrivent s'insèrent plutôt dans la vie urbaine par le secteur informel. Ceux ayant choisi cette voie transforment les rues en espace de commerce. Pour cela, ils rentrent en « guerre » contre les équipes de la police municipale, instance de régulation et de répression de la Communauté urbaine de Douala. Pour investir les rues, les commerçants dits de rue occupent les trottoirs, une partie de la chaussée et emploient les panneaux de signalisation comme étals. La particularité de ces pratiques réside sur le fait qu'elles noient les panneaux de signalisation dans l'anonymat. De ce fait, un visiteur ou un citadin attentif aux Codes de la route aura de la peine à se repérer dans la rue. Bien que les commerçants choisissent la rue comme espace de commerce, au point d'envahir les signalétiques urbaines, les autorités municipales sont débordées et privilégient l'urbanisme du laisser-faire.