Transnational Policing

Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 2002

2016

Two decades ago in a fine article about the state of police research, Maureen Cain (1979) remarked on the lack of an adequate conceptualisation of policing, on the narrow institutional focus of research, and on the absence of any substantive theorisation of the police-state relationship. The article became a useful point of reference since it forged some conceptual order in what was often a diffuse field of sociological inquiry. Afterwards, in the 1980s, there was a profusion of scholarly writing (largely Anglo-Saxon) both on the police and on social control more broadly. By the 1990s policing studies had, as it were, lost its innocence. It soon became clear that pro-police naiveté, ideological romanticism and theoretical dogmatism simply could not succeed in capturing the complexity of the modern police persona. Policing too turned out to be subject to the long march of history. Privatisation and globalisation in particular were now shaping its fortunes at the local level in ways w...

Stenning, P. & Shearing, C. 2012. The Shifting Boundaries of Policing: Globalization and its Possibilities. In: Newburn, T. & Peay, J. Eds. Policing: Politics, Culture and Control: Essays in Honour of Robert Reiner. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 265 -284.

Our first task is to contextualise our subject with regard to theories of policing, globalisation, social order and governance. We examine the role of the police within the classic nation-state system and how this has become problematic. We explore the idea of the 'social contract' and how this has been reshaped by an emerging transnational-state-system. The chapter also sets out two typolo-gies of policing that mark the conceptual boundaries of the field. The first explores the distinctions between policing that aims to secure territory and that which aims to maintain surveillance over suspect populations. It distinguishes between high policing (seeking to maintain particular interests of state and social elites) and low policing (seeking to maintain the interests of the social order more generally) and between public and private forms. A second typology suggests four geographical spheres of policing – glocal, national, regional and global. These typologies create the conceptual space within which the various forms of trans-national policing explored in later chapters are theorised and understood. The groundwork covered here provides the basis for making global policing visible as a theoretical object.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

‘Contemporary policing not only has a global reach…it is also globally made’, note the editors when introducing The Global Making of Policing. In doing so, they contrast two different ways of thinking about the relationship between ‘the global’ and ‘policing’. The first one approaches the relationship between ‘the global’ and ‘policing’ as a unidirectional and top-down flow of goods and ideas from the North to the South. Labelled here as the ‘export’ approach, this way of thinking about the relationship between ‘the global’ and ‘policing’ focuses on the ways in which those policing practices designed to produce social order in Western Europe and North America are exported elsewhere through training (academic and practical). The second approach considers the role of the periphery or the South as a ‘laboratory’, and focuses on how those in the North have developed their theories and practices through seeking to produce order in the South. In this latter approach, the flow of goods and ideas is not unidirectional, but the relationship is nevertheless top-down with limited agency granted to the South. Another difference between the two approaches is that the ‘laboratory’ approach sees the North and the South as coeval, in contrast to the ‘export’ approach, which temporalizes difference and spatializes time by treating the South as belonging to the past, in need of growing up, with a little bit of help from the North. The editors offer the ‘laboratory’ approach to highlight the limitations of the ‘export’ approach, noting that policing gets made globally—through interactions between the North and the South. The following suggests that the volume goes further than what can be seen through the prism of these two approaches. I identify a third, ‘co-constitutive’ approach, which focuses on how both sides interact with and learn from each other, while getting transformed in the process. Whereas the ‘laboratory' approach looks at how ‘we’ develop theories, go test them elsewhere (on our distant ‘others’) and come back home to apply them (on our near ‘others’), the ‘co-constitutive’ approach views the roles played by both sides in the production of goods and ideas, and their mutual transformation through this interaction. In one sense, the ‘co-constitutive’ approach is already a part of the volume’s theoretical framework, as outlined by the editors in the introduction, discussed more explicitly by Laffey & Nadarajah and Tickner & Morales, rather implicitly by Mueller, and illustrated by Graham & Barker. Yet, I will suggest that the significance of watching against conflating the ‘laboratory’ and ‘co-constitutive’ approaches cannot be overemphasized. Before doing so, I will highlight the volume’s contribution to IR by underscoring how policing gets to be globally made. I will then turn to IR’s postcolonial critics to unpack ‘the global’ and, following Himadeep Muppidi (2004), call for integrating a ‘postcolonial understanding of globality’ into the study of the making of policing.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

This paper examines the basis on which we might argue that there is a 'transnational' public interest in transnational policing. Is policing beyond the state simply a matter of finding points of overlap between the security interests of different national communities. If so, it appears as a precarious and contingent achievement. But if not, how can we imagine that transnational public interest in thicker terms, as involving a state-transcending common interest? Would this not involve sacrificing the very idea of national security interests, or indeed any security interest based upon communities more local than the transnational level? The paper develops an argument that this need not be the case, and that we can imagine 'thick' security and policing interests at different levels of territorial community simultaneously.

2014

In this article, I argue that the first series of Line of Duty (BBC2, 2012- ) invites viewers to consider the wider politicized function of the police as well as the depictions of criminality in Britain. It argues that the series reflects a broader shift in the understanding of the British crime drama as not simply a reproduction of national concerns, but rather a new discourse of transnational anxieties. I offer an analysis of how representations of crime and criminality are viewed through the lens of current news media trends to examine the relationship between the British crime drama, and the wider socio-economic and political concerns in which articulations of both national, and increasingly transnational identities can become visible.

2016

This paper brides a gulf between the Enlightenment idea of a science of policing and contemporary police techno-science and asks questions about how such ideas can be brought into accord with notions of ‘good policing’. Policing has been central to the art of governance since the modern period began more than two hundred years ago. Policing under transnational conditions presents enormous challenges. The system of global governance is highly complex and this is especially evident with regard to the conceptual field of policing. Globally speaking, police legitimacy is projected through a functionalist rhetoric predicated on certain folkdevils and suitable enemies, to which strong police measures are said to be the only answer. The original science of police was deeply imbued with normative thinking, since it was concerned with notions of the general welfare of society and state. In present times, police science is being reduced to experimental criminology and crime science. This pape...