Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi (2022)
Hurst & Co. / Oxford University Press
My doctoral research – and the intended book manuscript – explores the impact of securitisation processes on policing in urban Pakistan. For this project, I have thus far carried out more than 19 months of ethnographic fieldwork, inclusive of extensive interviews with police officers, lawyers, journalists, and civilians, as well as three months of participant observation at multiple field sites (e.g. police stations, training centres) across the city of Karachi. The aim of this project is to assess how a civilian institution – in this case, Pakistan’s largest urban police department – has been affected by decades of political turmoil and criminal and militant violence, as well as Pakistan’s turbulent history of civil-military relations. Broadly, I argue that competing interests, conflicting demands for security, and a lack of commitment towards institutional reform, have furthered the militarisation of policing and led to the prevalence of ‘procedural informality’, collectively producing what I frame as a ‘postcolonial condition of policing’. By providing detailed insights into the culture of contemporary policing, and how police practice and procedure is shaped by political, historical, and social forces, this book hopes to provide a unique contribution to the growing pool of scholarship on post-colonial policing and the complicated provision of public security in the global South.
Southern and Postcolonial Perspectives on Policing, Security and Social Order (2023)
with Roxana P. Cavalcanti & Peter Squires
Bristol University Press
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.
