To date, much of the analytical scholarship on policing in Africa has centred on non-state actors. In doing so, it risks neglecting state actors and statehood, which must be understood on their own terms as well as through the eyes of the people they supposedly serve. This article seeks to develop our theoretical and empirical understanding in this respect by exploring the contexts in which citizens seek to engage state police in Nigeria and South Africa. In doing so it highlights three particularly important uses that police contact may serve, that are currently being overlooked. State police can permit, authorize or limit crime control performed by others through informal regulatory intervention.They can exercise a unique bureaucratic power by opening a case which is valued as a record of right and wrongs to be used in the negotiation of everyday life, not simply as a means to legal prosecution. And finally, taking action 'off the books', the police can exercise a coercive power that can be termed 'police vigilantism', which citizens may try to harness for their own ends. We therefore argue that we should recognize the continued high public demand for the services of state police forces even in contexts where they fall short of expectations, and more closely analyse the ways in which people utilize and help to reproduce the police forces they condemn.

Studies of everyday policing in predominantly white areas in South Africa often focus on the spectacle of secured architecture and private policing services, concluding that the growth of the private security industry has created atomised units of residence that are alienated from the state. Such conclusions are important but incomplete: they do not look sufficiently behind closed gates to explore how private security is justified, utilised, supplemented, or avoided in daily life. In this article, I explore the everyday policing of theft and robbery in a predominantly white policing sector in Durban. I demonstrate that people have not simply transferred their dependence or allegiance from public to private policing. Instead, their approach to everyday policing straddles these two spheres, perpetually disrupts any simple dichotomy between them, and illustrates how all forms of policing are entangled in the wider inequalities and insecurities of post-apartheid South Africa. In making this argument, I highlight how residents remain reliant on the bureaucratic authority of the state police, distrustful of their employees who supposedly protect them, and appear far more willing to take matters into their own hands than many residents admit or imagine.

A growing scholarship on policing and security has given us valuable insights into the workings of private security firms, state police, and citizen-led policing organisations across Africa. In contrast, few have explored 'mob justice'-the policing performed by less organised, more transient formations of citizens. In academic and popular accounts, mobs are depicted as anonymous, sovereign entities, acting in a space that the state will not, or cannot, enter. Focusing on the township of KwaMashu in Durban, South Africa, I challenge this homogenous depiction. Although anonymous mobs punctuate the township's history, residents often find themselves within 'intimate crowds', navigating the ties that frequently bind them to their suspects, and negotiating a space in which they can act without fear of repercussion, legal or otherwise. The state police often play an important role in shaping the parameters of this policing, even when no case is formally opened. This reappraisal of policing formations consolidates and extends our understanding of statehood, society and sovereignty in postapartheid South Africa.

This introduction provides the rationale for a fresh look at an apparently obvious phenomenon -the production and life of state documents. Whilst ethnographies of statehood have multiplied in recent years, we focus on an underexplored avenue of inquiry: the role played by pieces of paper in constituting modern bureaucratic states. To date, attempts to map out this area of study have focused predominantly on the discourse and semiotics of state documentation. Our work goes further, discussing not just what is on such paper but also its shifting materiality, meaning and social significance throughout its production, circulation and preservation or destruction. These discussions deepen our understanding of statehood, sovereignty and power across Africa, with our part special issue drawing particularly on research in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.