Becoming Montenegrin: biopower, police reform and human rights

Abstract

The paper forms a Foucauldian analysis police reforms in Montenegro. Drawing on interviews with police officers at all ranks in 2004, undertaken as reform was commencing and on interviews undertaken in 2010, after Montenegro's independence, the paper explores the biopolitics of liberalization. The paper aims to demonstrate norms of internal security liberalization that operate beyond a legal understanding of state power. It illustrates the operation of a rule of police that produces norms conducive to the governance of a dynamic market state. It argues that the rule of police subsists within but also subverts the rule of law and human rights approach to democratic development. KEYWORDSPolice; Biopolitics; Human Rights; Foucault; Liberalization. INTRODUCTIONIt goes without saying that the rule of law is a foundational referent in all strategies of police reform in post-conflict settings. The assumption that state power can be regulated and liberalized through the rule of law enlivens advocates who associate improvements in the exercise of sovereign power with adherence to human rights. Claims are made on behalf of the rule of law approach that point to its role in economic development, democratization and poverty reduction. 1 Since the early 1990's a constellation of international organizations, NGO's, state aid agencies, academe, think-tanks and private interests has produced a sizeable body of knowledge gleaned from their experiences in various postconflict and post-socialist societies. This paper argues that somewhat blinkered assumptions regarding the nature of sovereign power and the transcendental potential of its rule of law pervade this body of knowledge and the assemblage of practices that constitute it. Encoded within the definition of a rule of law approach is an apolitical attitude to good governance that equates law to the objectivity of scientific positivism. 2 However in reality, the exercise of power within a state is more messy and complex than the rule of law can possibly regulate. When applied to the field of police reform, it is hardly radical to suggest that a great deal of police activity operates beyond the parameters of the law. 3 Consequently, notwithstanding the propensity for human rights and the rule of law to frame liberalization processes, it needs to be recognised that only a fraction of police reforms that occur in these settings are based on the enforcement of law. 4 It is in fact more common for police reform to be motivated by less principled, more contingent socioeconomic considerations that stem from the prerogatives of state and inter-state security. 3These are prerogatives that have historically had a promiscuous relationship with conceptions of justice and the rule of law more generally.Thus the article introduces an alternative analysis of police reform embedded not in the rule of law but on the pragmatics of securing national identity through a process of liberalization. The paper examines the early stages of police reform in the Republic of Montenegro as an exemp...