Citizens in uniform

Abstract

Amid economic and sociopolitical turmoil in Zimbabwe, police roadblocks proliferated throughout the country, creating sites not only of extraction but also of citizen engagement. These sites show that sociality mediates policing, as police and policed together negotiate the precarities of living in the wake of crisis. Roadblocks are key to the performance of the state as such. Yet this occasions the very stage on which the state's failings are manifested, as officers are rendered highly visible and scrutable on the road—this visibility is central to sociality, in a mechanism of power that relies on enfleshing the system of policing by those through whom the state acts. Whereas conceptualizations of governance in Africa often take people as a corrupting element, here, the peopling of the system is central to its operation. Encounters at roadblocks invite a reconsideration of reified ideals of policing and power in governance, including reified concepts of disciplinary power.