No longer merely “good to think”: The new anthropology of police as a mode of critical thought

Abstract

Images of police, punishment, and crime were central to the work of several of the key thinkers of the 20th century: the interpolative hail of the policeman for Althusser; the violence of the policeman in the shadow of law’s excess for Benjamin; the figure of the panopticon and, later, of police as the administration of man internal to the State for Foucault (to name just a few). Police, crime, and punishment were useful to consider a wide swath of issues including subjectivity, inequality, sovereignty, power, and text. If police have been such a productive tool through which to think, how does the emergence of anthropological research projects focused squarely on such practitioners stand to change that thought? Pushing this question more broadly, how does studying such subjects “head on” reshape how we reflect on the larger issues in critical theory today? This collection of articles will attempt to address such questions through ethnographic accounts that interrogate the limits and alternative possibilities for thinking about police. In the process these articles will push us to reexamine the practices of policing at the heart of collective life in such a way that challenges not only our understanding of such critical theorists but also places critical police studies at the center of our understanding of what it means to be human today.

Urban borderwork: Ethnographies of policing

“…The ethnographic focus on how non-state policing actors relate to, engage with, and act on behalf of or in the absence of state-sanctioned policing actors has occurred at the expense of understanding how the police themselves perceive of, perform and navigate what it means to police. In recent years, this has resulted in a significant body of ethnographically driven studies focusing on the police and policing (Beek, 2016; Beek et al., 2017; Fassin, 2013, 2017; Garriott, 2013; Göpfert, 2013, 2016; Hornberger, 2010, 2011; Jauregui, 2016; Karpiak, 2016; Martin, 2013, 2016; Mutsaers, 2014, 2018; Owen, 2013, 2016; Steinberger, 2008). Many of these works emerged from a growing interest in ‘the state’, as an idea and as a set of practices, but also as Cooper-Knock and Owen (2015: 356) emphasize, because of a relative analytical neglect of ‘state actors and statehood’ in the context of policing, and consequently ‘everyday realities and modes of state policing’ (see also Mutsaers et al., 2015: 786).…”

Sovereignty as new beginnings: Action beyond the liberal subject, among undercover police investigators in Europe, for example

“… 8. Several scholars, including those working on the anthropology of police, make related points but not directed at horizontal sovereign action as discussed here. See Jean-Paul Brodeur (2010: 6); Karpiak (2016: 420–421); Garriott (2013: 9–15); Karpiak and Garriott (2018); Horn (2011); Sausdal (2020). In particular, Jauregui (2017) examines how “critical empathy” enables an ethnographer to relate to interlocutors, such police or security personnel more broadly, involved in ethically dubious activities.…”