Police killings and the vicissitudes of borders and bounding orders in Mathare, Nairobi

Stapele, Naomi van

doi:10.1177/0263775819884579

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 44 publications

(42 reference statements)

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“…Such a stance acknowledges the police as at once upholding a notion of social, geopolitical, as well as "natural" law, which relies on an understanding of policing as tied to bodies, structures, as well as emotions. It has been recent work in a Global South context that the linkages between structural and emotional divisions within and as perpetuated by urban policing have been explored (Colona, 2020;Diphoorn, 2020;Kyed, 2019;Matallana-Villarreal, 2020;Vigneswaran, 2014;van Stapele, 2020;Warburg & Jensen, 2020).…”

Section: Policing Bordersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Police and policing in geography: From methods, to theory, to praxis

Bloch

2021

Geography Compass

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Despite the fact that any semblance of a "police studies" in geography is relatively recent, with calls for its development and expansion still being made in the literature today, geographers have nevertheless made important contributions to how scholars understand police and policing as a multifaceted manifestation of state power, coercion, and territoriality. Given the formative contributions that have already been made, and with promises of increased scholarly activity to come, there remains much opportunity for geography to become the go-to social scientific discipline for translating theory into action and advanced methods into practice. This is particularly so given heightened and widespread credence to the concept of defunding policing as we know it in the wake of continued and increasingly ruthless killings by police across the United States. In this article on police and policing in geography, I trace the brief history of a police studies, highlighting recent and contemporary contributions to its progress through critical examinations of community-, border-, affective-, and insidious-policing practices. Finally, I conclude with a brief discussion about how a police/policing studies can move forward as a durable geographical sub-field vis-à-vis greater inclusion of would-be scholars for whom being policed has been a lived experience that has resulted in personal encounters with hyper-criminalization, displacement, expulsion, un-homing, and incarceration.

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Section: Policing Bordersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Police and policing in geography: From methods, to theory, to praxis

Bloch

2021

Geography Compass

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“…These incidents are not isolated to times of political change and uncertainty. Police violence, extortion, intimidation and extra-judicial killings are a daily reality for many inhabitants living in Nairobi’s lower socio-economic neighbourhoods (Glück, 2017; Jones et al., 2017; Mathare Social Justice Centre, 2017; van Stapele, 2016, 2019). These studies, along with my own fieldwork observations, show that police interactions with the public are regularly hostile and far from the people-centred approach hallmarked by the NPS.…”

Section: Police Reform In Kenyamentioning

confidence: 99%

The ‘pure apples’: Moral bordering within the Kenyan police

Diphoorn

2020

Environ Plan D

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This article analyses various police reform initiatives in Kenya as a form of ‘moral bordering’. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Nairobi between 2017 and 2018, I analyse how police officers differentiate themselves from other police officers along (moral) ideas of reform and how this occurs in two divergent, yet interconnected, directions. The first is a process of bordering in: moral bordering occurs internally within the police and reform efforts aim to break down borders among police officers. The second is a process of bordering out: reform initiatives are designed in the urban centre and are aimed at spatially pushing the border externally, away from Nairobi. My approach to reform as moral bordering shows how borders can simultaneously take on disparate dimensions: with bordering in, borders are primarily social and symbolic, and with bordering out, borders take on a more spatial nature. This duality encapsulates the inherent friction that results from reform initiatives simultaneously moving in distinctive directions and differs from much of the (anthropological) work on the state police that analyses how the police themselves either enact borders or act as borders.

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“…As a result, many of these men draw sharp distinctions between 'society' and 'community'. 'Society' is often referred to as 'the city', or even 'Kenya', to which many do not experience a sense of belonging (even if they might still harbour a longing to belong), while they locate their own 'community', which they term 'ghetto', outside 'society' (van Stapele 2020). By doing this, they deliberately comment on decades of government neglect and police violence beleaguering their low-income neighbourhoods.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Providing to belong: masculinities, hustling and economic uncertainty in Nairobi ‘ghettos’

Stapele¹

2021

Africa

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Hustling as a concept has travelled through the global soundscapes of impoverished, neglected, racialized and otherwise marginalized urban settings. The widespread rearticulation of the term ‘hustling’ in a broad range of urban languages reveals that its use in particular forms of Black Atlantic music cultures speaks to shared experiences worldwide. Simultaneously, it shows the flexibility of this term to acquire new and unfolding meanings. This article focuses on the modes in which poor young men in Nairobi (re)deploy, translate and practise hustling to fit immediate circumstances and imagine possible futures, and on the meanings these men produce in the process. I argue that interrogating hustling as a practice provides insights into gendered experiences of urban life worlds in the underserved and highly policed areas of Nairobi, which may tentatively resonate with young men in comparable positions worldwide. I specifically examine how positions of (junior) manhood are configured by localized hustling practices to elucidate how navigating fear and hope, while facing extreme uncertainty, simultaneously defines and undermines their sense of manhood.

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Police killings and the vicissitudes of borders and bounding orders in Mathare, Nairobi

Cited by 8 publications

References 44 publications

Police and policing in geography: From methods, to theory, to praxis

Police and policing in geography: From methods, to theory, to praxis

The ‘pure apples’: Moral bordering within the Kenyan police

Providing to belong: masculinities, hustling and economic uncertainty in Nairobi ‘ghettos’

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